35 Burst results for "Freakonomics"
KQED Radio
"freakonomics" Discussed on KQED Radio
"Time on Freakonomics radio woke and are you ready for Freakonomics? It comes up at three. Tonight. Partly cloudy in the evening Mostly cloudy overnight with lows in the mid fifties Wednesday, creasing after midnight and tomorrow it will be mostly cloudy in the morning, clearing out with sunny skies high seventies to the lower eighties and temperatures going to warm up Through Tuesday and then we'll have some slight cooling later on in the week. Could I ask when this might air? Yeah. I'm four months pregnant today, and I just gotta Yeah. No, it's super exciting and I was Diagnosed with Hashimoto's, Uh Oh, uh, six months ago. So it was just like wait is is Hashimoto's an autoimmune disorder? It is, huh? I'm Molly Webster. And I'm Lulu Miller. This is radio lab. And today we are looking into one of the biggest medical mysteries, which is why bodies sometimes turns on itself. Um and miles. You're going to lead us through this one. Yeah, And it's something I got pulled into when I first was working on Go, Nads, go nads. For anyone who hasn't listened. Is.
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"Humans are like that a lot of the descent in the us in particular especially in the political realm is based around these my way or the highway blacker white choices and we rarely talk about serious policy things and social things as both end versus either or. I'm curious whether this is a tactic that you and others have used as recent. Am i late noticing. It and how effective is my philosophy has been in designing policies to use everything that we know that works. So let me give you an example. And it's this program that my former students schlomo ben artzi and i created called save more tomorrow and the idea was there are some people that are saving too little in their retirement plan. How can we help them and fidelity the big mutual fund company wants asked me to come give a talk and they asked me to talk about this question. I hadn't written anything about it. But i thought about it And created this plan. And we say they're not unselfish interested. That's correct for self serving and other reasons. They would like people to be saving more so we go to people and say. Would you like to sign up for a plan where we will increase your retirement saving soon like in a few months. Increase your saving. Meaning take a little bit larger. Share out of your check right. So let's suppose you're saving five percent of your salary which is woefully inadequate. We say okay. How about when you get your next raise. We increase it by one or two percentage points and we do that every year until you reach some sensible level of saving whatever that might be ten percent twelve percent. So what does this do first of all. It's using the fact that we all have more self control in the future. Saint augustine said god. Give me chastity. But not yet. Many us are planning diet starting say after the next holiday. So we're asking people whether they would want to start saving more leader. That's why because save more tomorrow which happens to initialized itself to smart which is a good idea. Then the second thing was we were linking it to raise and the reason was that we know about loss aversion that people are more sensitive to losing than to winning and we know that people make those calculations nod adjusting for inflation. So if they get a three percent raise even if inflation is two percent they're thinking about is three percent and so if they never see their paycheck. oh down. that's going to help. And so this was. Throw the kitchen sink at the problem. And that's been my philosophy later on. We realized that the only component of this that's really crucial is making. The raise is automatic and getting people signed up so this came to be called auto escalation and another component of retirement. Savings that you've promoted written about is called auto enrollment meaning when i'm an employee at a firm rather than having to fill out twenty pages to get into the retirement savings program. I'm just automatically enrolled in less. I choose to opt out so to me. These are the great successes. Laws were passed and research by you and shlomo ben-artzi and others was invoked to really really changed the trajectory of the retirement savings of probably millions. And maybe someday billions of people. So that's awesome. That said i knew there was something coming. And i don't mean to imply that this wasn't a really smart idea and solution. I think it really was. It shouldn't have taken that in the first place i- skeptics view of it. It should have been made more attractive for people to save more in the first place. Rather than having to nudge people into it. You're nudging has done a lot of good in the world. I would argue but wouldn't it be almost obviated if there was more. Good design thought that goes into the origin of programs rather than having to fix things. That are so entrenched. What you're saying is look. You don't have to be a genius to of thought of this. You have to be an idiot to have created the system that needed this fix. And i have quite a bit of sympathy for that and it's worse than that so automatic enrollment. I think i wrote about for the first time in the early nineteen nineties. And i couldn't convince anybody to do that. And one of the reasons was it had a terrible name. it was called negative election. Oh yeah let's let's get behind my program of negative election but similar one is reverse mortgages now reverse mortgages can have a sleazy part of them but there are many people who live in places where real estate has gone up a lot say in california that a reverse mortgage makes a huge amount of sense in that. They're sitting on say two million dollars worth of real estate that dwarfs there other assets their cash poor and house rich and figuring out a way to help people do that is smart then calling it a reverse mortgage it should just be called lake the biggest piggy bank in the world. Yeah it should be spend more today. Live a little get a life. I mean almost can't think of the name worse then reverse mortgage. We should talk about sludge. We'll i promise. And i have a suggestion for an egg zor. Which is the sentence we snuck in. About how painful it was to do. The.
Freakonomics Radio
Thousands Flee Homes As Utah Wildfire Advances
"Parts of the West are under excessive heat warnings as more than 100. Wildfires burn in the U. S. In Utah, thousands have evacuated from a fast moving fire outside Salt Lake City. From member station K U ER Sonia Hudson has more Amber Reicher loaded up her white SUV as she prepared to evacuate the small community of timber line She's lived in this community is surrounded by pine trees for five years. It's kind of surreal. I think we always knew there was a possibility of it happening here, especially with what's been going on fire wise and climate wise in recent times, um, but it's a little bit different when it actually happens. The widespread consensus of climate scientists is that climate change makes large destructive wildfire is more likely because of hotter temperatures and drier vegetation. Nearly all of Utah is in the most extreme categories of drought for NPR news. I'm Sonia Hutson,
KQED Radio
"freakonomics" Discussed on KQED Radio
"I started snacking voluntarily on the house crickets. Rosen has seen several examples of the mere exposure effect. If you drink recycled water for a while, Not too long, just maybe a week you won't even think about it anymore. The problem is getting over to discuss Trump because people don't realize they will cease to be disgusted. Once they get used to something. We've shown that medical students are disgusted by cadavers, but after they dissected a cadaver for a month or two, they're much less disgusted. And Val Curtis has seen the effect in Uganda. We used to eat the flying ants that flew out once a year, and we'd catch them and fry them. They don't really have much disease connection, and once you fried them and salted them, and you're having them with a few beers. The Wrigley's sticky, gooey nature of insects is rather forgotten. So basically, people will eat insects that don't have to stronger connection with disease and the more you can distance them from a connection with disease or, more likely they are to read them. We know that people eat insects for awhile. Not for too long, maybe even 10 times They'll get used to it. They won't be disgusting. They don't taste like meat. But there can be crunchy and little nutty tasting. And so the taste won't put you off once you don't find it disgusting. What started is that small companies? Are making insects and they package them. One person I know puts them in dog food, so that's one way to get people to eat. It is to have their pets seated first. We're looking at these various routes that we can do. A lot of Americans will try. Cookie. If you say it's 20% insect flower, the biggest problem with getting insects more into the world is cost because They're not mass produced. If we mass produced insects like Pepsi Cola, or, you know, craft as somebody made a serious attempt to do this, they would produce and sex on a large scale that use all the tricks they use with cows to make it cheap to breed better insects. So one of the problems is to convince a big company. They say We're going to get down this road because there's a lot of business and potential public health..
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"That ambulances or delayed but in our data about fifty percent of people who had tech's did arrive by ambulance. Someone drove them. Those people likely face even larger delays because private cars can't do the same things ambulances can do like going through red lights or breaking the speed limit Just to recap what we found. Was that even small delays in care lead to thirteen percent higher mortality in these patients and that finding relates to one of the fundamental questions. We ask ourselves in medicine. How fast do we need to act when someone is sick. Do we have days hours or just minutes. The gold standard for experiments in medicine is the randomized control trial and that kind of trial. We identify a big group of similar patients and some of them get one treatment while others get different treatment or in some cases even Placebo the patients don't know which group they're in and neither do the doctors now. We could never have conducted a randomized trial where patients were told. Hey hang on a couple of minutes and others were given treatment immediately and then we saw who did better. That wouldn't be ethical because we already know that acting fast can save lives. Like i said time is tissue when the heart is under this kind of stress. But we just don't know exactly how fast we really need to be. This study actually gave us. Would economists call a natural experiment to help us answer that question in a natural experiment conditions out in the world that we have no control over randomize patients for us. If only by accident in our study. The combination of randomly time emergency events in highly time-sensitive medical conditions allowed us to answer the question of just how time sensitive. This care is so if there's one thing i want you to take from this study it's this if you're experiencing chest. Pain don't hesitate. Call an ambulance.
