Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Patent Gap.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
It centers around a new working paper called “Why Don’t Women Patent?” and we talk to one of its authors, the Rutgers economist Jennifer Hunt. (We recently previewed this research on the blog, and some of Hunt’s earlier research too.)
1. Who is more in need of a witness-protection program today: Billy Cundiff or Kyle Williams? (I’d pick Cundiff even though Williams is guiltier.)
2. Looks like defense really doesn’t win championships. Here’s the regular-season defensive ranking (yards per game) of the four teams who played yesterday: Ravens (3rd); 49ers (4th); Giants (27th); Patriots (31st). Giants will play Patriots in the Super Bowl.
3. At least the Harbaugh parents won’t spend Feb. 5 in a Sophie’s Choice situation — but I’m guessing they would have preferred to.
There are a lot of things that need to go right for any given person to succeed in the NFL. We know all the stories about bad breaks, freak injuries, and mismatched coaches. On the flipside, we know how much hard work, discipline, and even luck go into a successful career.
In this installment of Football Freakonomics, we take a step back to ask the most basic question: are great players born or are they made? In other words, how much does raw talent matter?
French diet guru Pierre Dukan is urging his government to give extra marks in school for a healthy BMI. The Telegraph reports:
“Obesity is a real public health problem that is rarely – if at all – taken into account by politicians,” Mr Dukan told newspaper Le Parisien ahead of the book’s launch.
Mr Dukan said his education plan would be “a good way to sensitise teenagers to the need for a balanced diet.”
He denied it would punish overweight children, saying: “There is nothing wrong with educating children about nutrition. This will not change anything for those who do not need to lose weight. For the others, it will motivate them.”
It’s at this point in the NFL postseason when every NFL analyst, pundit, and blogger will inevitably proclaim “defense wins championships.” With the NFL conference championships upon us this weekend, this phrase will be uttered more times than “yo” in a typical Jersey Shore episode. And why not?
Last weekend we saw two of the NFL’s top offenses — Green Bay and New Orleans — lose to better defenses. Moreover, as Chris Berman himself pointed out on ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown, 38 (out of 45) Super Bowls have been won by a top 10 defense and 22 have been won by a top three defense. The sentiment has hardened from cliché into an article of sports law. But is it actually true? Does defense really win championships?
In a word: no.
In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, Steve Levitt visits with Marketplace‘s Kai Ryssdal to discuss his poker research and his personal poker history. The episode is called “Why Online Poker Should Be Legal.” You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.
In case you haven’t been following the long-running legal story, here’s the gist. Online poker was growing fast in the U.S. until Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which pretty much shut things down. The ruling was based in large part on the government’s reasoning that poker is predominantly a game of chance as opposed to a game of skill. But is this classification correct?
Yesterday I got a short and sweet insight into learning, courtesy of the New England Aquarium, where I took our daughters for our weekly visit. One of our favorite exhibits is the training session for the sea lions and fur seals. In the audience this time were about 100 school children with parents and teachers. To introduce the session, the lead trainer conducted the following discussion:
How many of you do chores? (Many hands go up.)
How many of you get an allowance for doing chores? (Most hands remain in the air.)
How many of do homework?
I see lots of hands! It makes homework not so bad because you get a reward at the end.
Reader Martin Dimitrov writes in:
Are ransoms paid to pirates tax deductible? The question actually makes sense to me. If we can pay medical insurance and dependent care pre-tax, we should be able to deduct the ransoms (typically a substantial sum) paid to save our relatives/dependents.
According to the IRS, the answer is yes, since ransom qualifies as theft, along with blackmail, embezzlement, and extortion. You must, however, show proof of your loss. So make sure to get a receipt, or file a police report. A recent court order in India also allows for tax deduction on ransom. This has some lawmakers worrying about a potential unintended consequence: a spike in fake kidnappings.
The Los Angeles City Council may require condoms in porn movies produced in the city limits. How will this affect the market? Whether companies stay in L.A. or leave, costs will rise (condom costs if they stay, the costs of relocation, loss of agglomeration economies, if they move outside the city limits). If costs do rise, will that matter to producers? I imagine product demand is fairly inelastic, and they can easily pass the cost increase onto consumers. But even if costs were unaffected, consumer demand might shift far leftward if producers remained in L.A., since customers may not wish to view protected sex. Industry members lobbied strongly against the bill — perhaps because they feared the direct drop in demand rather than the cost increase.
1. Guess which governor wants to spring non-violent drug users from prison? (HT: Ivan Kronenfeld)
2. Will the U.S. get its own InTrade to all betting on Presidential elections?
3. A fixie index shows a surprising capital of hipster bikes.
4. Can birdsong really kill crime? (I am skeptical; related.) (HT: Chad Troutwine)
A lot of our political debate boils down to questions about equality of outcomes versus equality of opportunity. But it turns out that they’re pretty closely related. Take a look at the chart below, which is from a terrific recent speech (with charts!) by Alan Krueger:
The horizontal axis shows the Gini coefficient, which is a summary of the degree of income inequality for each country. I think of this as a measure of inequality of outcomes. The United States sits out there on the right, which says that we have high inequality, which I bet that doesn’t surprise you.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Is Good Corporate Citizenship Also Good for the Bottom Line?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
The short answer: yes. That’s the finding of Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim from their recent paper “The Impact of a Corporate Culture of Sustainability on Corporate Behavior and Performance” :
“We show that there is significant variation in future accounting and stock market performance across the two groups of firms. We track corporate performance for 18 years and find that sustainable firms outperform traditional firms in terms of both stock market and accounting performance.”
Last week, we solicited questions for Harvard physicians Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, the authors of Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right For You
Given the risk of dislocating an elbow while patting oneself on the back, we don’t usually print fan mail. But this one, from James J. Krefft (also an author himself), needed to be shared: Recently I borrowed a copy of your book from a friend (so basically pure benefit for me) and I must say I am impressed. I am well-read, . . .
One of the private-sector retail stores adjacent to the main Austin cemetery sells grave monuments and related items, while another is a major gardening center. These are sensible location decisions—these retailers provide convenience to customers who will be using the cemetery.
A similar example is provided by the locational choice of our sons’ orthodontist—directly across the street from the local middle school. These are examples of agglomeration economies, but are in the retail sector and based on consumer demand, not production.
I wonder what are other good/bizarre examples in which small retail firms’ locational choices are determined by the fixed location of a major public facility that attracts potential customers? Brothels next to seaports?
David Brooks, in his Times column today (emphasis added):
When I started covering presidential primaries, the best part was getting to know the candidates. We journalists would ride around in vans and buses with them and get an intimate look at what it’s like to endure this soul-destroying process. But the ubiquity of Web cams and tweets has ended that off-the-record culture. As the technology gets more open, the lines of political communications become more closed.
True enough, and I’m surprised that more people don’t consider this paradox.
1. No, Brian Williams is not Walter Cronkite
2. Cory Doctorow: “The Coming War on General Computation” (video; transcript; interesting!)
3. Whole Foods has been thriving in a down economy.
4. Open-sourcing the scientific process.
We have long argued (most recently in this Marketplace podcast) that campaign spending isn’t nearly as influential in elections as the conventional wisdom holds.
This week, with the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls in South Carolina spending lots of money (and time and effort) and everyone’s talking about “super PAC” spending, we thought it was a good occasion to air this question out further. We’ve convened a Freakonomics Quorum on the topic, soliciting replies from a few folks with expertise in the realm. Thanks to all of them for participating.
Are you bummed out that you might have to postpone retirement for financial reasons?
Well, there may be a silver lining: it looks like retirement may be bad for your health. That’s the topic of our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, “Retirement Kills.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
The Great Recession has put a lot of retirement plans on hold, often at the behest of governments who can’t afford to pay pensions. Germany, the U.K., and France have all upped their retirement ages. And the U.S. is seeing a lot more older workers as well. Lisa Boily of the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that people 55 and older are expected to represent 25 percent of the labor force by 2020.
Part of this is simple demographics — the graying of the baby boom — but Americans are also working longer.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “A Cheap Employee Is … a Cheap Employee.”
(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
It’s about the question of whether low-paid employees are indeed a good deal for a retailer’s bottom line as the conventional wisdom states.
The piece begins with a couple of stories from blog readers, Eric M. Jones and Jamie Crouthamel, which were solicited earlier here. (One of the true pleasures of operating this blog is having a channel by which to turn readers into radio guests — thanks!)
Well, it’s January. And even though my team stumbled into inglorious, injury-plagued defeat, the most exciting football is yet to be played — some of it in very cold weather.
So we thought it was time to take a look at the various effects, and hidden side, of cold weather. That’s the focus of our latest installment of Football Freakonomics.
It is no secret that weather, cold or hot, has a significant effect on athletic performance. I don’t want to start an argument here about what constitutes a sport and what doesn’t, but I will say that the most frustrating six hours of my life was spent on a lake in upstate New York trying to coax some walleye through a hole in the ice. Brrr!
I don’t particularly like math. I’ve never been a fan of magic either. For some reason, however, when I heard about a new book entitled Magical Mathematics
I have to say that it is really good, and I would highly recommend it to any nerd. It is a really artful melding of card tricks that are remarkable, with explanations of the underlying math concepts that are at one level so simple and clear that almost anyone could get the basic intuition for what they are talking about, but at another level so deep and difficult that it is probably hopeless for someone like me to ever truly understand.
In a recent Football Freakonomics video about Tim Tebow, I made a connection between his faith and performance: Tebow is hardly the first NFL quarterback to be demonstrative about his religious faith. But he’s very demonstrative – and it’s worth considering how that faith may affect his play. By definition, faith often translates into a kind of fearlessness. Tim Tebow . . .
Encouraging news via the Associated Press: For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation’s top 15 causes of death. In Mexico, meanwhile, the murder trend continues to move in the opposite direction: During the first nine months of 2011, some 12,903 people were killed in drug-related violence—11% more than the . . .
1. Are world finances being run by an MIT fraternity?
2. A Bronx high-school teacher talks about teacher cheating.
3. Is the Mafia the biggest bank in Italy? (HT: Eric Jones)
4. Tyler Cowen‘s new Twitter feed on food, a must-follow; our related podcast is here.
5. Is more stress good for cops’ decision-making?
Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.
These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010.
The good news is that the numbers are wrong.
Weight Watchers has ads in heavy rotation with Charles Barkley saying: “lose weight like a man.”
You can also hear him mention his success in his Saturday Night Live monologue.
Something is working. Since starting WW, he’s lost 38 pounds. But what about the Weight Watchers program that has him shedding so much weight?
Is it the group weigh-ins?
Is it the famous Weight Watchers point system?
Or is it something else?
Last spring, I jokingly (okay, maybe half-jokingly) wrote about my quest to make the Champions Tour, the professional golf tour for people over the age of 50. In that post, I made reference to the ideas of Anders Ericsson, an old friend whom Dubner and I wrote about in our New York Times column back in 2006, and whose ideas later became the centerpiece of a number of popular books. Anders is the one who thinks that talent is unimportant. Oversimplifying a bit, he argues that with 10,000 hours of the right kind of deliberate practice, more or less anyone can become more or less world-class at anything. I’ve spent 5,000 hours practicing golf, so if I could just find the time for 5,000 more, I should be able to compete with the pros. Or at least that is what the theory says. My scorecards seem to be telling a different story!
It turns out I’ve got a kindred spirit in this pursuit, only this guy is dead serious. A few years back, twenty-something Dan McLaughlin decided he wanted to play on the PGA tour. Never mind that he had only played golf once or twice in his life and had done quite poorly those times. He knew the 10,000 hour argument, and he thought it would be fun to give it a test. So he quit his job, found a golf coach, and has devoted his life to golf ever since. So far he is 2,500 hours into his 10,000 hour quest, which he chronicles at thedanplan.com.
Two French economists, Simon Porcher and Alexandre Frondizi, have been working on a paper about the economics of Paris street prostitution in the late 19th century.
In 1878, there were an estimated 23,000 unregistered prostitutes and 3,991 registered prostitutes. Gathering data from 339 arrests, the researchers found that street prostitutes were generally young, unskilled, and well-paid:
They tended to work with pimps that were from the same area and clustered in neighborhoods where they could compete with regulated brothels. Street prostitutes not only generated profits for themselves but also for a whole bunch of actors, thereby switching the whole local economy to this industry, at the expense of the formal economy.
Mitt Romney won big in New Hampshire, but his opponents are vowing to push on in South Carolina. Which means stepping up their pleas for cash. In an e-mail to supporters, Rick Santorum wrote:
We must show real progress tonight and redouble our efforts … That’s why my campaign launched the “Game On” Moneybomb, and why we need your help right now. As you already know, we are facing serious and well-funded opposition for the nomination.
That’s the kind of language that confirms one of the biggest truisms in politics: money buys elections.
But how true is that truism?