When Freakonomics.com was launched in 2005, it was essentially a blog (c’mon, blogs were a thing then!). The first Freakonomics book had just been published, and Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt wanted to continue their conversation with readers. Over time, the blog grew to have millions of readers, a variety of regular and guest writers, and it was hosted by The New York Times, where Dubner and Levitt also published a monthly “Freakonomics” column. The authors later collected some of the best blog writing in a book called When to Rob a Bank … and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants. (The publisher rejected their original title: We Were Only Trying to Help. The publisher had also rejected the title Freakonomics at first, so they weren’t surprised.) While the blog has not had any new writing in quite some time, the entire archive is still here for you to read.
Yesterday we passed 500,000 in Twitter followers. Thank you! The person who put us over the top was Dan Kreitz (@dankreitz). We’ll send some Freakonomics swag to Dan, along with five randomly selected followers who have been with us for much longer. (And no, we didn’t make the same mistake as last time.)
We once made a podcast about Twitter in which we discussed that we didn’t (and still don’t) follow anyone. Maybe we’d be at 1 million followers by now if we did — who knows?
We don’t really Tweet in the classic sense; we mainly post links to things we’ve written, radio pieces we’ve made, etc. So let me ask you this: is there anything you’d like to see more of in our Twitter feed?
I thought you might like to hear this: I am an artist who works with wood and I listen to a lot of podcasts and music during the work day. I was listening to the “Upside of Quitting” episode and at the beginning you say something about how perfect radio is for multitasking except maybe when you are running a chainsaw, and then there is a little chainsaw sound effect.
Well, I was running a chainsaw at that moment and thought it was funny because I listen to podcasts all the time while using a chainsaw. I made up some custom headphones out of those noise-reduction earmuffs. They keep out the noise and channel in the news and music.
We did a kayak/hike/swim tour with Kayak Wailua in Kauai, Hawaii, mainly because our guidebook said it was as good as other tours and less expensive. I think the book was correct, so I asked the guide: “How do you guys charge a lower price and still survive?”
He answered that they are larger (because they have more permits for river trips), enabling the owner to do his own booking directly, thus saving expenses. Fine, but implicitly the opportunity cost of his time must be less than the cost of contracting out, or he is not profit-maximizing. If he is profit-maximizing, then implicitly he has taken advantage of economies of scale in this “industry,” while his competitors haven’t. If that is so, I would expect some consolidation among his competitors as they understand the shape of long-run average costs. (HT: KY)
Elena Malik, communications chair of the 12th annual Carroll Round at Georgetown, writes to solicit applications for a worthwhile event:
The Carroll Round is an annual undergraduate international economics conference at Georgetown University that provides a unique forum for research and discussion among the world’s top undergraduates. Each year, we invite applications from students to present and discuss their work with peers, professors, and policy-makers invited to participate. This year we are honored to host guest speakers including Dr. John B. Taylor and Dr. Janet Currie. We are still recruiting applications from students.
This year’s Carroll Round will be held from April 18-21; more info here.
In the New Republic, Nate Cohnexplores the small but growing role of advanced statistics in football. Projects like Football Freakonomics notwithstanding, the NFL isn’t usually thought of as a realm where stats hold all that much sway, in part because the game is so much more of a complex-dynamic system than, say, baseball. Here’s Cohn on one big change fans might notice if more coaches start relying on statistics:
The one place where fans could see analytics at work is in play calling, which also happens to be the place where analytics could impact the average fan’s experience of the game. The numbers suggest, for instance, that teams should be aggressive on fourth down, and that it’s better to go for first down with a lead in a game’s final minutes than to run the ball on third down to run out the clock. Yet even the teams with well-regarded analytics departments, including San Francisco and Baltimore, largely adhere to a conservative and traditional play calling approach: the coaches “just aren’t listening to them yet,” [Brian] Burke says. And the few coaches with a reputation for following the statistics, like New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, aren’t even close to as aggressive as the numbers would advise.
