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Freakonomics Blog

Bring Your Questions for Alex Stone, Author of Fooling Houdini

I get sent about 200 books a year by strangers who want me to provide blurbs.  About 199 out of those 200 will walk away empty-handed.   Most of the time I don’t even open the book – it would be a full-time job just to read everything sent my way.  Occasionally a subject will really interest me, and I will spend some time with a book, but certainly not read it from cover to cover.  And about once a year, I actually start reading one of these books and like it so much I can’t put it down. 

That book is Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind , by Alex Stone.  I happened to receive the book not long after I blogged about a book by two mathematicians on the mathematics of magic.  That mathematics book was excellent and taught me a lot, but wasn’t exactly a page turner.  In contrast, the first 30 pages of Fooling Houdini was some of the most engaging non-fiction I’ve read in a long time.


How to Make a Better Athlete

Olympic athletes have become increasingly reliant on scientists as advisers. A Wired article by Mark McClusky explores the efforts of sports scientists to improve athletic performance as gains have become harder to achieve. The Australian Institute of Sport is leading the charge; its success is best-demonstrated by an example from the skeleton, a sledding event that was recently reintroduced as an Olympic event:

They determined that one significant predictor of success had nothing to do with the sled itself or even the skill of the pilot. The faster a competitor pushed the sled through the 30-meter start zone before jumping on it, the better they performed. So researchers set up a national testing campaign, looking for women with backgrounds in competitive sports who excelled at the 30-meter sprint. They also evaluated candidates to see how well they responded to feedback and coaching. Eventually, they picked a group of 10 athletes—including track sprinters, a water skier, and several surf lifesavers, an Australian sport that requires sprinting through sand.


Homeownership and Suburban Sprawl

A new paper from economist (and city-lover) Ed Glaeser argues in favor of a reevaluation of government policies towards homeownership.  The abstract:

The most fundamental fact about rental housing in the United States is that rental units are overwhelmingly in multifamily structures. This fact surely reflects the agency problems associated with renting single-family dwellings, and it should influence all discussions of rental housing policy. Policies that encourage homeowning are implicitly encouraging people to move away from higher density living; policies that discourage renting are implicitly discouraging multifamily buildings.


Apple's New Podcast App

Apple has just released an app called Podcasts which, yes, helps you download and manage podcast from the iTunes store.

Coverage of the app can be found here, here, here, and here.

I haven’t used the app yet so I cannot comment on it — some of the iTunes reviews indicate some fixes are needed — but I have to say that I do like Apple’s taste in the podcasts it has chosen for its promo materials:


The Traffic Mimes

Our recent podcast “Riding the Herd Mentality” featured Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, who, among other unorthodox methods, hired mimes to tame the city’s unruly traffic. The mimes ridiculed bad behavior and handed out thumbs-up/thumbs-down cards to help people shame bad drivers.  Some photographic evidence:


Ol’ Man Levitt: The Answer to the Freakonomics Quiz

Earlier this week I posed a quiz to blog readers: what happened twice to me in the last few days that had never once happened to me in the first 45 years of my life.

Well, it turns out that the answers readers posted turned out to be a pretty interesting data for analysis.  At the time that my researcher Sara Kuse crunched the numbers, there were 280 guesses (some commenters guessed more than once, and we counted all their guesses) that fell into roughly 110 different categories. 

The most commonly made guesses were getting robbed or mugged, making a hole in one, getting recognized/asked for an autograph, winning a prize, losing something like a wallet being in a car accident, and being stung by a bee.  Over 30 percent of all the guesses were one of those items.  None of those would qualify, however, because they’ve all happened to me at least once before.  Getting robbed and a hole in one were two great guesses – both have happened to me exactly once in my life. 


Standing Your Ground

A new NBER paper examines the effect of Stand Your Ground self-defense laws, which “eliminate the longstanding legal requirement that a person threatened outside of his or her own home retreat rather than use force.”  Chandler B. McClellan and Erdal Tekin exploit cross-state variations in implementation dates to determine the effect of these laws on homicides.  Their findings are grim: 

Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males.  According to our estimates, between 4.4 and 7.4 additional white males are killed each month as a result of these laws.  We find no evidence to suggest that these laws increase homicides among blacks.  Our results are robust to a number of specifications and unlikely to be driven entirely by the killings of assailants.


Drivers Aren’t the Only People With Blind Spots

Math professor R. Andrew Hicks has come up with an amazing new rear-view mirror for the driver’s side of the car that eliminates blind spots. The secret is that standard mirrors are flat, but this one has subtle curves that greatly widens the field of view, but without being distorting. If you look at the photo accompanying the link above, it is amazing how much better the new mirror seems to be.