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"Minute counts just like me trying to get to my parking spot to watch my wife's race patients who live near marathon could get cut off from the nearest hospital by blocked roads and detours. So here was our goal. We wanted to see if living near the marathon route. Made it more likely that you had die if you had a heart attack or cardiac arrest on the day of race so we looked at data from marathon days and because heart attack mortality can actually vary day by day we compared mortality on marathon days to data from the same day of the week as the marathon but in the five weeks before and the five weeks after the race the non race days basically served as a control group so if the race fell on a sunday we looked at the five sundays before in five sundays after the marathon. Now it is possible though really unlikely that heart attack mortality could be higher on race days than non race days for reasons that are unrelated to marathons and ambulance delays so to address. This possibility we had a second control group as well. We looked at similar patients on marathon and non marathon days who lived in zip code just outside areas affected by the race routes. These are patients who should not have been affected by any marathon related delays. All in all we looked at one thousand one hundred and forty five patients who are hospitalized for a heart attack or cardiac arrest in the cities that we studied and we compare them to just over eleven thousand hospitalizations for patients on non race days. What did we find for patients. In areas near marathon routes the percentage who died within thirty days of being hospitalized. The thirty day mortality rate was thirteen percent higher if they had a heart attack or cardiac arrest on race day. Then if had either one of those conditions on a non race day we didn't find any increase in mortality on marathon days in those people who lived in nearby zip codes. That were unaffected by the race. Row which makes a lotta sense. Their trip to the hospital should not have been affected by blocked roads you might be thinking. Correlation isn't causation. When we do a study like this we have to be sure to eliminate all the other possible reasons for the effect that we're seeing so what are some of those other possible explanations. Would've the people having heart attacks were actually running into rates well. We studied patients aged sixty five years and older and okay. There are a lot of runners. Were over sixty five so we looked at people with multiple medical conditions. People who are chronically ill and therefore we're really unlikely to be running a marathon or would if for some reason the patients having heart attacks on marathon days were just different from patients on any other day. It doesn't seem plausible at least not to me but to double check. We compared patient characteristics like their age or other cardiac problems and we found that those characteristics were about the same on race days versus non race.
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"The survival of those patients. So i put together a small team of researchers at harvard to analyze data. We made a list of the eleven biggest in the united states. We included cities like new york. La honolulu and chicago. And we mapped the routes then we looked at more than a decade of medicare data to find people who lived in zip codes along those race routes who happened to have either a heart attack or a cardiac arrest on the day. Marathon was held in their city. We look specifically at data for medicare patients because that automatically narrows it down to the over sixty five crowd and the over sixty five crowd simply because they are older are the group. That's most likely to have heart attacks and cardiac arrest now. Why do we focus on heart attack and cardiac arrest as opposed to any other sort of medical care. Well for one. They are emergencies and that means they're random people don't choose when they happen. The second reason we looked at heart attacks and cardiac arrest is that these are serious business. A heart attack is when a blood vessel that supplies. Your heart is blocked off. There's a clot that forms and blood can't get to the heart in your heart muscle dies so it's a big deal. A cardiac arrest is an even bigger deal. It's when your heart stops pumping blood to the body. It's the closest you can come to being dead. Sometimes we're lucky to bring people back to life from a cardiac arrest so these are both really serious conditions and the treatment is really time sensitive. Every.
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"There is apparently nothing. You're not good at nicely. Done frigging radio sponsored by progressive insurance where customers save an average of more than seven hundred fifty dollars when they switch and save visit progressive dot com to get your car insurance quote. It only takes about seven minutes. National annual average auto insurance savings by new customers surveyed in two thousand nineteen potential. Savings will vary in twenty twenty one. It's finally okay to talk about our mental health and happiness. Humans are meant to keep everything inside and makes us. Sick and therapy helps. But what is therapy exactly. Well it's whatever you want it to be. Maybe you're not feeling motivated right now and would like some tools to help our. Maybe you're feeling insecure. Relationships are at work not dealing with stress. Well whatever you need. It's time to stop being ashamed of normal human struggles because you deserve to be happy and now you don't have to worry about finding an in person therapist near you to help. Better help is customized online therapy that offers video phone or even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. And it's much more affordable than in person therapy and you can start communicating with your therapist and under forty eight hours. Join the millions of people who are seeing what therapy is really about. It may or may not be for you but it's worth looking into because you are your greatest asset. This podcast is sponsored by better help and our listeners. Get ten percent off their first month at better help dot com slash stitcher. That's better h e l p dot com slash stitcher if you'd like to hear episodes of freakonomics radio without the ads subscribed to stitcher premium for just five dollars a month. You'll get access to every episode of our show ad free and your subscription supports us to you can get a free month of stitcher premium right now like going to stitcher dot com slash premium selecting monthly plan and entering the promo code freak. That's stitcher dot com slash premium. Promo code freak. I'm going to call it. Today's episode on your mark. Get set croak in boston where i live. There's a big annual event that. I love to watch every spring along the boston.
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"Doesn't actually have superpowers does the other than common decency which does seem like a superpower these days. The way that you ended up marrying the tools are blending. I should say the tools of medicine and economics in your research. Where did those curiosities come from. A lot of the work that i do. Sort of like Freakonomics meets medicine. It's questions that relate to medicine and healthcare that's criteria one criteria to is that it often requires large amounts of data like economists are very familiar with criteria threes that there has to be approached that is causally valid. Like i'm not interested in association for the most part of my research. I really want to know whether x causes. Y and a lot of those tools that economists use i implement in my work some of your research highlights the fell ability of doctors or at least the fact that they are as human as the rest of us. I'm really curious to know how that's received in the field when you write a paper. That shows that older doctors for instance that their skillset seems to deteriorate certainly the case that when he came out i got emails from doctors who had tons of clinical experience. Who said you know. This absolutely can't be true to which i responded. I said it may not be true for you but that's not really the question. I'm trying to answer what i'm trying to answer. If we took a thousand doctors above the sixty five and one thousand doctors between thirty five and forty and we randomize patients to those two groups of doctors. Where would we expect to see. Better outcomes and we'd expect to see better outcomes in the doctors who are younger now. They're certainly going to be doctors who are older. Who have a lot of experience who maintain high volumes in their clinical practices. That would have superior outcomes and maybe the doctors who email me would fit into that category. But it's certainly possible that some of the people who email me didn't and maybe that's why they had to have emailed me. Why do you wanna make this podcast other than the fact that you know. I called you beg you to do it. Yeah i don't have anything else to do. I think that there's a real interest in the intersection between economics. Human behaviour and medicine and that is exactly my sweet spot. So the idea here. Is that every episode. You will dive into a single medical study including some studies that were done by you and your colleagues and others done by other researchers. Why is that the right way to talk through an issue. I think the structure of a study. It follows a structure of podcast. It starts with a question and then okay. What would you need to answer that question. What would the data need to be to answer that question. All right now you have the data. How would you answer it. What approach would you take. Are you have approach. Have an answer. That's tentative how do you know that that's the right answer. What sorts of ways. You have to interrogate your approach to make sure that you've got to the right conclusion. That's exactly what researchers try to do in every study that they published and then the last thing is so what. What do we do about this right. And that's the most interesting part coming up with implications now that you are a medical doctor and economist and a podcast host. How much harder would you say it is to be a podcast host. Then to be just the doctor economist. Oh i think being a podcast hosted the most incredibly difficult thing in the world requires immense scale intelligence and really defining good looks is that is that correct. That's pretty much the answer. I was going for you and humility. Yeah glad we're on the same page there now to our podcast listeners. We want your feedback on the episode. You're about to hear radio at freakonomics dot com. Bobby jenner. Thank you so much for coming to play in our sandbox. Let me shut up now and ask you to handle what we podcast hosts. Call a tease. The show will start right after these messages. How is that..
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"Hey bob bill has it going. I like your podcast. Thank you so why. Don't you just say your name and what you do. My name is babu jenna. I'm an economist and a physician at harvard. I teach healthcare policy and health economics. I see patients at massachusetts general hospital. And i'm a professor at harvard medical school. As if you need another job you are getting ready to host. A new podcast for the freakonomics radio network. We are about to play now for our listeners. A pilot episode of your new show which i am incredibly excited about but i let me just ask. Babu is not the name on your birth certificate is it is being recorded for legal purposes. No my first name is on new palm. Bob who is my middle name. It's really more of a nickname. It's probably on every legal document except for my birth certificate so babu means father in a variety of different indian languages. It's what they used to. Actually call mahatma gandhi. Not that i'm trying to draw any You know this important distinction to be made popular. How many people are there in the world like you. That have both an md and a phd in economics in the world dot. Say i don't mean maybe ten to twenty. So i guess you could look at the two ways one is your very very very very rare bird and that's awesome or you could look at it from the demand side and there's so little demand for that. It must be a waste of time. I know exactly what you see. So few people going into something you have to wonder why unless there's some market power of the unifying explanation. Maybe that's what you're after then. Yeah exactly. I'm out of question market power. You have a bit of history with freakonomics radio. Can you recall what you've told our audience in the past. So i've been on a couple of times. The first time was about a study that i had with some others looking at what happens to patients who are hospitalized. During the dates of cardiology conferences when cardiologists or way. They're out of town at these meetings. We found that patients actually do better mortality rates fall during the day to those meetings so that was the first time i was on the show and then he did a really nice series on bad medicine which i was on a couple of times and i presume you asked me to join because i'm reflective of bad medicine so bob who as you know. We love economists around here and we also live doctors. Each seem to have their own intellectual superpower. So is it fair to say that. You are both superman and batman..
