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December 5 - December 8, 2017
People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences.
cumulative advantage.
Why do so many people get behind the wheel after drinking? Maybe because—and this could be the most sobering statistic yet—drunk drivers are rarely caught. There is just one arrest for every 27,000 miles driven while drunk. That means you could expect to drive all the way across the country, and then back, and then back and forth three more times, chugging beers all the while, before you got pulled over.
51 percent of Indian men said that wife-beating is justified under certain circumstances; more surprisingly, 54 percent of women agreed—if, for instance, a wife burns dinner or leaves the house without permission. More than 100,000 young Indian women die in fires every year, many of them “bride burnings” or other instances of domestic abuse.
According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, some 60 percent of Indian men have penises too small for the condoms manufactured to fit World Health Organization specs.
When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists.
That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.”
At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute.
If prostitution were a typical industry, it might have hired lobbyists to fight against the encroachment of premarital sex. They would have pushed to have premarital sex criminalized or, at the very least, heavily taxed.
(It should also be said, however, that some of the most deviant acts in our sample actually include family members, with every conceivable combination of gender and generation.)
So if you are a street prostitute in Chicago, using a pimp looks to be all upside. Even after paying the commission, you come out ahead on just about every front. If only every agent in every industry provided this kind of value.
So once you consider the value you get for each of these two agents, it seems clear that a pimp’s services are considerably more valuable than a Realtor’s.
The data don’t lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.
As for the question posed in this chapter’s title—How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?—the answer should be obvious: they both take advantage of short-term job opportunities brought about by holiday spikes in demand.
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.
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.
The age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer is essentially unchanged over the past half-century, at about 200 deaths per 100,000 people.