Last week, we got an email from Freakonomics reader Paul Gu, a Thiel 20under20 fellow and founding team member of Upstart, a startup from former Googler Dave Girouard aimed at matching promising young students with financial backers. Here’s how it works:
Upstart aims to help you with the most important part of pursuing your dreams — taking the first step. It may be as simple as applying for an internship, relocating to another city, or spending a few months in a garage working on your idea. Your Upstart backers will provide you with a modest amount of capital, combined with the support and guidance you’ll need. In return, you share a small portion of your income for 10 years. By matching you with the right backers and by providing just a slice of economic freedom – where repayment is based on your future success — we help you get started on the right path.
In addition to being an Upstart employee, Gu is also a participant. We were curious about why someone with such high potential future earnings was willing to give away a percentage of his hypothetical millions … here’s how he explained his decision:
For me, becoming an upstart is good economics. I’m stepping away from the hedge fund path to build a startup. That’s a much higher risk, higher volatility path, and most of the income potential is concentrated years into the future. Taking an Upstart investment makes it possible for me to access the educational and long-term benefits of working on a startup I’m passionate about without the loss of financial security or flexibility to make efficient consumption choices today (e.g. choosing housing with a shorter commute). Since Upstart determines each upstart’s funding rate offer based on his or her academic and career achievements, it makes economic sense for individuals all along the talent distribution.
In this paper, we use the variation across space and time in the expansion of natural gas infrastructure in Turkish provinces using data between 2001 and 2011. Our results indicate that the rate of increase in the use of natural gas has resulted in a significant reduction in the rate of infant mortality in Turkey. In particular, a one-percentage point increase in the rate of subscriptions to natural gas services would cause the infant mortality rate to decline by 4 percent, which could result in 348 infant lives saved in 2011 alone. These results are robust to a large number of specifications.
The authors outline two ways through which the effect may occur:
Hollywood is abuzz with reports that the tiny islands of Antigua and Barbuda may begin operating their own national versions of the Pirate Bay, where individuals can cheaply, or even freely, download the latest films and TV shows. The clincher: this will all be legal.
How is that possible? Because the World Trade Organization says so. Let us explain.
When the U.S. helped create the WTO back in the early 1990s, it had a few main goals. One was to create a serious world trade court. The WTO has a lot of complex rules on trade, and the idea was to build a legal system that could neutrally adjudicate allegations of rule breaking. And it would work by allowing the winning country to retaliate against the loser by “suspending obligations.”
In other words, if the U.S. takes Japan to trade court and wins, Japan has to stop doing whatever bad thing it was doing. And if it doesn’t, the U.S. gets to retaliate–by, for example, increasing tariffs on Japanese goods up to the amount of harm Japan was causing.
On that last point — the demand side — we should especially consider “consumption amenities,” as Brian Jacob, Brian McCall, and Kevin M. Stange label them in a new working paper called “College as Country Club: Do Colleges Cater to Students’ Preferences for Consumption?” (abstract; pdf). I find the passage that I’ve bolded, below, to be especially fascinating:
This paper investigates whether demand-side market pressure explains colleges’ decisions to provide consumption amenities to their students. We estimate a discrete choice model of college demand using micro data from the high school classes of 1992 and 2004, matched to extensive information on all four-year colleges in the U.S. We find that most students do appear to value college consumption amenities, including spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories. While this taste for amenities is broad-based, the taste for academic quality is confined to high-achieving students. The heterogeneity in student preferences implies that colleges face very different incentives depending on their current student body and the students who the institution hopes to attract. We estimate that the elasticities implied by our demand model can account for 16 percent of the total variation across colleges in the ratio of amenity to academic spending, and including them on top of key observable characteristics (sector, state, size, selectivity) increases the explained variation by twenty percent.
It would be great news if this meant that high-achieving students craving high academic quality will be rewarded with cheaper tuition in the future, but somehow I don’t see that happening. Do you?