Freakonomics
Manchin Says He'll Vote Against Democratic Elections Bill
"West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin confirms he will not support the election overhaul bill called for the People Act, making it unlikely to pass the evenly divided Senate in an op ed this morning Mansion calls it partisan
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"Equilibrium is to find ways to facilitate face to face within the remote work model. There are these ideas collision of ideas. Some of its deliberates of it's spontaneous but there is no eureka coming over a zoom call. I would submit that again. Is the new york real estate developer. Marianne gilmartin remember. She recently opened her own firm. Mentoring in upskilling really requires interactions and my decision to rent space in april. And not wait is because of the age and the ambition of the people that work for me and they wanna be part of something bigger than themselves and they don't want to be in their apartments they wanna be amongst other bright people if i can look at my workforce and say craft your perfect arrangement. How do you want your life to be lived. Tell me what works. I'll get different answers. So one person on my team would love to go to maine august with her family and her children. I probably could do that for her now. Because i know that it's going to be okay but that's different than saying over a very long period of time. People not being with people is sustainable and that talent is going to find that invigorating and that great ideas are going to be surfaced and great things achieved. I think it's not true. That may not be true but some places are acting as if it is. They are acting as if anyone can live anywhere. Regardless of their employer places like tulsa oklahoma. Here again is roused chowdhury so studying work from anywhere. In twenty sixteen twenty seventeen tonight stumbled upon tulsa remote in late twenty eighteen tulsa remote is a project funded by the george kaiser family foundation which promotes equality inclusivity in tulsa a city of about four hundred thousand people in the years just before the pandemic. The state of oklahoma had its worst population. Outflow in years as college graduates kept moving away tosa remote wanted to reverse this brain drain. Although you didn't have to be from tulsa to take advantage you just had to prove lived outside. The state of oklahoma and the incentive was a financial one. They offer ten thousand dollars to each remote worker who would move to tulsa and stay there at least for a year a lot of cities us incentive schemes and tax breaks to attract employers but tulsa remote taking advantage of work from anywhere technology was going after employees. The reason i like the tulsa remote experiment is it. Talks to the chicken and egg problem when you're trying to attract companies because the company might get a huge tax break but the company also needs workers and traditionally. The problem has been companies. Don't want to come to these small towns because there's not enough talent and in workers want to come there because they are not enough companies but if you can move workers who could remotely work for other companies then you breaking this vicious cycle. In two thousand eighteen. The first year of tulsa remote there were twenty five slots available for the ten thousand dollar bounty after receiving ten thousand applications. They bumped it up to a hundred slots. Chowdhary is now studying these new oklahoma's when i interviewed them. Disproportionately the reason they gave for why they were moving to tulsa was either cost of living or getting a much cheaper house to raise their family but also this opportunity to contribute to the community so these were very pro social people they really wanted to give back to the tulsa community in meaningful ways in his preliminary analysis of the program. Chowdhary is found that the state of oklahoma gained around two to three thousand dollars a year from each new tulsa worker and says a result of that the state of oklahoma got excited about the program. And i believe they just passed this bill. Which would reimburse tulsa remote from the government if remote work states for at least a yup so now the government is sort of getting involved. Remember the experiment had been funded so far by a foundation. And i think it's great. News for the financial sustainability of this program because now tulsa remote could scale up and get more workers to relocate to tulsa all this is good news good ammunition for a work from anywhere argument. The same can be said for raj. Chowdhury's.
Freakonomics
"freakonomics" Discussed on Freakonomics
"And that needs the most effort for the examiner. What we found was that the first office actions went up and a subsequent revisions didn't go up as much and if the patent examiner wanted to slack they could have done the rivers. There's one really important thing to know about this program. The patent office did not adjust the income of the patent examiners based on where they chose to live and that was clearly a benefit because real incumbent up that's because the washington dc area is expensive to live. You may have heard that. Facebook for instance has announced its employees can live wherever they want for the foreseeable future. But if they're no longer living in somewhere like silicon valley they will no longer receive silicon valley salaries chowdhury prefers the patent office model. My intuition tells me that that is the right way to structure salary because if you adjust salaries based on location and not task than the risk is that your right tail of the distribution of talent will jump to your competitor if your competitor gives them the same salary for where the living chowdhury's analysis of the patent office program didn't include just quantitative data. He also interviewed patent examiners and the story that came. Stephen was one of loyalty that i was really helped by this policy. Because now i could move to philly and my daughter needs a medical treatment which is only available in philly northern organization will let me work in philly and do the kind of work. I'm doing so. I have to give something back. That is so interesting and it also implies that this increasingly fractious relationship between firms and employees maybe turning a corner at least for some sectors. Yes we actually frame the work from anywhere policy as a non pick unity benefit. It was highly valued by the patent examiners especially women so the other group i spoke to but the military spouses and diplomatic spouses and their story was that we had to change jobs every few years because our spouse was moving some base. And now we don't have to because now we can work from anywhere so it was a story of being happy and working harder. Okay but what about then any kind of objective measure of quality was there one. Yes so we looked at two. We looked at these requests for continued examination which come from the funds and the patent lawyers on their side and we didn't find any chains of quality on that measure. Didn't go up down and the other thing. We looked at as the most objective. Measure of quality on patent examination is how many citations through. Prior art is being added by examiner and we found that didn't change so quality didn't improve but it also did not deteriorate. Can you just tell me in terms of sectors where work from anywhere is possible. Do you think they were particularities about that kind of work. The patent examiners work that made it more viable than another kind of work so my priors changed to the pandemic. my thinking was that Welcome anywhere is more amenable to tasks which can be performed more independently such as the baton examination task or think about call center workers what i believe now is that there's also a very robust way of engineering collaboration and social interactions in the virtual world. Which makes me think that this is probably much more pervasive phenomenon. That will be imagined as to be. Why do you believe that now. So a specific experiment. Iran last year was around this phenomenon. Virtual water coolers which engineered these random interactions in the workplace between really senior managers and new employees use be found fascinating effects on performance on the probability of getting an offer for a full time. Job would you say that it was much more likely for. Let's say a low level or new employees to interact with a senior executive at this virtual watercooler. Then if they actually were working at the office so these interns all participating in this virtual internship last year. And what they write in the surveys is that these interactions facilitated knowledge-sharing which normally would not be written down in any manual. It's stuff that the senior manager would tell you when the talk to you. This actually goes back to research. In the nineteen seventies by tom allen at mit he studied our social interactions. In the physical office and mazing inside there was yes we do. Have these serendipitous water cooler conversations a cafeteria but it's almost always with people in very close proximity of us in the office said exponentially decays with distance in the office and the floor between the two people forget about it but in the virtual world you can bring anyone together so presumably you can have much richer and more virtual interactions than real physical. What's so if i'm a senior manager and i'm thinking the pandemic is hopefully winding down soon and i plan to gather all of my employees back in the office. What's a key lesson about this virtual water cooler that i should try to replicate in the office so i if i think that's a terrible idea where you think it's a terrible idea to have all the workers back or to replicate the virtual water cooler not go back in time to twenty nineteen even if workers are being brought back to office in a hybrid remote context. I feel virtual water. Coolers are a great tool to facilitate discussions. That wouldn't normally happen. Are why raj. Is it a terrible idea to go back to two thousand nineteen and persuade me that your answer is not influenced by the fact that you are a work from anywhere scholar so you know i think i am conditioned by that but make a case for you. So the case is that for the individual worker it would be sort of taking away the flexibility that workers craving especially women. Because there's tons of research which has shown that in the past women have borne the brunt of dual career situations so if you had a promotion opportunity that might make you move from columbus ohio to new york and your spouse doesn't want to move there you forgo that promotion opportunity. So what from anywhere allows companies to hire from anywhere and create a more inclusive workforce based on gender-based disabilities so my prediction. And of course this is testable. Is that companies that do not offer this option are going to lose the right tail of the talent distribution. you know. I've found that with our project with economics. Radio we are built to have remote work although pre pandemic i was the only one that worked remotely. And that's just 'cause. I like being alone and i'm a little bit antisocial in the last whatever fourteen months we've found that hiring a totally different prospect because of course anyone can be anywhere if i can hire from. Not just the new york area but anywhere else in the country or indeed the world. I have access to a much higher caliber pool and larger pool of labor. Yeah that is absolutely correct. Also it mitigates the frictions of immigration. Because you don't need to get workers on an h. One b. visa. You're not subject to that lottery system. Which makes no sense. but it's also great for workers because they can make more real income. I have a feeling that if someone were to listen to this conversation and you being really enthusiastic about the upsides of working from anywhere with data to back it up for sure but if we were to take out you said the word work and plug in the word learn or on line education. I think people would laugh uproariously and think that you do not know what you're talking about because i think a lot of people during the pandemic of experience at online education is really hard for young children older college so on. What do you think the work from. Anywhere revolution has to teach the more rudimentary online education revolution. That's a very interesting question. I've not studied the education space so to be honest. I don't have a research based answer.
WBEZ Chicago
"freakonomics" Discussed on WBEZ Chicago
"Up. Three people got out with assault weapons and handguns and opened fire. This type of gun violence has to stop. Every weekend. It's the same thing this is targeted. This is definitely not random. No arrests have been announced. Vietnam says it will soon release genome data of what officials are calling a very dangerous Corona virus variant. It combines characteristics of a variant first reported in Britain and a strain first identified in India. Egypt and Israel or holding high level talks to shore up a fragile cease fire that ended an 11 day war between Hamas militants and Israel. Israel's foreign minister says they're discussing mechanisms For allowing humanitarian aid into the devastated Gaza Strip. About two dozen states have decided to end some form of enhanced expanded and unemployment benefits offered through the covert relief bill. NPR's Asma Holiday reports. These expanded benefits mean an extra $300 a week. They also mean that people who don't traditionally qualify for unemployment like gig workers have been able to get help. These expanded benefits don't expire until September, but a number of states led by Republicans say their states don't need them. In fact, some argue that the extra money is actually hurting the job market and leading to worker shortage is not a single state, led by a Democratic governor has decided to terminate unemployment benefits. Early in analysis by J. P. Morgan argues that it looks like politics rather than economics, is driving the decision. While some of these states have tight labor markets and strong earnings growth, many of them do not a small college NPR news. This is NPR. Judge in Italy says a service technician is largely responsible for a cable car accident that killed 14 people a week ago. The judge says the technician intentionally disabled the cars break because it kept locking spontaneously. The only survivor of five year old boy is still hospitalized. In North Carolina. The Charlotte Motor Speedway is getting ready for NASCAR's Coca Cola 600. Later today, Nick Della Canal of member station W. F a reports it's drawing tens of thousands of race fans more than 50,000 race. Fans were expected to attend the race, including people from all 50 States. Stands can accommodate up to 95,000 people. It will be one of the most heavily attended events in North Carolina's since most covert 19 restrictions were lifted this month. Speedway spokesman Scott Cooper says face masks and social distancing will not be required. Other safety measures will be in place. All of our ticket will be mobile tickets were only allowing in clear bags, and any purchases on property will need to be cash list this be we will also have a clinic administering free covered 19 vaccines on site. For NPR News. I'm Nick Della Canal in Charlotte. The front open tennis tournament open.
Freakonomics Radio
USDA to Begin Paying off Loans of Minority Farmers in June
"Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack says debt relief and checks for farmers of color will start to be issued early next month. And I heard from member station W. Abe reports. It's part of the department's debt relief program. Under the recently passed American Rescue Plan, Farmers of color have won multiple class action settlements with the government over lending discrimination, but that promised relief did not actually materialize for many farmers. Now Secretary. Vilsack says the department is trying to make amends by canceling their USDA debts. So the Department of Agriculture is anxious to work. Anxious to get the work anxious to do the work. Um, and we're gonna spend every waking moment. Trying to make this right Aziz best we can. The department is also tasked with changing its own processes to try to prevent that discrimination going forward. Fewer than 2% of American farmers are black 3% or native American and
WBEZ Chicago
"freakonomics" Discussed on WBEZ Chicago
"Live from NPR News. I'm Barbara Klein. European negotiators trying to bring the US back into the Iran nuclear deal and restarted say they are not optimistic about progress so far in agreement between Tehran in the UN's nuclear watchdog on continued monitoring of Iranian nuclear activities. Is due to expire this month, and then przybylo nor Beardsley reports European officials were hoping to reach a deal before it does. In a statement released this weekend, senior diplomats from France, Britain and Germany said. We have much work and little time left against that background. We would have hoped for more progress this week. They added that success is not guaranteed. But not impossible, either. President Trump's unilateral withdrawal and reinstatement of sanctions has pushed Iran to breach many of the deal's limits on its nuclear activities. The Iranians refused to meet directly with the Americans. The deal's remaining signatories Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany and Iran are attempting to revive it. Eleanor Beardsley NPR NEWS PARIS North Korea, says President Biden maiden intolerable blunder in last week's address to Congress by calling Pyongyang a security threat. North Korea calls the statement hostile and says it's compelled to respond. Canada's western province of Alberta, is reporting a third record day of Corona virus infections. Dan conflict, Chuck reports, health officials say there were 2400 and 33 cases on Saturday, the province's largest one day increase several days ago, Alberta recorded 2000 and 48 cases. Officials also identified more than 1700 new cases of variants of concern, they say variance now account for more than 62% of the active cases in the province to major hot spots of the main cities of Calgary and Edmonton. Several communities are under strict health guidelines. But on the same day that the new record case count was announced, thousands of people attended a rodeo north of Calgary in defiance of the health regulations on Lee, a handful wore masks. For NPR News of Dan Carp in shock in Toronto for astronauts are back on Earth after six months on the international space station, Brendan Byrne of member station W. M a fee reports they splashed down early this morning. The international crew of three American astronauts and one Japanese astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. The crew rode in the same space X Crew Dragon capsule that launched them to the space station back in November. NASA's head of human spaceflight, Kathy leaders, they're doing great and We're very, very happy that will be bringing them home to their families. The crew will now spend time in astronaut quarantine at Johnson Space Center in Houston, monitored by flight doctors as they recover from space flight for NPR News. I'm Brendan Byrne in Orlando. This is NPR. The nation's top military officer says Afghan forces face an uncertain future General Mark Millie's comments come a day after US and NATO troops officially began pulling out. Millie says the Afghan military is reasonably well equipped and trained, but is refraining from saying whether it can stand up to the Taliban without international support. Thousands of demonstrators marched through central London this weekend Protest ng the British government's plans to curb peaceful protest Vicki Barker reports from London. The protesters march.
No Stupid Questions
How Does When You Are Born Affect Who You Are?
"Does when you were born affect who you are in my econometrics class or talking about instrumental variables and one thing. That has come up. Is that while you may think that the time of year someone is born is a great random variable that can be used to make more robust estimates. It turns out that when the year you were born is actually correlated with things like parents income or mental health outcomes. Is it true that people born at different times of the year different does this mean. Horoscopes are in fact valid. Thanks alkaline so the way. I would think about this. Is there at least two major dimensions. One is that the time of year born or more broadly. The year you're born in what's going on in the world then may have some natural ish effect but then there's a very different dimension which is how the time you were born again. What's going on in the world where the environment can change your outcome. And that gets even more complicated. Because then we're talking about parental behavior and that parental behavior may be pre or postnatal. And so on. I don't know how much your parents or your family care about. The traditional chinese zodiac. But i am curious. What sign you were born under and how it's influenced your life. I am the year of the dog and everybody has good things to say about their year but the year to be is apparently the year of the dragon. I'm not a dragon so my parents. I'm quite sure did not plan my birth around the lunar calender. That's fairly because i'm told by my sister that i wasn't planned at all boy. Okay i'm not going to get into that but it seems as though there are quite a few chinese and chinese american parents who do delay birth to the year of the dragon. Yes because there's a spike in births. Among certain communities across the globe during that year. I find this research on the year of birth according to lunar calendar in cultures that really respect that mind blowing. I remember when my grandmother passed away. This is my mother's mother. Apparently they had to wait for a lucky day to bury her and that was months away so they they waited. Wow there's also some research suggesting that in addition to the decisions like to have a child or one to have funeral that actually life outcomes can be influence because of parents expectations and amount. They invest in their children's education etcetera. But i do know that. Children born in the year of the dragon to chinese or chinese american families that they do get more education. They have better lifetime outcomes than non dragging your children. We did do an episode about this years ago with freakonomics radio but according to that research it is on the parents guide which is basically once. You've got a dragon in the family. You invest a lot in that kid. Is that your understanding. That is my understanding if you are living in a culture where someone says hey. This is the lucky year. And then you're lucky enough to be having a kid that year. Then maybe when you're making decisions about whether one is gonna get extra tutoring give it to the lucky kid right because you know there are dragon but also would there be a little bit of something like endowment effect there like this. Is the child that we created on our timetable and therefore we feel a little bit more invested in this one not so much because they might be lucky because this is how we planned. Oh absolutely. I don't think it's necessarily that you give the child. The extra tutoring because you think the child is luckier. But because their dragons and they're going to do more with that tutoring the research that it made me think about is in psychology and it was by bob. Rosenthal have you heard of the pygmalion effect. Yes my fair lady. Yeah probably more people have heard of my fair lady than teak malian or the pig melon effect but the original play was called pygmalion and that was of course after the greek myth that pygmalion created a statue. That was so beautiful that he fell in love with it. But the plot of my fair lady. You have elisa doolittle who needs to get rid of one lower class british accent. In order to acquire a higher class british accent. And the reason. I bring this up. And the reason why the psychological research was called the two million. It's just that the expectations. Not only that you have for yourself right. Not only eliza doolittle's expectations for herself. But actually henry higgins her teacher his expectations for her. We're going to put the thumb on the scale of her destiny and if he thought that she was going to do great maybe he would act in ways. That would actually make that prophecy. Come true so. These are behavioral components and belief and preference components. Let's go back for second to the biology question. I don't know much about this. I've done a little reading. I'm curious to know if you know more but in terms of biology the month of year that you're born to the season that you're born. I have seen some arguments that to me. Look between week and mixed that there is a strong effect. I read one piece. For instance argued that babies born in the spring are more prone to optimism but also more prone to depression. And i realize they're not polar opposites necessarily but it does make me feel like some of this thinking may be like i said somewhere between week and mixed but i'm not ready to dismiss it in part because there's been so much interesting science in the last ten twenty years on circadian rhythms and how real they are. According to time of day so month of year might also have similar effects. I'm curious if you know or think anything about that. I know very little but it would be hard for me to believe that the time of year that you're born which of course has its own particular is for how long the days were versus the nights and also by the way other things like the availability of nutrients vegetables being in or out of season of course less relevant these days because we can get our strawberries year round but i wouldn't be surprised if any of these effects were huge. I can maybe imagine a small with tranquilly but nothing large because there's so many other things that would swamp the effect of you know it was a six hour daylight day versus an eight hour daylight
Freakonomics Radio
New York AG rejects Cuomo's proposal, calls for official referral for harrassment investigation
"General a tissue James has rejected a plan announced by an aide to Governor Cuomo to team up with the state's chief judge to choose an independent lawyer to investigate claims of sexual harassment against him.
