Think Like a Freak

by Steven D. Levitt

Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger.

you follow this selfish incentive—protecting your own reputation by not doing something potentially foolish—you are more likely to kick toward a corner. If you follow the communal incentive—trying to win the game for your nation even though you risk looking personally foolish—you will kick toward the center.

Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, deciphering them—is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.

A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.

Another barrier to thinking like a Freak is that most people are too busy to rethink the way they think—or to even spend much time thinking at all. When was the last time you sat for an hour of pure, unadulterated thinking?

“Few people think more than two or three times a year,” Shaw reportedly said. “I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

Perhaps, for instance, you meet a lovely, conscientious couple with three children, and find yourself blurting out that child car seats are a waste of time and money (at least that’s what the crash-test data say). Or, at a holiday dinner with your new girlfriend’s family, you blather on about how the local-food movement can actually hurt the environment—only to learn that her father is a hard-core locavore, and everything on the table was grown within fifty miles.

We must have looked puzzled, for he explained further. England, he said, having started the Industrial Revolution, led the rest of the world down the path toward pollution, environmental degradation, and global warming. It was therefore England’s obligation to take the lead in undoing the damage.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

Think of the last time you sat down at an all-you-can-eat restaurant. How likely were you to eat a bit more than normal? The same thing happens if health care is distributed in a similar fashion: people consume more of it than if they were charged the sticker price. This means the “worried well” crowd out the truly sick, wait times increase for everyone, and a massive share of the costs go to the final months of elderly patients’ lives, often without much real advantage. This

What if, for instance, every Briton were also entitled to a free, unlimited, lifetime supply of transportation? That is, what if everyone were allowed to go down to the car dealership whenever they wanted and pick out any new model, free of charge, and drive it home? We expected him to light up and say, “Well, yes, that’d be patently absurd—there’d be no reason to maintain your old car, and everyone’s incentives would be skewed. I see your point about all this free health care we’re doling out!”

But the children did much worse with questions 3 and 4. Why? Those questions were unanswerable—there simply wasn’t enough information given in the story. And yet a whopping 76 percent of the children answered these questions either yes or no. Kids who try to bluff their way through a simple quiz like this are right on track for careers in business and politics, where almost no one ever admits to not knowing anything.

September 11. Do you believe this to be true or not? To most of us, the very question is absurd: of course it is true! But when asked in predominantly Muslim countries, the question got a different answer. Only 20 percent of Indonesians believed that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks, along with 11 percent of Kuwaitis and 4 percent of Pakistanis. (When asked who was responsible, respondents typically blamed the Israeli or U.S. government or “non-Muslim terrorists.”)

With complex issues, it can be ridiculously hard to pin a particular cause on a given effect. Did the assault-weapon ban really cut crime—or was it one of ten other factors? Did the economy stall because tax rates were too high—or were the real villains all those Chinese exports and a spike in oil prices?

The takeaway here is simple but powerful: just because you’re great at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything. Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a deep breath—ultracrepidarianism, or “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”

That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying “I don’t know” is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least for the individual. Think back to the soccer player

Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good.

One solution was recently proposed in Romania. That country boasts a robust population of “witches,” women who tell fortunes for a living. Lawmakers decided that witches should be regulated, taxed, and—most important—made to pay a fine or even go to prison if the fortunes they told didn’t prove accurate. The witches were understandably upset. One

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass.

In centuries past, sailors who relied on a ship’s compass found it occasionally gave erratic readings that threw them off course. Why? The increasing use of metal on ships—iron nails and hardware, the sailors’ tools and even their buckles and buttons—messed with the compass’s magnetic read. Over

suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

The executives explained that because TV ads are so much more expensive than print ads, they were concentrated on just three days: Black Friday, Christmas, and Father’s Day. In other words, the company spent millions of dollars to entice people to go shopping at precisely the same time that millions of people were about to go shopping anyway.

“Are you crazy?” the marketing executive said again. “We’ll get fired if we do that!” To this day, on every single Sunday in every single market, this company still buys newspaper advertising—even though the only real piece of feedback they ever got is that the ads don’t work.

But experimentation of this sort is regrettably rare in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, government, and elsewhere. Why? One reason is tradition. In our experience, many institutions are used to making decisions based on some murky blend of gut instinct, moral compass, and whatever the previous decision maker did.

however, you’re willing to think like a Freak and admit what you don’t know, you will see there is practically no limit to the power of a good randomized experiment.

Not long after, the answering machine at his fake restaurant in Milan received a real call from Wine Spectator in New York. He had won an Award of Excellence! The magazine also asked “if you might have an interest in publicizing your award with an ad in the upcoming issue.” This led Goldstein to conclude that “the entire awards program was really just an advertising scheme.”

But a lot of obvious ideas are only obvious after the fact—after someone has taken the time and effort to investigate them, to prove them right (or wrong). The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don’t.