The Texas Legislature is back in session, providing its usual cookie jar of absurd economic proposals. A real winner is House Bill 649, which would provide compensatory tax reductions to companies that become taxed under the Affordable Care Act because their employer-provided health insurance fails to cover employees’ emergency contraception. Such a bill means Texas would be giving firms incentives to thwart federal law. It also opens up the possibility of much broader tax offsets. I’m certain that our governor and legislature dislike the recent imposition of higher federal income tax rates on high-income families. Why not take the logic of this bill one step further and offer tax reductions (sales tax, since we have no income tax) to very high-income families? Indeed, the reductio ad absurdum would construct all state tax policy to offset to the extent possible any incentives provided by federal tax policy.
Beneficiary women are 40 percent less likely to be victims of physical abuse, but are more likely to receive violent threats with no associated abuse. This evidence is consistent with a model of decision-makers’ interactions with asymmetric information in the male partner’s gains to marriage, who can then use threats of violence to extract rents from their female partners.
“The article may have important implications for policy, since it provide a mixed view of conditional cash transfer programs’ effectiveness in improving women’s empowerment within the household,” the authors wrote in an earlier draft. “The program may increase the likelihood of violent threats, which may in turn compromise women’s emotional health and other aspects of their wellbeing.”
In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner wrote about another interesting research finding gleaned from Oportunidades data:
I am a software engineer, and used to have a job writing software for scientists. I was hired by Good Boss, and thoroughly enjoyed my job. One year later, Good Boss accepted a position at another institution, and was replaced by Bad Boss. I worked for Bad Boss for another two-and-a-half years before resigning because I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Keep in mind the following occurred at the same institution, the same project, the same grant, the same team, the same office; the single difference was the boss.
Very recently I drove through a couple of small villages in the northwestern part of Belgium (near the border with France). A couple of road signs caught my attention. When you reach a village there’s a sign (in Dutch) saying “here, X percent of the drivers stay within the speed limit.” Then when you reach the next village there’s the same sign except that the percentage is different. Usually it’s around 90% (87% in one village, 91% in another, etc.).
I don’t know how they collect the data or even if the numbers are real. I also wish I knew the trends, how often they change the signs, how many villages participate in this safety initiative, etc. Then I wondered: where does this idea come from? Have you heard of anything like this before? If yes, is this effective to slow cars down?
When you are a transportation professor, it is your privilege to hear a lot of zany ideas. I have heard about a scheme to create a fleet of intercontinental freight zeppelins (actually, this may not be quite as zany as it sounds). Fifty years after The Jetsons, there are still dogged advocates of flying cars. The most common thing I hear is that we should attack congestion by building monorails down the medians of the freeways. I have no idea how the monorail has bewitched our citizenry (too many trips to Disneyland?), or what precisely is so offensive about the idea of trains that run on two rails, but it’s amazing how beloved the monorail is, so much so that an episode of the Simpsons parodied it. Monorail! Monorail!
Because I love hearing people’s ideas and have no desire to be rude, I engage in an exacting regimen of meditation, yoga, and deep breathing so I can exhibit the equanimity of a lama when hearing goofy ideas. But occasionally something comes up that none of my mantras or self-hypnosis can handle.
The show is all about storytelling – and the stories are of remarkable lives or surprising ideas in economics. We’ll learn about the impromptu engineering genius Bill Phillips, the cold war guru Thomas Schelling, and life-saving market designer Al Roth. We’ll discover how the geeks took over poker, and what happened to them.
And the series begins with the innovation lessons from the London Olympics – or as we’ve called it, “Hot Pants vs. the Knockout Mouse.”
While listening to your podcast on British copyright laws I was thinking you missed an important point. If you want to keep content providers producing, you can’t pay them too much. It’s what I call the “one-hit-wonder” rule. If a single piece of copyrighted work is so popular that fair compensation to the creator eliminates the incentive for the copyright owner to ever produce anything else. The same could apply to the creator’s heirs. Would Churchill’s descendants produce new and more content if they were not getting paid for the work their ancestor did?