Freakonomics Radio
White House: China And WHO Need To 'Step Up' On Investigation Into Origin Of Pandemic
"The White House is calling on China and the World Health Organization to step up an investigation into the origin of the Corona virus pandemic As NPR's Barbra's front reports President Biden's national security advisor says the administration has concerns over data from China. Jake Sullivan told CBS's face the Nation. The Biden administration has questions about an upcoming report from the W H O about the pandemics origins. We need a credible, open, transparent international investigation led by the World Health Organization, he added. The administration does not believe that China has made sufficient original data available. To examine how the pandemic spread both in China and globally, Sullivan said. Biden did raise the issue during his recent call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Barbara
Freakonomics Radio
United flight from Denver has engine failure, drops debris on neighborhoods
"But our regulators investigating what caused a catastrophic engine failure on a United Airlines passenger plane, the flight to Honolulu, a 231 passengers and 10 crew members on board. Made an emergency landing in Denver shortly after taking off. No one was hurt, but debris from the plane fell on several
Freakonomics Radio
Millions of Texans still without power and safe drinking water
"Texas. Warmer temperatures have residents doing clean up after the power and water outages this week. But although the water may be back on for some officials are still warning people to boil it before drinking it more than 70 people died because of the weather and 56,000 customers are still without power.
The Indicator from Planet Money
Fisher Vs. Keynes: Investing Tragedy And Triumph
"Irving fisher was born in eighteen sixty seven in the town of saugerties. New york got his phd economics from yale in eighteen ninety one and for most of his adult life he enjoyed this almost unparalleled streak of success. Yeah not just as a great economist but also as an entrepreneur and investor. Tim harford is the author of the data detective. A new book that includes a chapter about irving fisher. He was the basically the inventor of what we now call the rolodex card filing system. That made him a multimillionaire. He was a diet and fitness expert. He published a book called how to live which was the freakonomics of its day. Only sold five hundred thousand copies. He set up the life extension institute. He was a campaigner on prohibition. He was a vegetarian. Assist an astonishing a prolific campaigner and thinker and he made a lot of money in the markets for a while as the stock market in the nineteen twenties was going up and up fisher was investing more and more money into it in fact even though he was already investing a ton of his own money he was also borrowing even more money to invest in stocks so that he could boost his returns fisher was just supremely confident about his forecast that the market would keep going up confident both in his own intelligence and also in the possibility of using data and statistics to predict the future. So that's where irving fisher was right before the crash of nineteen twenty. Nine john maynard. Keynes the other. Great economists of the era got there a little differently. Canes was definitely already considered one of the great economic minds of the time and just like irving fischer canes knew. He was the smartest guy in every room. He walked into same. Yeah me too something. We all share with gains right. But unlike irving fisher john maynard. Keynes had gotten some things wrong. By that point he had been humbled by the market before he had an early investment fund immediately after the first world war that just went went bankrupt and it was fine canes raise more money went back into the market. Got everyone's cashback. Everyone lived happily ever after but he had that experience going. Oh yeah. I thought i was smart on the market. Maybe i'm not smart on the market when the crash of one thousand nine hundred nine arrive. The stock market collapsed more than twenty percent in two days and within three years it had fallen more than eighty nine percent from where it was before the crash. Both and john maynard. Keynes lost a lot of money on their investments in the crash but there is a huge difference in how they responded so after the crash fisher kept doubling down on the same investments. He even kept borrowing money to invest in the same. Losing stocks for example fisher owned stock in a company called remington rand and right before the crash remington rand stock was at fifty eight dollars share but after the crash of two three months it was twenty eight dollars. A share and fisher was borrowing money and buying more shares at twenty eight dollars for years into the crash. It was one dollars a share. That is how to be a millionaire. Lose everything maybe fisher believed that his precious data just could not be wrong or that he could not be wrong or that. His self worth was tied up in this idea that he was right. Whatever the case he couldn't change his mind and he lost everything. Canes was different kane street at his failures as a chance to learn a chance to improve his process up to the crash he'd been investing based on his ability to predict the ups and downs of the whole economy. But after the crash he decided that that was just too hard to unknowable so he changed his strategy to investing in companies that he believed had good management and he thought would go up over time no matter what the overall economy was doing. Canes made a fortune for himself and for the endowment of king's college us money he was managing one of the things he said when he was trying to raise money from his own father was win or lose. This high stakes gaming amuses me. That's that's just an amazing linked to say when you're trying to persuade someone to give you money and yet in the end it helps because he just didn't take it so personally for the past few decades. A psychologist named philip tat. Lock has studied the behaviors that lead to better forecasting being very precise predictions constantly. Checking to see if your forecasts or proving true and updating your forecast if they are not true all of these make you a better forecaster. But tim says if he had to summarize. All of this research on a bumper sticker. Full cost is better when they recognized. They might be wrong and they are asking themselves. What am i missing. What perspective having tie considered. Who haven't i talked to that sort of almost paranoid suspicion that you might have messed up. And the willingness to change your mind that leads to much better forecasting you know it sounds so obvious. Just be able to change your mind and yet in practice. People really struggle to change their minds especially about their deeply held beliefs. That irving fisher could not change his mind and john maynard. Keynes could ended up making all the difference in how they lived the rest of their lives a few months after the second world war at fissuring canes both died fisher was alone and nearly bankrupt hitting bailed out by his millionaire sister-in-law and he'd completely lost his reputation as a result of his failed forecast. It's such a tragic end to a great career. Canes died a millionaire the most famous and celebrated economists on the planet and there is a quote that sometimes gets attributed to canes that. Tim also likes to remember him by. He probably never said it but he lifted which is when the facts change. I change my
News Radio 1190 KEX
"freakonomics" Discussed on News Radio 1190 KEX
"Though, is becoming a problem maybe sees Alex Perez from Kansas, where hundreds of seniors over 80 line Up in the cold waiting hours to be vaccinated. The Washington state where Lauren Thorpe is working the phones, 10 phone numbers here. Not always though. I get through I have 10 4 numbers that I have called vaccine sites complaining deliveries have fallen short Jamie's now and talks to send as many as 10,000 troops across the country to help administer the shots. A bipartisan effort is underway in the U. S. Senate to censure President Trump instead of convict him for that one article of impeachment that he's facing inciting insurrection. Democrat Tim came from Virginia, one of the architects of the plan, says it could prevent another political run under the wording of Part of the 14th amendment. The Constitution Section three Anybody who participates in an insurrection against the Constitution or gives aid and comfort to those who do is barred from ever serving in office. Again. Legal scholars call it a long shot. A lot of Democrats are still pushing for the impeachment. Ah, lot of people are still talking about the short squeeze carried out by college students. Those working from home and investors who have driven up the share price of struggling video game retailer Game. Stop the company going from a losing bet. To an epic payday, ballooning to a value of more than $24 billion. In just a matter of days, the pros on Wall Street are losing big. That's because they were betting that game stop would fail. Ah process known as shorting the stock. That's a B C's Andrea Fujii. You're listening to ABC news. It's such a beautiful night. Look at the stars. They're amazing. Did you know 20% of stars have planets orbiting them capable of sustaining life? How did you know that? You must spend a ton of time reading? Not at all. I used bleakest blink assed. Yeah, it's an app that takes key insights from over 4000 non fiction bestsellers and gathers them into 15 minute blanks. For you to read or listen to. With Blink ist. You can learn the main points of an entire book in just 15 minutes, as opposed to days or weeks. What kind of books nonfiction books in over 27 categories from personal development to history, management, investing philosophy and more books like a beautiful Mind the four hour work week. Freakonomics and SAPIENs..
No Stupid Questions
Which Matters More, a First or Last Impression?