Alas, you won’t see Hicks’s mirror on many cars any time soon. U.S. regulations require that driver’s side mirrors be flat, and this mirror is not flat. So if you want one, you will have to buy it and install it on the car yourself.


N.Y. Times, Playing Role of the Pot, Calls the Wall Street Journal’s Kettle Black

I love the New York Times (and not just because I used to work there) but goodness gracious, this kind of thing really hurts its credibility.

An article about News Corp.’s decision to split off its publishing business (including the Wall Street Journal) from its entertainment business contains the following sentence:

Both companies would maintain their controversial dual-class share stock structure, which enables the Murdoch family to control nearly 40 percent of the voting power.

Well, guess what other family-run news organization maintains a dual-class share stock structure? Yes, the New York Times — as well as the Washington Post and others, as Rupert Murdoch pointed out in announcing News Corp.’s move. This fact, however, isn’t mentioned in the Times article. But here’s the reality: given the turmoil in the newspaper business in general and at the Times in particular, it’d be easy to argue that if anyone’s dual-class ownership is “controversial,” it is the Times‘s more than the Journal‘s.

The Times article also omits that the new publishing unit will include News Corp.’s education unit and HarperCollins, one of the world’s largest book publishers. (Our books are published by William Morrow, a division of HC.) The Journal‘s coverage of the story is superior.


Making Prison Schoolwork Pay

Prisoners in Brazil now have a path to reduced sentences: schoolwork.  The Chicago Tribune reports that:

Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil’s most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced.

Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,” said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.

If Brazil is bribing its prisoners to do schoolwork, can bribing students be far behind?

(HT: Marginal Revolution)


Mapping Gang Turf

A new paper from P. Jeffrey Brantingham, an anthropologist at UCLA, uses a mathematical model for hunting to map street gang territory. From the UCLA Pressroom:

“The way gangs break up their neighborhoods into unique territories is a lot like the way lions or honey bees break up space,” said lead author P. Jeffrey Brantingham, a professor of anthropology at UCLA.

Using police records, the researchers mapped the activities of 13 gangs in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood just east of Los Angeles. They found the most dangerous place to be wasn’t the heart of a gang’s territory, but near the borders:


Freakonomics Quiz: Twice Is Enough

Last week something that has never happened to me before in my life, occurred twice, independently, in two days.

What was it? First correct answer in the comments section gets Freakonomics swag.

Although that is a meager set of hints, I’ve found that no matter how hard the quiz, Freakonomics blog readers can answer just about any question within an hour. I’ll be curious to see what happens on this one.


The Summer Trademark Olympics (Please Don't Sue Us)

Whether the Olympics are around the corner (as they are now) or a few years away, there are always Olympic-themed events going on. Recently, a group called Ravelry sponsored a knitting competition called the “Ravelympics.” [Related post on Ravelry: “Is There an Elitist Oligarchy in the Underworld of Knitters?”] Whereas most people probably imagined a bunch of grandmothers knitting mufflers, the U.S. Olympic Committee saw a conspiracy to infringe its trademark in the word “Olympics.”

After enduring a lot of criticism, the USOC backed off the knitters. But what the USOC tried to do isn’t unusual.

In fact, just recently luxury goods purveyor Louis Vuitton threatened to sue Penn law school over a poster for an academic conference on the law of fashion that featured an artist’s funny take on the Louis Vuitton logo (with the famous “LV” replaced with a “TM”). Louis Vuitton didn’t see the joke, and threatened the law school (which, being a law school, knew enough not to be scared).


Honor vs. Time

I just got a letter saying the American Economic Review was including me in a published list of exceptionally diligent referees.  I suppose I should be proud, but this “honor” has problems.  It is a signal to other editors that could increase the demands on my time.  Worse still, it indicates that I view my time as having relatively little value; and in so much of modern American society, signaling a high value of time (seeming very busy) is a status symbol.  The only virtue is that, being very senior in my profession, this additional signal adds very little new information for most observers. One friend requested that I be one of four people doing a tenure review on an assistant professor; and, after I agreed, the friend wrote back, “I have no doubt that I’ll get your review first.”

(HT: PG and MR)


Bribing Kids to Try on Tests

We use direct financial incentives to motivate so many different activities in life.  No one expects workers in a fast food restaurant to flip burgers for free.  No one expects teachers to show up and teach without getting paid.  But when it comes to kids in school, we think that the distant financial rewards they will earn years or decades later should be enough to motivate them, even though for most kids a month or two feels like an eternity.