I think Ed’s observation is more relevant for the heirs than the creator him/herself. Thoughts?
My son, who does downhill skiing, noticed that the resort he usually visits has changed its pricing policy. It used to offer free lift tickets to skiers ages 70+; now it only gives them a 20 percent discount off the regular rates. This change makes sense. My guess is that in times past, fewer older seniors even thought of skiing; and those few who did were somewhat marginal—had a fairly high demand elasticity. Today’s older seniors are healthier, have more skiing experience, and thus probably have a lower demand elasticity. It thus makes sense for the resort to reduce the extent of discrimination favoring old folks in its pricing scheme. (HT: MAH)
A frequent response to the dysfunctions of American air travel is technological: namely, self-driving cars (also see this article). In a self-driving car, you can relax, even sleep, while being driven safely to your destination at 60 mph. We once had such a system. It’s called a train network.
Compared to air or car travel, a decent train network is cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and quicker. As an example, I’ll compare two door-to-door, city-center-to-city-center journeys.
For years now, Facebook watchers have wondered when the company would unleash the potential of its underpowered search bar. (Nobody has feared this day more than Google, which suddenly faces a competitor able to index tons of data that Google’s own search engine can’t access.) They have also wondered how a Facebook search product might work. Now we know. Graph Search is fundamentally different from web search. Instead of a Google-like effort to help users find answers from a stitched-together corpus of all the world’s information, Facebook is helping them tap its vast, monolithic database to make better use of their “social graph,” the term Zuckerberg uses to describe the network of one’s relationships with friends, acquaintances, favorite celebrities, and preferred brands.
The statistician Andrew Gelman has asked us to publicize what sounds like a nifty project: a Year-in-the-Life look at what data hounds and statisticians actually do:
So here’s the plan. 365 of you write vignettes about your statistical lives. Get into the nitty gritty—tell me what you do, and why you’re doing it. I’ll collect these and then post them at the Statistics Forum, one a day for a year. I think that could be great, truly a unique resource into what statistics and quantitative research is really like. Also it will be perfect for the Statistics Forum: people will want to tune in everyday to see what comes next.
In an e-mail, he adds:
I think it would be a great service to the professions of quantitative research to get vignettes from a wide variety of statistical practitioners. (I’d be interested in hearing what empirical economists do during their days too!) So I’d like to spread the net wide and get lots of stories from people.
And yes, for those of you who read the agate type, this post goes in the Bygones Being Bygones file.
Q. I work in an office with stark contrasts in the cultures of different departments. Has there been research on the success/failures of forcing departments to assimilate/work together more? –Drew
A. A 2003 experiment by economists Colin Camerer and Roberto Weber was designed to speak to exactly the question you’re asking: What are the challenges of cross-cultural interaction, and what difficulties present themselves when two distinct cultures are forced together?
Each participant in their experiment viewed a matrix of sixteen office scenes on a computer screen. The participants were randomly paired up and put in the roles of “manager” and “employee.” Managers’ screens highlighted and numbered eight of the pictures. Their job was to communicate to the employee, through instant messaging, the eight highlighted scenes in order. The employee had to identify the picture the manager was describing. Simple enough.
We’ve blogged and podcasted about the value (or lack thereof?) of a collegeeducation. A new paper (summarized here) by sociologist Laura Hamilton suggests one way parents can help their kids get more out of college: help them a little less — with tuition, at least. Here’s the abstract:
Evidence shows that parental financial investments increase college attendance, but we know little about how these investments shape postsecondary achievement. Two theoretical frameworks suggest diametric conclusions. Some studies operate from amore-is-more perspective in which children use calculated parental allocations to make academic progress. In contrast, a more-is-less perspective, rooted in a different model of rational behavior, suggests that parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement. I adjudicate between these frameworks, using data from nationally representative postsecondary datasets to determine what effect financial parental investments have on student GPA and degree completion. The findings suggest seemingly contradictory processes. Parental aid decreases student GPA, but it increases the odds of graduating—net of explanatory variables and accounting for alternative funding. Rather than strategically using resources in accordance with parental goals, or maximizing on their ability to avoid academic work, students are satisficing: they meet the criteria for adequacy on multiple fronts, rather than optimizing their chances for a particular outcome. As a result, students with parental funding often perform well enough to stay in school but dial down their academic efforts. I conclude by highlighting the importance of life stage and institutional context for parental investment.
