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There is often a vast gulf between how people say they behave and how they actually behave. (In economist-speak, these two behaviors are known as declared preferences and revealed preferences.)
But as this swarm of humanity moved itself, and its goods, from place to place, a problem emerged. The main mode of transportation produced a slew of the by-products that economists call negative externalities, including gridlock, high insurance costs, and far too many traffic fatalities.
technological innovation.
The carbon emissions spat out over the past century by more than 1 billion cars and thousands of coal-burning power plants seem to have warmed the earth’s atmosphere.
freakonomics—marrying the economic approach to a rogue, freakish curiosity—but the word hadn’t yet been invented.
Becker suggested that the economic approach is not a subject matter, nor is it a mathematical means of explaining “the economy.” Rather, it is a decision to examine the world a bit differently. It is a systematic means of describing how people make decisions and how they change their minds;
economic approach aims for the opposite: to address a given topic with neither fear nor favor, letting numbers speak the truth. We don’t take sides.
The economists Douglas Almond and Bhashkar Mazumder have a simple answer for this strange and troubling phenomenon: Ramadan.
pregnancy, but they can occur if the mother fasts at any time up to the eighth month.
Such birth effects aren’t as rare as you might think. Douglas Almond, examining U.S. Census data from 1960 to 1980, found one group of people whose terrible luck persisted over their whole lives. They had more physical ailments and lower lifetime income than people who’d been born just a few months earlier or a few months later.
These people were in utero during the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918.
Most elite athletes begin playing their sports when they are quite young. Since youth sports are organized by age, the leagues naturally impose a cutoff birthdate. The youth soccer leagues in Europe, like many such leagues, use December 31 as the cutoff date.
“relative-age effect,
when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love—yes, your nana told you this too—because if you don’t love what you’re doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.
terrorists, he found, were less likely to come from a poor family (28 percent versus 33 percent) and more likely to have at least a high-school education (47 percent versus 38 percent).
In general, Krueger found, “terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle-class or high-income families.”
It may be that when you’re hungry, you’ve got better things to worry about than blowing yourself up. It may be that terrorist leaders place a high value on competence, since a terrorist attack requires more orchestration than a typical crime.
crime is primarily driven by personal gain, whereas terrorism is fundamentally a political act.
Revolutionaries want to overthrow and replace a government. Terrorists want to—well, it isn’t always clear. As one sociologist puts it, they might wish to remake the world in their own dystopian image; religious terrorists may want to cripple the secular institutions they despise.
So simple, so cheap, and so effective: that is the leverage of terror.
Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims.
These facts, along with myriad psychological studies of terrorism’s aftereffects, suggest that the September 11 attacks led to a spike in alcohol abuse and post-traumatic stress that translated into, among other things, extra driving deaths.
Money and manpower that otherwise would have been spent chasing financial scoundrels were instead diverted to chasing terrorists—perhaps contributing to, or at least exacerbating, the recent financial meltdown.
Thanks to decreased airline traffic, influenza—which travels well on planes—was slower to spread and less dangerous.
In Washington, D.C., crime fell whenever the federal terror-alert level went up (thanks to extra police flooding the city). And an increase in border security was a boon to some California farmers—who, as Mexican and Canadian imports declined, grew and sold so much marijuana that it became one of the state’s most valuable crops.
The diagnosis was clear: the WHC emergency department had a severe case of “datapenia,” or low data counts.
Doctors were spending about 60 percent of their time on “information management,” and only 15 percent on direct patient care.
Smith and Feied discovered more than three hundred data sources in the hospital that didn’t talk to one another, including a mainframe system, handwritten notes, scanned images, lab results, streaming video from cardiac angiograms, and an infection-control tracking system that lived on one person’s computer on an Excel spreadsheet. “And if she went on vacation, God help you if you’re trying to track a TB outbreak,” says Feied.
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.
new architecture that they called “data-centric” and “data-atomic.”
Within a few years, the WHC emergency department went from worst to first in the Washington region. Even though Azyxxi quadrupled the amount of information that was actually being seen, doctors were spending 25 percent less time on “information management,” and more than twice as much time directly treating patients.
old ER wait time averaged eight hours; now, 60 percent of patients were in and out in less than two hours.
As of this writing, Amalga covers roughly 10 million patients at 350 care sites; for those of you keeping score at home, that’s more than 150 terabytes of data.
For a variety of reasons, measuring doctor skill is a tricky affair.
selection bias:
An excellent doctor is disproportionately likely to have attended a top-ranked medical school and served a residency at a prestigious hospital. More experience is also valuable: an extra ten years on the job yields the same benefit as having served a residency at a top hospital.
you also want your ER doctor to be a woman.
One factor that doesn’t seem to matter is whether a doctor is highly rated by his or her colleagues.
It seems that practicing to fight a war can be just about as dangerous as really fighting one.
Anti-terror efforts are traditionally built around three activities: gathering human intelligence, which is difficult and dangerous; monitoring electronic “chatter,” which can be like trying to sip from a fire hose; and following the international money trail—which, considering the trillions of dollars sloshing around the world’s banks every day, is like trying to sift the entire beach for a few particular grains of sand.
Variable X measures the intensity of a particular banking activity.
For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens…. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.
More than thirty-five years later, the horror lived on in The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s groundbreaking book about social behavior, as an example of the “bystander effect,” whereby the presence of multiple witnesses at a tragedy can actually inhibit intervention.
By 1960, the crime rate was 50 percent higher than it had been in 1950; by 1970, the rate had quadrupled
Voilà! You’ve just run the kind of randomized, controlled experiment that lets you determine the relationship between variables.
That’s why researchers often rely on what is known as a natural experiment, a set of conditions that mimic the experiment you want to conduct but, for whatever reason, cannot.
So did the introduction of TV have any discernible effect on a given city’s crime rate? The answer seems to be yes, indeed. For every extra year a young person was exposed to TV in his first 15 years, we see a 4 percent increase in the number of property-crime arrests later in life and a 2 percent increase in violent-crime arrests.
Why did TV have this dramatic effect?
Our data offer no firm answers.
It may be that kids who watched a lot of TV never got properly socialized, or never learned to entertain themselves.