To learn a little more about whether kids’ school effort responds to financial incentives, John List, Suzanne Neckermann, Sally Sadoff, and I carried out a series of field experiments we recently wrote up as a working paper (PDF here).  Sally Sadoff (who you might remember from the Freakonomics movie as the woman who works tirelessly to help the students in Chicago Heights), talked about the research on Fox Business News.

Unlike most previous studies involving kids, schools, and payments, in this research we aren’t trying to get kids to study hard or learn more, we were going after something even more simple: just get the student to try hard on the test itself.  So we don’t tell the kids about the financial reward ahead of time — we just surprise them right before they sit down to take the test by offering them up to $20 for improvements.


How Big Is the World Black Market?

Economists Ceyhun Elgin and Oguz Oztunali are researching the size of shadow economies, or black markets, around the world. Using a dataset with 7,395 observations for 161 countries from 1950 to 2009, they’re looking into how the size of black markets differs in rich and poor countries.

They estimate that shadow economies account for 22.67 percent of world GDP, with a generally downward trend that seems to have been interrupted by the global recession:

For almost all country groups (except for the post-Socialist one), we observe a declining trend over time. However, the pace of the reduction seems to lose some momentum in the last decade. Somewhat more interestingly, we observe a spike staring in 2007. Considering the emergence of the global economic crisis, this could give further support for the hypothesis that the size of the shadow economy is countercyclical, as suggested by Roca et al (2001) and Elgin (2012).


Foodie Economist Tyler Cowen Answers Your Questions

We recently solicited your food questions for economist Tyler Cowen, whose latest book is An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. (He also blogs at Marginal Revolution and at Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide.) That book was the jumping-off point for our recent podcasts “You Eat What You Are” Parts 1 and 2. 

Below are the answers to some of your questions. Cowen talks about food subsidies, the Malthusian trap, “ethnic” food, the the meal he’d like to share with Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. Thanks to all for participating.

Q. Any advice on choosing the best food when eating at a college cafeteria? – Philip Mulder

A. That is a good time to start your diet. Otherwise, look for items which can sit and stew for a long time.  Indian food works okay in such contexts, as do stews, as the name would suggest.  Stay away from anything requiring flash frying or immediate, short-term contact with heat.  The vegetables won’t be great, but often they are not great (in the U.S.) anyway, so now is the time to fill up on them!  The opportunity cost of eating the bad-tasting but nutritious food is especially low in these circumstances.


How California’s GMO Labeling Law Could Limit Your Food Choices and Hurt the Poor

The American Medical Association resolved this week that “there is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods.”

The association has long-held that nothing about the process of recombinant DNA makes genetically engineered (GE) crop plants inherently more dangerous to the environment or to human health than the traditional crop plants that have been deliberately but slowly bred for human purposes for millennia. It is a view shared by the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., the European Commission, and countless other national science academies and non-governmental organizations.


Would Paying Politicians More Attract Better Politicians?

Whenever you look at a political system and find it wanting, one tempting thought is this: Maybe we have subpar politicians because the job simply isn’t attracting the right people. And, therefore, if we were to significantly raise politicians’ salaries, we would attract a better class of politician.

This is an unpopular argument for various reasons, in part because it would be the politicians themselves who have to lobby for higher salaries, and that isn’t politically feasible (especially in a poor economy). Can you imagine the headlines?

But the idea remains attractive, doesn’t it? The idea is that, by raising the salaries of elected and other government officials, you would a) signal the true importance of the job; b) attract a kind of competent person who might otherwise enter a more remunerative field; c) allow politicians to focus more on the task at hand rather than worry about their income; and d)  make politicians less susceptible to the influence of moneyed interests.


Your Parked Car Gets Dinged By an Unknown Driver. Now What?

A British reader named Dominic Ellison sends the following photo and note:

I saw the attached notice in the window of a neighbor’s car that had been pranged and lost its bumper.

I felt that it was an interesting test in game theory and was reminded of what I think is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, as the reader must certainly ask a number of questions:

Does the owner really have CCTV evidence? If so, why does the poster not allude to make, model or registration?

Would the consequences be genuinely worse if not come forward? For example, was it a drink driver not wishing to be identified at the time?


FREAK-est Links

1. ABC repeats Roland Fryer’s resume experiment and finds that “white-sounding names were actually downloaded 17 percent more often by job recruiters.”