"Emails from a listener named sam cohn who happens to be a nursing student and he wants to know this our first impressions or last impressions more impactful question or you're thinking about the colonoscopy study i mean honestly there's only one cold i'll give you study will. There are many colonoscopy studies in the medical literature but only one in the psychology literature that i'm aware of exactly that social scientists would know about and that's the famous economy and colleagues study about peak and end the peak and theory. So can you tell us. About the pecan therion. How colonoscopy works to illustrate that so danny katamon and his colleagues did a study where everybody in. The study is getting a colonoscopy. You are randomly assigned. These are people who are already going to be getting on us. Yes i think. It was a collaboration with physicians. If only there were experiments that we could sign up for four which we get a colonoscopy decide. The i would prefer the chemotherapy pleased survey. I'm going to prefer the high fat diet one. This study randomly signs patients who are already signed up for a colonoscopy to either get colonoscopy as usual which i am told and as they say in the article is a pretty unpleasant experience because of the mechanics of the whole thing and the experimental condition is where the exploratory equipment of they have to put into. You is held there for a little longer than would necessarily be the case and your instinct might say oh. That's the bad version of the experiment right because you get more pain but what was so clever about this experiment is that yet. It's more pain. But because you're just having the tip of the scope to sitting there in the rectum. It's more moderate level of pain than what it's moving around during the colonoscopy itself. I think they would probably just call it a mild discomfort compared to a greater discomfort. I mean i can't imagine what it's like to have. The tip of a colonoscopy will come back in a week or two and give us the details so the reason why is interesting. Is that patients who underwent the extended procedure with the additional. Moderate level of pain actually raided the overall experience as less unpleasant and the reason why this was so important is that congressman was at the time developing a theory. Where there is the remembering self and the experiencing self and he says the experiencing self is just experiencing moment by moment. How happy my house. Adami anxious in my hungry am i but the remembering self is consolidating all of that and collapsing it into a memory and he had the theory that when the remembering self processes information and collapses a whole string of moments into one impression. Two things are going to take additional weight. One is the peak of the experience of the high in the low points and the other is the end points and so this famous study affirmed the hypothesis that the end of an experience takes disproportionate weight when we evaluate the overall experience. Now knowing the colonoscopy study what will i ask for if i had the chance to ask my doctor you say gimme the katamon colonoscopy please exactly the katamon special so it's interesting. Is that even though. This finding is a sturdy finding. I don't want the extra pain although since you're inexperienced in colonoscopy so we'll have to see if maybe you'll change your mind after you have but let's say that we want to take it out of the realm of the colonoscopy which i probably should and let's say we want to steer this back toward what sam is asking about the first impression or the last impression imagine a family vacation but say you are apparent with kids and a spouse or whatnot and you go on a family holiday. What would you rather have of the to a great beginning or a great ending y. So oh gosh. I think i would like to have a great ending because i do think the peak end effect does hold true so my ambivalence at my colonoscopy if the vacation we're say four days i would rather have a terrible first day and a wonderful fourth day than the opposite that makes sense because as you were describing the lasting thing is the memory so of course you want that to the positive one. Yeah the whole memory is going to be colored by the last moments more than like the mid point or something. I have to say. Ever since i read that paper years ago and interviewed donald reddell meyer one of the co about it. I have tried to apply the peak in theory all the time in my life in interviews with my family and random encounters with strangers. The minute something good happens. I just stop so you just leave when i learned about this. It made me think first of all of so many rituals that are part of our lives that seem to capitalize on the peak in theory. So dessert why desert last. Why don't we eat it. i. I don't know how much yoga you're doing these days so much. Okay so shiva's nina. Do you know this corpse pose at the end. Of course it feels so good to be sitting there and completely relaxing. And there's a reason. I think that every yoga practice ends with shibata so the next time you think. Do i wanna do yoga. Your memory is least colored by that. But that's challenge this notion so i think you've done a pretty good job persuading everybody. The last impressions are really powerful. But let's talk about first impressions. I mean there's this whole mountain of cliches about that right. You never get a second chance to make a first impression and so on and let's go back to that vacation if you show up with your family to this place where your vacation for four days in your first impression is terrible. Doesn't that set a tone that will be impossible to recover from and from which no final impression is possible to save the experience yet to argue that last impressions take on disproportionate. Way does not say that first impressions. Don't matter disproportionately also for different reasons. First impressions can carry more weight than the mid point or some other point in experience. So one reason is that first impression. Has this kind of path dependency so say you have a really bad day of that. Four day vacation. Everybody's now on a sour mood now. You're all fighting on day two and then because you were fighting on day two day. Three is a total catastrophe. Even those comes out you get off on the wrong foot as it were. And then everything. Kind of goes downhill from there. You know when. I first read this question from sam our first impressions or less imprisons more impactful. My initial impulse was to try to answer it. Like we're trying to do now but my my second impulse and the deeper one was to view it as i do as a writer which is to say wool. Both i think for everything i've ever written whether to book an article Podcast script whatever. I'd probably spend three to ten times more effort on the beginning and the end than on anything else because as a writer was informed years and years and years ago by my experiences a reader which is at the beginning really really matters the ending really really matters and there's also a notion expressed in various places. I don't know where i got it from. Maybe the talmud or shakespeare that the best beginnings have a little bit of the end in them. If the writing is good so i do wonder if maybe sam is pursuing an either or choice when the answer in fact should be an end answer. Both end is usually the answer to checkoff and the great multiple choice of life. The way that this question was framed. It's like when we are meeting another person or when you open a book or you start an article or you start listening to a podcast or watching a movie. It's so clear to us when we just think about those experiences. How the very beginning. It does matter because you are very quickly coming to judgments. And there is this research on thin slicing by among others nominee embody. Maybe you did freakonomics episode on this note. I read about thin slicing in one of malcolm. Glows books blink. This is the idea that you can come to very quick impressions and they're not even necessarily verbally articulated ones but just got feelings of like good or bad in milliseconds and that these very quick impressions can be predictive of later judgements. That are much more deliberative and so forth. That's an argument in favor of a strong first impression because in some cases lake with a move your book or a person if the first impression is not a good one there will be no opportunity for a final impression where the final impression will be one second after the first impression right hopefully less with people and more with like net flicks. So imagine there a job interview and your first impression of candid. It is a positive one. Well danny ottoman would remind us that then confirmation bias is gonna kick in and then for the last fifty eight minutes of the hour long interview. You're just going to be confirming your own positive impression. And so there's a path dependency in judgment and not just the path dependency in life events.
KQED Radio
"freakonomics" Discussed on KQED Radio
"Kids who weren't restrained at all definitely suffered the consequences. Car seats versus seatbelts. The comparison between Children's car seats and Children aged 2 to 6 who are wearing adult seat belts. No matter how I slice it, I never was able to find any benefit of the car seats in terms of preventing either death or serious entry. Although it is true that in a second paper I wrote with Joe Doyle from M I t. We did find that. Child car seats are about 25% better at preventing the least serious kinds of injuries in car crashes. These papers were published in 2005 and 2006. I was encouraged to see that a couple author's name Jones and See, Bart wrote a piece in 2017, where they just tried to replicate and extend the first paper starting from scratch and extending the day to the next 10 years in both the existing sample and in the future sample they found Exactly similar results. Could it really be that adult seatbelts performed Justus well as child car seats in preventing serious injury and death, even though they're not size for Children. One way to check would be to look at the research done with crash test dummies. In fact, every time a car seat wants to get government approval, it's required that they go through a series of crash tests and passed with a minimum threshold of safety and various kinds of impacts. And so I want to look in that literature expecting to find that there had been lots of research done comparing child car seats to adult seatbelts for Children in a controlled circumstance with Crash test dummies. And what I discovered is that there were literally none. This was around the time the Levitan I published our first Freakonomics book. By now we were writing a monthly column for the New York Times Magazine. So we thought it might be a good idea for that column to run our own experiment using crash test dummies. What I thought was really incredible when we decided to go and actually put some Crash test dummies on seats and strapped him into adult seatbelts and see what happened in the crashes was the reaction of the crash test sites to do in this. You were there, not me. You wanted to tell that story? Yeah, this truth, So it was kind of a two step amazement. Number one was it was really, really hard to find a crash test facility that would agree to do this as it was explained to us over and over again. All our business comes from the car seat manufacturers. There's no good in proving that car seats are not better than seat belts, and then some would say that they weren't set up to do that. But that seemed a little bit odd. Because in order to do a bit of a car seat crash, you need seatbelts. Finally, then we found a lab that was willing to do it. The caveat was that we were not allowed to identify them by name or where they were. I will say that I flew there and it was really interesting because the guy running the lab was a scientist. And he said, I was really intrigued by this question, because it's something I would really like to know. And I think it's good for the science. So I had bought a couple of different size and brands of new car seats, and we start to hook them up and the technician who was installing the crash test dummies. In the seat belts didn't want to do it. There were actually two Dummies, one that represented a three year old child with all these wires to measure the impact of the crash. And the other six year old dummy child. And the reason he didn't want to do it is he was so sure, but the seatbelt would fail and that the crash would like break. His dummy. So then I had to sign. Yet Another indemnification form was on the hook for all kinds of indemnification in case something went wrong. If this wasn't standard testing, and then we ran the tests. And the data from the crash test basically came to the conclusion that the seatbelt had done pretty close to, if not as good a job as the car seat and in fact, if you would just submitted the data From the crash where the crash test dummy was in a seat belt alone. That would have easily passed the requirements for it to have been a car. See, even though it was actually just a seatbelt, and I don't know if you remember, but they were so shocked by the results that they thought there must be a mistake. And they actually ran it over because they thought that something had gone wrong for the seat belt have done so well. Yeah, that's right now. We wrote up the results of these tests and your academic research in our times common level. How would you describe the reception to the news We delivered about car seats, I would say somewhere between complete hatred and not even noticing. I mean, my favorite story is when The secretary of transportation at the time, Ray LaHood came across our work and what he writes in his blogged is quote if you want to slice up the data to be provocative have at it. As a grandfather and a secretary of an agency whose number one mission is safety. I don't have that luxury. I mean, it's like what the heck is only job is to keep people safe. And when evidence comes out that maybe the policies that his department has been pushing for the last 20 years are not keeping people safe. And he has a staff of statisticians who have literally nothing else to do accepted. Look at the agency if it's keeping people safe. It's amazing to me that the response isn't Hey, Let's go show that these quacks are completely wrong or, you know, let's actually try to get to the truth, but just to be dismissive of it, because it doesn't fit with what they've been doing for 20 years. It was really discouraging. Now the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Some officials there after we published these findings in New York Times, wrote a letter to the editor is said Our research consistently shows that child safety seats and booster seats significantly lower the risk of serious injury compared to seat belt alone. They go on to say that your recommendations to rethink car seat laws are quote, irresponsible and dangerous. So.