But even if this goes poorly—if your boss sneers at your ignorance or you can’t figure out the answer no matter how hard you try—there is another, more strategic benefit to occasionally saying “I don’t know.” Let’s say you’ve already done that on a few occasions. The next time you’re in a real jam, facing an important question that you just can’t answer, go ahead and make up something—and everyone will believe you, because you’re the guy who all those other times was crazy enough to admit you didn’t know the answer.

It is demonstrably true that a good teacher is better than a bad teacher, and it is also true that overall teacher quality has fallen since your grandmother’s day, in part because smart women now have so many more job options.

a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student’s performance than a completely different set of factors: 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-based inputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do. Schools have your kid for only seven hours a day, 180 days a year, or about 22 percent of the child’s waking hours. Nor is all that time devoted to learning, once you account for socializing and eating and getting

His experimentation was endless. He videotaped his training sessions and recorded all his data in a spreadsheet, hunting for inefficiencies and lost milliseconds. He experimented with pace: Was it better to go hard the first four minutes, ease off during the middle four, and “sprint” toward the end—or maintain a steady pace throughout? (A fast start, he discovered, was best.) He found that getting a lot of sleep was especially important. So was weight training: strong muscles aided in eating and helped resist the urge to throw up. He also discovered that he could make more room in his stomach by jumping and wriggling as he ate—a strange, animalistic dance that came to be known as the Kobayashi Shake.

It was essentially: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make hot dogs easier to eat?

In recent experiments, scientists have found that even elite athletes can be tricked into improvement by essentially lying to them. In one experiment, cyclists were told to pedal a stationary bike at top speed for the equivalent of 4,000 meters. Later they repeated the task while watching an avatar of themselves pedaling in the earlier time trial. What the cyclists didn’t know was that the researchers had turned up the speed on the avatar. And yet the cyclists were able to keep up with their avatars, surpassing what they thought had been their top speed. “It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,”

You decide to do some push-ups. How many? Well, it’s been a while, you tell yourself, let me start with 10. Down you go. When do you start getting mentally and physically tired? Probably around push-up number 7 or 8. Imagine now that you had decided on 20 push-ups instead of 10. When do you start getting tired this time? Go ahead, hit the floor and try it. You probably blasted right past 10 before you even remembered how out of shape you are.

Thinking like a Freak means you should work terribly hard to identify and attack the root cause of problems.

Gun murders are down? Well, you figure, that must be from all those tough new gun laws—until you examine the data and find that most people who commit crimes with guns are almost entirely unaffected by current gun laws.

In Freakonomics, we identified one missing factor: the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s. The theory was jarring but simple. A rise in abortion meant that fewer unwanted children were being born, which meant fewer children growing up in the sort of difficult circumstances that increase the likelihood of criminality.

It is a lot easier to argue about cops and prisons and gun laws than the thorny question of what makes a parent fit to raise a child. But if you want to have a worthwhile conversation about crime, it makes sense to start by talking about the benefits of good, loving parents who give their children a chance to lead safe and productive lives.

century. In 1517, a distraught young German priest named Martin Luther levied a list of ninety-five grievances against the Roman Catholic Church. One practice he found particularly odious was the sale of indulgences—that is, the Church’s practice of raising cash by forgiving the sins of big-ticket donors. (One senses that today Luther would rail against the tax treatment enjoyed by hedge funds and private-equity firms.) Luther’s bold move launched the Protestant Reformation.

The religious patchwork of modern Germany also overlapped with an interesting economic patchwork: the people living in Protestant areas earned more money than those in Catholic areas. Not a great deal more—about 1 percent—but the difference was clear. If the prince in your area had sided with the Catholics, you were likely to be poorer today than if he had followed Martin Luther.

He identified three factors: 1. Protestants tend to work a few more hours per week than Catholics. 2. Protestants are more likely than Catholics to be self-employed. 3. Protestant women are more likely than Catholic women to work full-time.

One thing was clear: heart disease, historically the biggest killer of both whites and blacks, is far more common among blacks. But why?

The ocean journey of a slave from Africa to America was long and gruesome; many slaves died en route. Dehydration was a major cause. Who, Fryer wondered, is less likely to suffer from dehydration? Someone with a high degree of salt sensitivity. That is, if you are able to retain more salt, you will also retain more water—and be less likely to die during the Middle Passage. So perhaps the slave trader in the illustration wanted to find the saltier slaves in order to ensure his investment.

salt sensitivity is a highly heritable trait, meaning that your descendants, i.e., black Americans, stand a pretty good chance of being hypertensive or of having cardiovascular disease.”

He took an antibiotic to help wipe it out. His and Warren’s investigation had proved that H. pylori was the true cause of ulcers—and, as further investigation would show, of stomach cancer as well. It was an astonishing breakthrough. Granted,

aided by newly powerful computers that facilitate DNA sequencing—have learned that the human gut is home to thousands of species of microbes. Some are good, some are bad, others are situationally good or bad, and many have yet to reveal their nature.

Does it seem absurd to think that a given ailment that has haunted humankind for millennia may be caused by the malfunction of a microorganism that has been merrily swimming through our intestines the whole time?