In a Freakonomics Radio episode called “Misadventures in Baby-Making,” we looked at the unintended consequences of China’s One Child Policy. A new paper (gated) in Science looks at the so-called “little emperors” and how they might impact China’s economy. From Bloomberg:
China’s one-child policy has produced adults that tend to have personality traits unsuited for starting businesses or managing companies, according to a study that adds to economic concerns surrounding the rule.
Using surveys of 421 men and women in Beijing and testing their skills in economic games, researchers in Australia found those born after the 1979 policy were more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse. They also found them to be 23 percent less prone to choose an occupation that entails business risk, such as becoming a stockbroker, entrepreneur or private firm manager.
Jason Fletcher, who teaches public health at Yale, has written earlier on the connection between ADHD and crime. (The gist: “children who experience ADHD symptoms face a substantially increased likelihood of engaging in many types of criminal activities.”) He now has a new working paper called “The Effects of Childhood ADHD on Adult Labor Market Outcomes” (abstract, PDF):
While several types of mental illness, including substance abuse disorders, have been linked with poor labor market outcomes, no current research has been able to examine the effects of childhood ADHD. As ADHD has become one of the most prevalent childhood mental conditions, it is useful to understand the full set of consequences of the illness. This paper uses a longitudinal national sample, including sibling pairs, to show important labor market outcome consequences of ADHD. The employment reduction is between 10-14 percentage points, the earnings reduction is approximately 33%, and the increase in social assistance is 15 points, which are larger than many estimates of the black-white earnings gap and the gender earnings gap. A small share of the link is explained by education attainments and co-morbid health conditions and behaviors. The results also show important differences in labor market consequences by family background and age of onset. These findings, along with similar research showing that ADHD is linked with poor education outcomes and adult crime, suggest that treating childhood ADHD can substantially increase the acquisition of human capital.
The more research of this sort that we see, the easier it is to believe the following: compound interest may indeed be the eighth wonder of the world, but early-childhood investment and intervention is probably Wonder 7.5.
A student writes that she became a monopolist in her freshman dorm — hoarding Midol to sell to her dorm-mates at the time each month when dorm-mate had a quite inelastic demand for this product. She also realized that at that time, there is an increasingly inelastic demand for chocolate-chip cookies, so she hoarded and sold those, too. She correctly notes that the two goods are complementary over time — more of both consumed on some days than on others. But I bet that over a short interval, they are substitutes — the satisfaction from one reduces the demand for the other. This illustrates how we need to think about the time dimension of consumer choice. I would also bet that her monopoly doesn’t last long. Anybody can bring the two products to the dorm and sell them — there are few barriers to entry. A better description is that she’s an innovating entrepreneur in what inherently will be a competitive industry.
A few weeks ago, before the flu was national news, a reader who works at a hospital in Portland, Or., wrote to say: “The organization I work for just started this policy, I think it is very interesting and may push those who don’t want to get a flu shot for whatever reason to get a flu shot to avoid the stigma of wearing a mask. The employee comment section has ranged from HIPPA violations to discrimination for those who can’t have a flu shot based on egg allergies.”
Here’s the policy:
You may have heard by now: Flu season is ramping up in Oregon, with cases now starting to affect hospitalized patients in greater numbers. For individuals whose immune systems are compromised by other conditions, the flu can be life threatening.
To keep patients safe, a new Influenza Vaccination and Masking policy requires that workforce members do one of two things during flu season:
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, Levitt and Dubner wrote about another interesting research finding gleaned from Oportunidades data:
