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May 23 - June 29, 2017
A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it.
When prostitution was criminalized in the United States, most of the policing energy was directed at the prostitutes rather than their customers. This is pretty typical. As with other illicit markets—think about drug dealing or black-market guns—most governments prefer to punish the people who are supplying the goods and services rather than the people who are consuming them. But when you lock up a supplier, a
scarcity is created that inevitably drives the price higher, and that entices more suppliers to enter the market.
But if a government really wanted to crack down on illicit goods and services, it would go after the people who demand them. If, for instance, men convicted of hiring a prostitute were sentenced to castration, the market would contract in a hurry.
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.
the trait we commonly
call “raw talent” is vastly overrated. “A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with,” he says. “But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” Or, put another way, expert performers—whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming—are nearly always made, not born.
Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
as Krueger points out, crime is primarily driven by personal gain, whereas terrorism is fundamentally a political act. In his analysis, the kind of person most likely to become a terrorist is similar to the kind of person most likely to…vote. Think of terrorism as civic passion on steroids.
Anyone who has read some history will recognize that Krueger’s terrorist profile sounds quite a bit like the typical revolutionary. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, Simón Bolívar, and Maximilien Robespierre—you won’t find a single lower-class, uneducated lad among them.
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.
He believed that the best way to improve clinical care in the ER was to improve the flow of information.
“Emergency medicine is a specialty defined not by an organ of the body or by an age group but by time,” says Mark Smith. “It’s about what you do in the first sixty minutes.”
Consider the evidence from a series of widespread doctor strikes in Los Angeles, Israel, and Colombia. It turns out that the death rate dropped significantly in those places, anywhere from 18 percent to 50 percent, when the doctors stopped working!
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.
But in most other cases, chemotherapy is remarkably ineffective. An exhaustive analysis of cancer treatment in the United States and Australia showed that the five-year survival rate for all patients was about 63 percent but that chemotherapy contributed barely 2 percent to this result. There is a long list of cancers for which chemotherapy had zero discernible effect, including multiple myeloma, soft-tissue sarcoma, melanoma of the skin, and cancers of the pancreas, uterus, prostate, bladder, and kidney.
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.
Human behavior is influenced by a dazzlingly complex set of incentives, social norms, framing references, and the lessons gleaned from past experience—in a word, context. We act as we do because, given the choices and incentives at play in a particular circumstance,
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.
the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence. Governments, for instance, often enact legislation meant to protect their most vulnerable charges but that instead ends up hurting them.
The most amazing thing about cheap and simple fixes is they often address problems that seem impervious to any solution.
By 1850, worldwide population had grown to 1.3 billion; by 1900, 1.7 billion; by 1950, 2.6 billion. And then things really took off. Over the next fifty years, the population more than
doubled, reaching well beyond 6 billion. If you had to pick a single silver bullet that allowed this surge, it would be ammonium nitrate, an astonishingly cheap and effective crop fertilizer. It wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that ammonium nitrate feeds the world. If it disappeared overnight, says the agricultural economist Will Masters, “most people’s diets would revert to heaps of cereal grains and root crops, with animal products and fruits only for special occasions and for the rich.”
The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard
Indeed, if we hadn’t played with Mother Nature by using ammonium nitrate to raise our crop yields, many readers of this book probably wouldn’t exist today. (Or they would at least be too busy to read, spending all day scrounging for roots and berries.) Stopping polio was also a form of playing with Mother Nature. As are the levees we use to control hurricane flooding—even if, as in Hurricane Katrina, they sometimes fail.
Even the “locavore” movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn’t help in this regard. A recent study by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, found that buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions. Why? More than 80 percent of the emissions associated with food are in the production phase, and big farms are far more efficient than small farms. Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent.
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.
When people aren’t compelled to pay the full cost of their actions, they have little incentive to change their behavior.
That’s right: not all externalities are negative. Good public schools create positive externalities because we all benefit from a society of well-educated people. (They also drive up property values.) Fruit farmers and beekeepers create positive externalities for each other: the trees provide free pollen for the bees and the bees pollinate the fruit trees, also at no charge. That’s why beekeepers and fruit farmers often set up shop next to each other.
A single volcanic eruption practically reversed, albeit temporarily, the cumulative global warming of the previous hundred years.
As Wood, Myhrvold, and the other scientists discuss the various conventional wisdoms surrounding global warming, few, if any, survive unscathed. 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.”
Caldeira’s study showed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady all other inputs—water, nutrients, and so forth—yields a 70 percent increase in plant growth, an obvious boon to agricultural productivity. “That’s why most commercial hydroponic greenhouses have supplemental carbon dioxide,” Myhrvold says. “And they typically run at 1,400 parts per million.”
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.”
Too little means that typical conservation efforts simply won’t make much of a difference. “If you believe there’s a problem worth solving,” Myhrvold says, “then these solutions won’t be enough to solve it. Wind power and most other alternative energy things are cute, but they don’t scale to a sufficient degree. At this point, wind farms are a government subsidy scheme, fundamentally.” What about the beloved Prius and other low-emission vehicles? “They’re great,” he says, “except that transportation is just not that big of a sector.” Also, coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity
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What distinguishes a big-ass volcano isn’t just how much stuff it ejaculates, but where the ejaculate goes. The typical volcano sends sulfur dioxide into the troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to the earth’s surface. This is similar to what a coal-burning power plant does with its sulfur emissions. In both cases, the gas stays in the sky only a week or so before falling back to the ground as acid rain, generally within a few hundred miles of its origin. But a big volcano shoots sulfur dioxide far higher, into the stratosphere. That’s the layer that begins at about seven miles above the
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