2. Groupon offer: a baby name for just $1,000.

3. New study says old people are more likely to die on their birthdays. (HT: Eric M Jones)

4. A conversation with neuroeconomist Colin Camerer.

5. Are people using the new Israeli organ donation cards to game the priority system?

6. The Nobel Prize Committee is tightening its belt: the prize is now only 8 million Swedish kronor (U.S $1.12 million). (HT: V Brenner)


What Countries Should Maximize

We watched some of the Diamond Jubilee celebration and loved it. The only disturbing part was to see media comments that the U.K. would have been better off if people hadn’t had the Monday holiday for the Jubilee (much less the Tuesday holiday that some workers also had). The argument was that GDP would have been higher without the holiday.

Perhaps, but workers often make up for lost output when they return from holiday. Much more important is that no nation’s purpose should be maximizing output (and income). Instead, maximizing utility is what societies should be about. While well-being is much less readily measurable than output, measurement difficulties should not seduce us into becoming market fetishists. Perhaps if the U.S. emulated the U.K. (and Europe generally), and we took longer vacations and had more public holidays, our country would be better off (even if output were slightly lower).


An Incentive to Hitchhike

Our “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?” podcast poked into various reasons for the decline of hitchhiking, including rising car ownership and the feature of strangers.

A Wall Street Journal article now highlights one scenario where hitchhiking is on the rise: at the George Washington Bridge, which links New Jersey and New York. The rise in hitchhiking (or, really, carpooling) is driven by a desire to escape the GWB’s high toll: vehicles carrying three or more passengers get a $6 toll discount.  “There are no official meeting points or matching services for carpoolers,” writes Spencer Jakab.  “So drivers approach the bridge and pick up pedestrians at a bus stop just before the toll plaza, giving a free ride to two commuters who would otherwise pay $2.00 to take a jitney into town.”


Tyler Cowen on Wal-Mart and World Hunger

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton interviews Tyler Cowen about food and economics.  Here’s a particularly interesting bit about why Wal-Mart’s presence in places like Africa might actually make it easier for the poor people to buy food there:

Cowen: If you look at wheat and rice, there have been price spikes over the last five years and they’ve made food a lot harder for poor people to afford. The so-called “Green Revolution” has somewhat slowed down. This is an unreported story. Crop yields are stagnant. It isn’t a problem we can solve overnight but it’s really one of the biggest problems in the world. It hardly gets any publicity. But for poor people in India, the Middle East and parts of Africa, it really matters.

Some of the problems are we don’t have enough trade. It could be either legal barriers or just costly to transport or trade things. If there could be a shortage of rice in one place, it actually not that easy to ship a lot of rice in there because of bad roads and so on.


The Cost of Friendship

Interesting if perhaps not so surprising: in a new working paper called “The Cost of Friendship,” Paul Gompers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov, and Yuhai Xuan argue that even in as performance-based an industry as venture capital, people tend to collaborate with people who have similar backgrounds, often to their detriment:

This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals.  First, we investigate what personal characteristics affect people’s desire to work together.  Second, given the influence of these personal characteristics, we analyze whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance.    Addressing these problems in the venture capital syndication setting, we show that venture capitalists exhibit strong detrimental homophily in their co-investment decisions.  We find that individual venture capitalists choose to collaborate with other venture capitalists for both ability-based characteristics (e.g., whether both individuals in a dyad obtained a degree from a top university) and affinity-based characteristics (e.g., whether individuals in a pair share the same ethnic background, attended the same school, or worked for the same employer previously). 


Extreme Locavorism

As part of The Decolonizing Diet Project, a new study at the School of Native American Studies at Northern Michigan University, a group of 25 volunteers will spend the next year eating primarily foods that “were part of the Great Lakes diet prior to the year 1600.” As the blog Found Michigan explains:

The purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between humans and regional native foods; components include an ethnobotanist (for native plant identification), a physician (to check up on participants’ physical changes), group outings and potlucks, daily journaling for research subjects, and a master list of “DDP-eligible” foods. So, things like squash, bison, and wild leeks are in; things like tomatoes, cheese, and chocolate are out. What can’t be bought from local suppliers must be grown, hunted, fished, or foraged—meaning your next meal might be waiting in the woods as opposed to the grocery store.


Is College Worth It? Non-Grads Say Yes

Notwithstanding the ongoing controversy over rising college tuition costs, there’s one group of people who think that college is worth the cost: people who haven’t gone. Catherine Rampell of Economix blogs about a new survey of recent high school graduates:

Seven in 10 of these recent graduates said they would need more education if they were to have a successful career. Despite their belief in the value of post-secondary education, though, only 38 per cent definitely planned to attend college to get more education in the next five years. Barriers included skyrocketing tuitions and family obligations.

Many of the respondents felt differently at the start of high school — 35 per cent thought they would “definitely” go to college and 28 percent believed they would “probably” go.  Minority students were even more optimistic at the start of high school: