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51 percent of Indian men said that wife-beating is justified under certain circumstances; more surprisingly, 54 percent of women agreed--
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Steven D. Levitt |
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declared preferences and revealed preferences.)
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Steven D. Levitt |
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c4acdad
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But while there are exceptions to every rule, it's also good to know the rule.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So why aren't we petrified of them?
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Steven D. Levitt |
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have sued for an injunction against Jaws.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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rely on accumulated data rather than on individual anecdotes,
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Steven D. Levitt |
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glaring anomalies, personal opinions, emotional outbursts, or moral leanings.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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After recent events, one might wonder if the macroeconomy is the domain of any economist.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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But as we've seen lately, such predictions are generally worthless.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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He upended the conventional wisdom on altruism by introducing new elements to a clever lab experiment to make it look a bit more like the real world. If your only option in the lab is to give away some money, you probably will. But in the real world, that is rarely your only option. The final version of his experiment, with the envelope-stuffing, was perhaps most compelling. It suggests that when a person comes into some money honestly and ..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education. If these home
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Most giving is, as economists call it, impure altruism or warm-glow altruism. You give not only because you want to help but because it makes you look good, or feel good, or perhaps feel less bad. Consider the panhandler. Gary Becker once wrote that most people who give money to panhandlers do so only because "the unpleasant appearance or persuasive appeal of beggars makes them feel uncomfortable or guilty." That's why people often cross th..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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And it would be startlingly cheap. IV estimates the "Save the Arctic" plan could be set up in just two years at a cost of roughly $20 million, with an annual operating cost of about $10 million. If cooling the poles alone proved insufficient, IV has drawn up a "Save the Planet" version, with five worldwide base stations instead of two, and three hoses at each site. This would put about three to five times the amount of sulfur dioxide into t..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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To an economist, the strategy is obvious. Since even a penny is more valuable than nothing, it makes sense for Zelda to accept an offer as low as a penny--and, therefore, it makes sense for Annika to offer just a penny, keeping $19.99 for herself. But, economists be damned, that's not how normal people played the game. The Zeldas usually rejected offers below $3. They were apparently so disgusted by a lowball offer that they were willing to..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Enter, therefore, a new and ingenious variant of Ultimatum, this one called Dictator. Once again, a small pool of money is divided between two people. But in this case, only one person gets to make a decision. (Thus the name: the "dictator" is the only player who matters.) The original Dictator experiment went like this. Annika was given $20 and told she could split the money with some anonymous Zelda in one of two ways: (1) right down the ..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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As we wrote earlier, the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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4,400 women are working as street prostitutes in Chicago,
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Yes, but . . . think about it for a moment. Why did it take so much effort to persuade doctors to do what they have known to do since the age of Semmelweis? Why was it so hard to change their behavior when the price of compliance (a simple hand-wash) is so low and the potential cost of failure (the loss of a human life) so high? Once again, as with pollution, the answer has to do with externalities. When a doctor fails to wash his hands, hi..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Among the best solutions: using disposable blood-pressure cuffs on incoming patients; infusing hospital equipment with silver ion particles to create an antimicrobial shield; and forbidding doctors to wear neckties because, as the U.K. Department of Health has noted, they "are rarely laundered," "perform no beneficial function in patient care," and "have been shown to be colonized by pathogens."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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When there are too many physician-patient interactions, the amplitude gets turned up on everything," he says. "More people with non-fatal problems are taking more medications and having more procedures, many of which are not really helpful and a few of which are harmful, while the people with really fatal illnesses are rarely cured and ultimately die anyway." So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving ..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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THE BRANCH OF ECONOMICS concerned with issues like inflation, recessions, and financial shocks is known as macroeconomics. When the economy is going well, macroeconomists are lauded as heroes; when it turns sour, as it did recently, they catch a lot of the blame. In either case, the headlines go to the macroeconomists. We hope that after reading this book, you'll realize there is a whole different breed of economist out there--microeconomis..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Given that the monkeys aren't very smart in the first place, you might assume that any gambling strategy was well beyond their capabilities. In that case, you'd expect them to prefer it when a researcher initially offered them two grapes instead of one. But precisely the opposite happened! Once the monkeys figured out that the two-grape researcher sometimes withheld the second grape and that the one-grape researcher sometimes added a bonus ..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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To answer this question with some kind of scientific certainty, what you'd really like to do is conduct an experiment. Pretend you could randomly select a group of states and command each of them to release 10,000 prisoners. At the same time, you could randomly select a different group of states and have them lock up 10,000 people, misdemeanor offenders perhaps, who otherwise wouldn't have gone to prison. Now sit back, wait a few years, and..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you'd be right.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.
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freakonomics
economics
questions
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Some of Becker's most compelling research concerned altruism. He argued, for instance, that the same person who might be purely selfish in business could be exceedingly altruistic among people he knew--although, importantly (Becker is an economist, after all), he predicted that altruism even within a family would have a strategic element. Years later, the economists Doug Bernheim, Andrei Shleifer , and Larry Summers empirically demonstrated..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn't fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it's all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too.
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theory
window
freakonomics
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Steven D. Levitt |
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We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time, such a reckoning is correct. But when it comes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now when we ..
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freakonomics
link
cause
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Steven D. Levitt |
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To Chen's surprise, Felix and the others responded rationally. When the price of a given food rose, the monkeys bought less of it, and when the price fell, they bought more. The most basic law of economics--that the demand curve slopes downward--held for monkeys as well as humans.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ONCE YOU STRIP AWAY the religious fervor and scientific complexity, an incredibly simple dilemma lies at the heart of global warming. Economists fondly call it an externality. What's an externality? It's what happens when someone takes an action but someone else, without agreeing, pays some or all the costs of that action. An externality is an economic version of taxation without representation. If you happen to live downwind from a fertili..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Mount Pinatubo was the most powerful volcanic eruption in nearly one hundred years. Within two hours of the main blast, sulfuric ash had reached twenty-two miles into the sky. By the time it was done, Pinatubo had discharged more than 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. What effect did that have on the environment? As it turned out, the stratospheric haze of sulfur dioxide acted like a layer of sunscreen, reducing the a..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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The company currently controls more than twenty thousand patents, more than all but a few dozen companies in the world. This has led to some grumbling that IV is a "patent troll," accumulating patents so it can extort money from other companies, via lawsuit if necessary. But there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created the first mass market for intellectual property. Its ringleader is a g..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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The climate models are crude in space and they're crude in time," he continues. "So there's an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can't model. They can't do even giant storms like hurricanes." There are several reasons for this, Myhrvold explains. Today's models use a grid of cells to map the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modeling..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Not so many years ago, schoolchildren were taught that carbon dioxide is the naturally occurring lifeblood of plants, just as oxygen is ours. Today, children are more likely to think of carbon dioxide as a poison. That's because the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased substantially over the past one hundred years, from about 280 parts per million to 380. But what people don't know, the IV scientists say, is that the car..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Twenty thousand years ago," Caldeira says, "carbon-dioxide levels were lower, sea level was lower--and trees were in a near state of asphyxiation for lack of carbon dioxide. There's nothing special about today's carbon-dioxide level, or today's sea level, or today's temperature. What damages us are rapid rates of change. Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the biosphere--it's just that it's increasing too fast."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Rising sea levels, for instance, "aren't being driven primarily by glaciers melting," Wood says, no matter how useful that image may be for environmental activists. The truth is far less sexy. "It is driven mostly by water-warming--literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up." Sea levels are rising, Wood says--and have been for roughly twelve thousand years, since the end of the last ice age. The oceans are about 425 feet..
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Steven D. Levitt |