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March 20 - April 1, 2018
law of unintended consequences.
Overall, 1 of every 140 miles is driven drunk,
There is just one arrest for every 27,000 miles driven while drunk.
60 percent of Indian men have penises too small for the condoms manufactured to fit
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.)
No one at the time was worried about global warming, but if they had been, the horse would have been Public Enemy No. 1, for its manure emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
The automobile, cheaper to own and operate than a horse-drawn vehicle, was proclaimed “an environmental savior.”
economist Betsey Stevenson discovered, girls who play high-school sports are more likely to attend college and land a solid job, especially in some of the high-skill fields traditionally dominated by men.
The data show that a man who solicits a street prostitute is likely to be arrested about once for every 1,200 visits.
Economists have a name for the practice of charging different prices for the same product: price discrimination.
Rather, this is a graphic example of what economists call the principal-agent problem.
Of all the tricks turned by the prostitutes he tracked, roughly 3 percent were freebies given to police officers.
The data don’t lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.
But in the cash-incentive version, the men blew away the women.
A recent tally of the British national youth leagues, for instance, shows that fully half of the players were born between January and March, with the other half spread out over the nine remaining months.
Referenced more in depth in the book Outliers
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, they might have been better off if they simply stayed at home. 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!
Well, you could purchase an annuity, a contract that pays off a set amount of income each year but only as long as you stay alive.
Smith points out that cancer patients make up 20 percent of Medicare cases but consume 40 percent of the Medicare drug budget.
Some governments, wise to the ways of the world, have gone so far as to legally require grown children to visit or support their aging moms and dads. In Singapore, the law is known as the Maintenance of Parents Act.
One recent academic study found that a given disaster received an 18 percent spike in charitable aid for each seven-hundred-word newspaper article and a 13 percent spike for every sixty seconds of TV news coverage.
When the eyes were watching, Bateson’s colleagues left nearly three times as much money in the honesty box.
“Just about any request which could conceivably be asked of the subject by a reputable investigator,” he wrote, “is legitimized by the quasi-magical phrase “This is an experiment.’”
“induce almost any level of giving they desire.”
when women delivered babies at home with a midwife, as was still common, they were at least sixty times less likely to die of puerperal fever than if they delivered in a hospital.
the data convincingly show that the net result was fewer jobs for Americans with disabilities.
McNamara had all of Ford’s company cars outfitted with seat belts.
or, put another way, if you drove 24 hours a day at 30 miles per hour, you could expect to die in a car accident only after driving for 285 straight years.
there is no evidence that car seats are better than seat belts in saving the lives of children two and older.
Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a long-recurring climate cycle of sixty to eighty years during which the Atlantic Ocean
These articles, published in the mid-1970s, were predicting the effects of global cooling.
Their exhalation and flatulence and belching and manure emit methane, which by one common measure is about twenty-five times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide released by cars
The world’s ruminants are responsible for about 50 percent more greenhouse gas than the entire transportation sector.
“Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more greenhouse-gas reduction than buying all locally sourced food,” they write.
the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.
A single volcanic eruption practically reversed, albeit temporarily, the cumulative global warming of the previous hundred years.
“Because carbon dioxide is not the major greenhouse gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapor.”
Not so many years ago, schoolchildren were taught that carbon dioxide is the naturally occurring lifeblood of plants, just as oxygen is ours. Today, children are more likely to think of carbon dioxide as a poison.
carbon dioxide level some 80 million years ago—back when our mammalian ancestors were evolving—was at least 1,000 parts per million. In
“It is driven mostly by water-warming—literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up.”
while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.
“The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat—which contributes to global warming.”
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, all commercial flights in the United States were grounded for three days. Using data from more than four thousand weather stations across the country, scientists found that the sudden absence of contrails accounted for a subsequent rise in ground temperature of nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.1 degrees Celsius.