KQED Radio
"freakonomics" Discussed on KQED Radio
"I mean. You look at the death certificates. Those are the folks that are really getting hit. But she also says it's understandable why a 74 year old with lung cancer would think that qualify because in neighboring states they would State of Tennessee's directed local health departments to worry less about checking ID's and more about getting the shots out as quickly as possible for NPR news. I'm Blake Farmer in Nashville. This is NPR news. Live from KQED News. I'm Kate Wolf. California Healthcare Startup Curative is still administering tests to asymptomatic people in the Bay Area, despite recent FDA guidelines guidance that the tests produce a high rate of false negatives. Kate Judy's Julie Chang reports. The company has put up nearly 40 temporary testing sites across the region and security's website. People without symptoms can still book tests online. But last week, the FDA issued an alert, saying that the tests were on Lee authorized for symptomatic people. Marcie Richardson is Sonoma County's director of nursing for covert response. It was on Lee approved for use in people who are symptomatic who have had symptoms in the last 14 days. That's what their emergency use authorization was for. The FDA recommended that patients and caregivers who have concerns about their curative test results, talk to their health care provider and possibly get retested. Period of didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about asymptomatic testing. I'm Julie Chang KQED NEWS, Santa Clara County officials say they have vaccinated more than 47,000 people, including the county's health care, workforce and staff of skilled nursing facilities. The county supervisor auto, Lee says. For now, residents need to keep following health orders. I want to make sure with the lunar New Year coming by many of us would love to see our loved ones, but this is absolutely wrong thing to do. We could beat this thing that we need everybody to hunker down for the last time officials hope to start vaccinating seniors and people in some essential.
WNYC 93.9 FM
"freakonomics" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"We get through the end of Tuesday, January, 5th and elect to the United States Senate, a son of Savannah, Rafael Lorna. And a son of Georgia, John US off to the United States Senate. Democrats. Warnock and Ausaf are running to unseat Republican incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Leffler. After a too close to call election in November. The outcome will determine which party controls the U. S. Senate. Details. Air coming out about President elect Biden's inauguration organizer say it will include a virtual parade across America. That's because of the coronavirus crowd limits that will restrict who could be in Washington to watch the ceremony on January 20th. Well, the number of people have died from covert 19 and the U. S has now surpassed 350,000. According to Johns Hopkins University. NPR's Amy held has more as the U. S left. 2020 behind it surpassed 20 million Corona virus cases and confirmed a new, more transmissible strain. First found in the UK is already here. Health officials are reminding people to avoid traveling gatherings. Still, T. Essa says it's processed millions of travelers around the holidays. In his Sunday address, the pope says he's saddened by people catching flights to vacation and skip lockdown. Fuji did they love down If I relive a car, see, they're not thinking of others left behind, Francis said. Still, there's reason for hope in 2021. Officials expected delayed vaccine rollout will speed up there. Also warning the coming weeks could be the worst in the nation's public health history. Before things turn around. Amy held NPR news. This is NPR. This is W. N. Y. C in New York. I'm Lance. Lucky Governor. Cuomo says he won't receive the Corona virus vaccine until black Hispanic import New Yorkers in his age group are able to receive it. He made the pledge that Abyssinian Baptist Church. He's considered an essential worker and would be eligible to receive it in the second phase of distribution after health care workers and nursing home residents and staff Thousands of New York City public school students return to classrooms tomorrow following the holiday break, But a faction of the teachers union is speaking out once again, calling for remote only lessons. Gothamist reporter Sydney Pereira says the Solidarity caucus of the United Federation of Teachers includes about 4000 of the union's 75,000. Members of the caucus had unsuccessfully sued in the fall to keep school buildings closed. Co founding member with the Solidarity Caucus is worried about a post holiday surge, especially as kids and teachers who may have gathered in large groups indoors for the holidays could be unknowingly bring the virus back to the classroom and Education Department spokesperson says safety measures, including weekly covert testing will continue in schools Most diverse Congress in the nation's history is now sworn in, and it includes three new members from the New York City area who are black and Latino. They include Monday Air Jones of Westchester and Rockland counties. Richie Torres of the Bronx and Jamal Bowman of the Bronx in Westchester. I think it's exciting because it's representative of the country right. The country is not just white, wealthy men. The country is women. The country are poor people working class people. Bowman was invited to become the first male member of the squad. A group of progressive women of color in Congress that includes Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, Joan says as the pandemic persists, one of his top priorities. Is to have a vote on Medicare for all. This is w n Y. C. Support for NPR comes from the estate of Joan Be Crock, who's request serves as an enduring investment in the future of public radio and seeks to help NPR be the model for high quality journalism in the 21st century. Today. I'm Freakonomics radio..
Freakonomics Radio
China says it will respond to delisting of telecom giants
"Vowing to respond after the New York Stock Exchange said it will delist three Chinese companies following an executive order from President Trump. Will bar Americans from vesting in firms believed to be linked to China's military, NPR's John wrote reports. The investment band takes effect on January 11th. The New York Stock Exchange said on Thursday it would complete the delistings by then. Companies are China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, Hong Kong all our major state owned telecommunications firms. China's Commerce Ministry says the U. S move hurts the interests not only of the Chinese firms but also investors outside China. Including in the United States. It says it will also damage confidence in US capital markets. In response, China will take necessary measures to quote resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises. It did not give details of what that would entail.
No Stupid Questions
How Much of Your Life Do You Actually Control?
