SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

by Steven D. Levitt

Martin Weitzman, an environmental economist at Harvard, argues there is a roughly 5 percent chance that global temperatures will rise enough to “effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.” In some quarters—the media, for instance, which never met a potential apocalypse it didn’t like—the fatalism runs even stronger. This is perhaps not very surprising. When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger.

Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims. The most substantial of these indirect costs is fear of a future attack, even though such fear is grossly misplaced. The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

To give the ER doctors and nurses what they really needed, a computer system had to be built from the ground up. It had to be encyclopedic (one missing piece of key data would defeat the purpose); it had to be muscular (a single MRI, for instance, ate up a massive amount of data capacity); and it had to be flexible (a system that couldn’t incorporate any data from any department in any hospital in the past, present, or future was useless). It also had to be really, really fast. Not only because slowness kills in an ER but because, as Feied had learned from the scientific literature, a person using a computer experiences “cognitive drift” if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person’s mind is somewhere else entirely. That’s how medical errors are made.

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. Such are the vagaries of life.

People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don’t, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity’s steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.

In a similar vein, longtime friends and rivals Thomas Jefferson and John Adams each valiantly struggled to forestall death until they’d reached an important landmark. They expired within fifteen hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence.

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.

If John List’s research proves anything, it’s that a question like “Are people innately altruistic?” is the wrong kind of question to ask. People aren’t “good” or “bad.” People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers. So are human beings capable of generous, selfless, even heroic behavior? Absolutely. Are they also capable of heartless acts of apathy? Absolutely.

When Moseley returned to his car and found it wouldn’t start, he fled on foot but was soon chased down by a policeman. Under interrogation, he freely admitted to killing Kitty Genovese a few nights earlier. Which means that a man who became infamous because he murdered a woman whose neighbors failed to intervene was ultimately captured because of…a neighbor’s intervention.

The earth’s atmosphere is in constant, complex motion, which means that your emissions become mine and mine yours. Thus, global warming. If, say, Australia decided overnight to eliminate its carbon emissions, that fine nation wouldn’t enjoy the benefits of its costly and painful behavior unless everyone else joined in. Nor does one nation have the right to tell another what to do. The United States has in recent years sporadically attempted to lower its emissions. But when it leans on China or India to do the same, those countries can hardly be blamed for saying, Hey, you got to free-ride your way to industrial superpowerdom, so why shouldn’t we?

The emphasis on carbon dioxide? “Misplaced,” says Wood. Why? “Because carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapor.” But current climate models “do not know how to handle water vapor and various types of clouds. That is the elephant in the corner of this room. I hope we’ll have good numbers on water vapor by 2020 or thereabouts.” Myhrvold cites a recent paper asserting that carbon dioxide may have had little to do with recent warming. Instead, all the heavy-particulate pollution we generated in earlier decades seems to have cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun. That was the global cooling that caught scientists’ attention in the 1970s. The trend began to reverse when we started cleaning up our air. “So most of the warming seen over the past few decades,” Myhrvold says, “might actually be due to good environmental stewardship!”

Leverage is the secret ingredient that distinguishes physics from, say, chemistry. Think back to the Salter Sink, IV’s device for preventing hurricanes. Hurricanes are destructive because they gather up the thermal energy in the ocean’s surface and convert it into physical force, a primordial act of leverage creation. The Salter Sink ruptures that process by using wave power to continually sink the warm water all through hurricane season.

“They want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through. This will have a huge drag on the world economy. There are billions of poor people who will be greatly delayed, if not entirely precluded, from attaining a First World standard of living. In this country, we can pretty much afford the luxury of doing whatever we want on the energy-and-environment front, but other parts of the world would seriously suffer.”

what public-health officials have finally embraced to cut down on hospital-acquired infections. 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.” That’s why Craig Feied has worn bow ties for years.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising that it’s hard to change people’s behavior when someone else stands to reap most of the benefit. But surely we are capable of behavior change when our own welfare is at stake, yes? Sadly, no. If we were, every diet would always work (and there would be no need for diets in the first place). If we were, most smokers would be ex-smokers. If we were, no one who ever took a sex-ed class would be party to an unwanted pregnancy. But knowing and doing are two different things, especially when pleasure is involved.

“An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question.”

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? If you’re like most people, it’s been a while. Is this simply a function of our high-speed era? Perhaps not. The absurdly talented George Bernard Shaw – a world-class writer and a founder of the London School of Economics – noted this thought deficit many years ago. “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.” We too try to think once or twice a week (though surely not as cleverly as Shaw), and encourage you to do the same.