"This question arose. When i was reading maria kovas new book. The biggest bluff so maria like you has a phd in psychology. But she's not an academic she's a writer and this book is about her quest to become a professional poker player starting from scratch so we made a freakonomics radio episode about her book. That was called how to make your own luck and really what. Maria is wrestling with throughout. That book is the relationship between luck and skill. She's doing it in the context of poker but it's easy to extrapolate into our daily lives. So here's the passage that made me think of you. There's an idea in psychology. She writes. I introduced by julian. Wrote her in nineteen sixty. Six called the locus of control when something happens in the external environment is it due to our own actions in other words skill or some outside factor. Chance people who have an internal locus of control tend to think that they affect outcomes often more than they actually do whereas people who have an external cause of control think that what they do doesn't matter too much events will be what they will be. Typically an internal locus will lead to greater success. People who think they control events are mentally healthier and tend to take more control over their fate so to speak. Meanwhile people with an external locus or more prone to depression and when it comes to work a more lackadaisical attitude so angela. My question has two parts one. Is it indeed. Better to generally have an internal locus of control as maria. Kind of cova rights. And if so if. I am more inclined toward the external if i tend to feel life as more happening to me rather than me making it happen. How can i shift to have a more internal locus of control. It's a great passage from a great book from a great author. So i'm glad to be asked this question i'm gonna throw in a bonus answer here. You didn't ask me if i had. An internal control of control is probably. I haven't internal locus control. and yes. it is generally a good thing. It correlates positively with just about every life outcome you can think of you know income and wellbeing not going to jail it cetera. I guess my suspicion the counter would be that. It might also correlate with things like arrogance and nurses system in other words no characteristic that we think of is unabated. Good all the time obviously well. You're right that it can't be a complete recipe for a good human and there might be instances in which it could be bad. I am not aware of a lot of research. On the downsides of internal control in my data when i measure things that are conceptually siblings two locus of control like growth mindset or self efficacy or optimism. I don't find negative correlations with good things now. That might be. Because i'm studying teenagers. And maybe i'm not measuring all the right outcomes. So i would have imagined that your answer would be something along the lines of well. Of course you want to have an internal locus of control when you're talking about things that you actually can control. But it's really really important to acknowledge that despite your best efforts or maybe despite your worst actions that there's going to be a lot of countervailing activity from institutions or societies systemic things other people and so on that you can't control so that's i guess the answer i was expecting to hear but it sounds like you're saying that the more internal you have at least for teenagers who you've studied the better. It is yes. Yeah i mean you asked me a really straightforward question which is what's the correlation is it positive is it negative and the answer is also simple which is a positive but i think we should move onto the more interesting question more than thinking about. What's the downside. I do think we should think like. Is it a fully accurate view of the world to think that you can control what happens to you or are people who are very aware of all the things like luck and social inequality and racism and the list goes on. Is that a more accurate view of the world. The idea of look control goes all the way back as you said to rotor in the sixty s when he was developing this idea it was really on the heels of behaviorisms where the idea that you would even have any thoughts in your head expectations about the future. That didn't really matter because we are basically all just animals responding and very mechanical ways to stimuli punishments rewards etc is really true as recently as the nineteen sixties. You're saying that was the standard scoop thought. Well certainly the early twentieth century was definitely behavior ism and it was pretty dominant. And that's why when you have a psychologist like rotor. And then also like alexandra. Who is still with us. He's in his nineties and stanford he has a very similar idea. Called self efficacy. They wanted to make the point that people are not just lab rats responding to rewards and punishments. They are thinking and they're projecting into the future and wondering if i do this is going to pay off. And so it really was a conception of human nature which was much more genetic having agency and having free will and having an influence on your future as opposed to just when environment does this. I do that. That's not just like stimulus response.
Freakonomics Radio
Unemployment benefits lapse with stimulus bill stuck in limbo
"Is facing a government shutdown beginning early Tuesday as a massive covert relief and spending bill remains in limbo. President Trump is refusing to sign the deal that one sweeping approval in Congress he wants relief checks tripled to $2000 move his own party has rejected. Meantime, millions of Americans have lost unemployment benefits with the current federal In past, some states are stepping in from member station Kunc. Carly Hucles reports on what Colorado is doing. Governor Jared Polish has extended provisions that enable political parties to continue utilizing remote operations to minimize the risk of spreading Copan 19. Hole is also extended in order that authorizes the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to make one time direct cash stimulus payments to qualifying individuals facing financial difficulties due to cope in 19. This extension makes funds available to the department until the end of February.
Freakonomics Radio
Congress agrees to $900 billion Covid stimulus deal after months of failed negotiations
"Months of stalled talks, Congress tonight says it has agreed to a nearly trillion dollar coronavirus relief package. Bill will reportedly be attached to a government funding bill that runs out at midnight. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calls it a breakthrough that the country desperately needs. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the bill will provide child care support and more as we see food lines all over the country. It was the R R legislation that had the initiative. For food for nutrition. Where are Children in school and the and seniors as well as America's working families. Among the bill's provisions, direct payments to qualifying Americans Ah, boost in weekly unemployment benefits and funds for small business aid and vaccine distribution. It's unclear though, when the chambers will vote on that package.
No Stupid Questions
Which Gets You Farther: Talent or Effort?
"In college was not enough of foundation. The what does that even mean to map. Newtonian physics onto your concept of achievement. Okay so i took the simplest of newton's ideas remember in high school when you learned that distance equals rate times time. Sure and then you had to solve just a countless number of problems like a car is going seventy five miles an hour. It's traveling for and the idea was always like you get two of these and then you have to figure out the third one. So if you know the distance and the rate you have to figure out the time cetera but just taking that simple idea that distance he goes rate times time. I was like you know. Metaphorically human achievement is like distance when you say that. Somebody's really accomplish. They've achieved a lot. We really do. They've moved from point. A. to point b. and b. is really far from point a. And so then. I thought okay if achievement is like distance rate is kind of skill. Let's take freakonomics. For example you have a skill and then you have to apply that skill. So that's the time. So if i multiply your skill as a freakonomics producer times the amount of energy you put into it. I will get how much you accomplish. So skill is standing for rate and application of skill is standing for time. Is that right. That's right so if you want to achieve skill and you got to spend a lotta time doing it so that was the first like oh. This is kind of newtonian. So let's go back to your high school. You know cars travelling sixty five miles an hour. It's going for two hours. How far does again remember that. A car can go faster or slower. So it's not like the car is always going sixty five. In fact i say that the skill that you have is not fixed that you acquire skill that your speed as it were your rate actually can change over your life were generally it changes in the positraction right. You get more skilled. But then you're suggesting there's a whole other dimension which is how you apply that skill to your route to produce the greatest distance or achievement. Yes yes so imagine. Stephen is a car. okay you can make all the sound effects that you want. Wasn't there a disney movie where it's all cars. But they're like anthropomorphized. They talk to each other thing. It's called cars. it's the called cars. Well there is a genus name. Okay so basically. You are car stephen and you're not a car that has always been travelling at the same speed. Your skill in what you do is higher than it used to be. We start off in your little slower but then you learn some things and you've got faster. Okay i don't like your car metaphor. i'm sorry. I like you like this idea law. I am having a hard time imagining myself as the car. It's a bridge too far as it were honestly. I'm still trying to get the feeling of my wheels. It feels weird to be on wheels and the other thing is when i think about a car as the skill or the rate i think of a car is something that is getting slower and deteriorating from the minute you drive it off the law. Oh that is true. It depreciates fifty percent when you drive it off a lot. Yes i want to think about a different kind of activity. So let's make it a pursue some kind of achievement or goal or vocation. Whatever that i or some other person is serious about okay. Let's consider that you are an aspiring scientists. So i you're in high school and you certainly can't make any independent scientific contributions because you're still in high school and you hardly know anything then you get to and your knowledge is probably more complex and deep then by the time you get to graduate. School probably are on the frontiers of knowledge in your discipline. And you know how to run experiments in you know how to analyze data so you have accumulated skill as a scientist and my point. Is that if you have reached a certain level of skill where you really have a at contributing something you have to apply that skill. It's a trivial insight. But if you for example. Go to your post doc and then your third year of your post doc you retire. I mean actually can think of a few people that they reach a certain high level skill and they actually stopped producing or they effectively retire. That actually has happened a lot. Not just in science but really in every domain okay. Let's take my favorite gritty person. Will smith one of the reasons why i admire. Him is not just that he has reached a certain skill level in his acting and his general creative pursuits but every year that passes does more stuff and my point with this equation is that if achievement is like distance travel. It's not just that you want to be somebody who is skilled. But you actually have to apply that. And if you're like a wall smith and every year you're still grows but every year you're actually producing more stuff that's great. This reminds me of you know that famous old paper. It was taxi driver. Researched failure and kammerer and babcock and lowenstein remember that paper. This was about earnings and basically these economists found that when taxi drivers were having a particularly good day for whatever reason yeah. It was like raining and everybody wanted a taxi. Exactly that usually what they would do is once. They hit their target income. They would stop for the day. Yeah they satisfy. They satisfy rather than maximise whereas the economist argued. No if you're making a great rate
Freakonomics Radio
Congress Passes Two-Day Spending Bill
"Appears ready to vote today on a more than $900 billion coronavirus aid package. One of the final hurdles was cleared last night, lawmakers resolved a dispute over the Federal Reserve's lending authority during the pandemic. Relief plan is expected to be attached to a huge spending bill that funds government agencies in the new year.
Freakonomics Radio
9 Arrested During Protest, Clash With New Jersey Police Outside Bergen County Jail
"Protests have continue throughout the weekend outside the Bergen County Jail in Hackensack over the county's contract to jail people for immigration, customs enforcement. Unlike yesterday when nine people arrested after clashes with police, today's protest was held across the street from the jail away from the cops. Madeline tremble of Bergen County resident who rallied with about 50, protesters said the county is complicity in Isis operations. Bergen County and it's entirely Democratic led county government is enabling age to detain and deport more people. It's a simple is that and it's time to end the contract. Now I speaks Bergen County $110 a day for each of the 200 immigrants. That are held there.
Freakonomics Radio
Charley Pride, Groundbreaking Country Music Star, Has Died In Dallas At Age 86
"The country music industry is mourning the loss of Charley Pride. The legendary black singer died in Dallas at age 86 from complications from covert 19 for member station KTRH in Dallas. Alejandro Martinez reports on prides career Charley Pride made his mark as the first black country music star to hit it, big music critic Thor Christensen says. When Pride's career took off in the late 19 sixties, he moved to Dallas. He told me I grew up in a segregated society, and he didn't want to subject his his three kids to that. And when he thought about where you could travel around the world and not be subjected to such racism, he said. You couldn't find a better place than Dallas. Pride was also part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. I was a regular at home