Economist on Guns

Not surprisingly Freakonomics has the best and most reasonable discussion on gun laws that I have seen. You can listen to it here.
But I have one criticism. About halfway through the podcast, Levitt suggests a better way to lower gun crime is to attach severe punishments to crimes involving guns. He says that mandatory sentences will work and have proven effective when used:

"LEVITT: Well I think the policies that can work are ones that tie heavy punishments to uses of guns that we don’t like. So for instance, laws that say if you commit a crime and you have a gun with you, regardless of whether the gun was used, then without any sort of other consideration, we add five years, or 10 years, or 20 years, or 50 years to the sentence that you get. Those kinds of laws, I guarantee you, will work. If the incentives are strong and tell you don’t use guns, then I guarantee you we will see the number of gun homicides fall and the number of knife homicides rise, but not one for one. People will substitute away for using guns to kill people to using knives to kill people. But it won’t be one for one because knives just aren’t as good of a tool for killing people as guns are. That will work. I have no doubt that will work. It’s worked in California in the past when California put mandatory sentence enhancements on for felonies that were committed with guns. But I think the policy has to be one of that nature, where you’re not tying it to the gun itself, you’re tying it to the use of guns that you don’t want"

This argument ignores the often discussed Freakonomics topic of decision making. We know that people are terrible at making good decisions about the future, even when they know that something is a good idea. We know they don't put money away for savings and they don't stop committing crimes  even when they already have two strikes. 

How effective will mandatory sentences be if we already know criminals don't make good decisions?

Econ Humor

"Susan, we need to talk. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. About us. I really like you, but ever since we met in that econ class in college I knew there was something missing from how I felt: quantitative reasoning. We can say we love each other all we want, but I just can’t trust it without the data. And after performing an in-depth cost-benefit analysis of our relationship, I just don’t think this is working out.
Please know that this decision was not rash. In fact, it was anything but—it was completely devoid of emotion. I just made a series of quantitative calculations, culled from available OECD data on comparable families and conservative estimates of future likelihoods. I then assigned weights to various “feelings” based on importance, as judged by the relevant scholarly literature. From this, it was easy to determine that given all of the options available, the winning decision on both cost-effectiveness and comparative-effectiveness grounds was to see other people."

 It’s Not You, It’s the Data

 

the Power of Leadership

This story won't surprise anyone. We all understand the importance of leadership, but the commentor's clear and concise description made it post-worthy.

Good Boss vs. Bad Boss output

Compound Interest in real life

"As ADHD has become one of the most prevalent childhood mental conditions, it is useful to understand the full set of consequences of the illness.  This paper uses a longitudinal national sample, including sibling pairs, to show important labor market outcome consequences of ADHD.  The employment reduction is between 10-14 percentage points, the earnings reduction is approximately 33%, and the increase in social assistance is 15 points, which are larger than many estimates of the black-white earnings gap and the gender earnings gap.  A small share of the link is explained by education attainments and co-morbid health conditions and behaviors.  The results also show important differences in labor market consequences by family background and age of onset. These findings, along with similar research showing that ADHD is linked with poor education outcomes and adult crime, suggest that treating childhood ADHD can substantially increase the acquisition of human capital..."

How Is Early-Childhood Intervention Like Compound Interest?

Horses, Kit, and Google

Now, only six years later, the miracle innovation is arriving. It is not only feasible with today’s technology but is already being introduced commercially, right under our noses. There is little doubt it will be the biggest innovation in transportation since internal combustion itself. It is cars that drive themselves.

Freakonomics

Hilarious Headlines

a collection of newspaper headlines that don’t quite accomplish what the writer set out to accomplish. Anyone who has ever written or published anything can surely sympathize — and laugh.

Freakonomics

Jimmy Kimmel Thinks Like a Freak

Jimmy Kimmel Thinks Like a Freak:
Starbucks recently came out with an ultra-high end cup of coffee. Wondering whether that cup of coffee was really worth $7, Kimmel took to the streets and ran some experiments.  He didn’t however, do what you might expect.  Rather, he pulled a page out of the old wine tasting experiment I ran twenty years ago. It is definitely worth watching.

Baseball--like life--is random

Freakonomics post: Does the “Best” Team Win the World Series?

And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed! So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned “world champion” is not a reliable indication that a team is actually the best one.

Freakonomics on Mass Transit

Can Mass Transit Save the Environment? Right Wing or Left Wing, Here’s a Post Everybody Can Hate:

(Photo: RJ Schmidt)

A major rationale — perhaps the major rationale — touted by supporters of mass transit is that by reducing our output of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, transit can help save the environment. The proposition seems intuitive and even obvious: by no longer encasing each traveler in thousands of pounds of difficult-to-move metal, surely transit is more energy-efficient. Plenty of analyses prove this. But then again, Aristotle, who was revered as the infallible font of truth for more than 1,000 years, proved that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones and that women have fewer teeth than men. Might studies that demonstrate transit is greener be similarly wrong?

Convictonomics

The New Economics of Crime and Punishment: It now costs more than $70 billion a year to keep 7 million people behind bars, on parole, or on probation. The best way to address this problem is not with ad hoc political negotiations or by rehashing the age-old debate about retribution versus rehabilitation. What we need is convictonomics: a coldly rational economics-based approach to crime and punishment.

Gov, invention killer.

From Freakonomics: 

Drivers Aren’t the Only People With Blind Spots

Math professor R. Andrew Hicks has come up with an amazing new rear-view mirror for the driver’s side of the car that eliminates blind spots. The secret is that standard mirrors are flat, but this one has subtle curves that greatly widens the field of view, but without being distorting. If you look at the photo accompanying the link above, it is amazing how much better the new mirror seems to be.

Alas, you won’t see Hicks’s mirror on many cars any time soon. U.S. regulations require that driver’s side mirrors be flat, and this mirror is not flat. So if you want one, you will have to buy it and install it on the car yourself.
It seems strange to me that the U.S. government is in the business of telling auto makers what shape their mirrors should be. Doesn’t that seem like something that markets can take care of just fine on their own? I can’t think of many good reasons why car makers would opt for a curved mirror if flat mirrors perform better. What is the government trying to protect against? Instead, by having such specific regulations, it will probably be years – if ever – before this great new invention becomes widely available.
My guess it is that is much easier to solve the problem of a driver’s blind spot than to fix this regulatory blind spot.

The College Bubble

This blog post from Mark Cuban made a lot of internet noise recently and was even featured on Freakonomics.  Now that I am finally getting around to posting it, let the hullabaloo begin! (again):

It’s just a matter of time until we see the same meltdown in traditional college education. Like the real estate industry, prices will rise until the market revolts. Then it will be too late. Students will stop taking out the loans traditional Universities expect them to. And when they do tuition will come down. And when prices come down Universities will have to cut costs beyond what they are able to. They will have so many legacy costs, from tenured professors to construction projects to research they will be saddled with legacy costs and debt in much the same way the newspaper industry was. Which will all lead to a de-levering and a de-stabilization of the University system as we know it. 

And it can’t happen fast enough. 

IMHO, the biggest problem the economy has is the enormous student debt new college grads and those leaving college find themselves with. In the past leaving college meant getting a job and getting a used car and/or an apartment with some friends. Yes there was student debt, but it wasn’t any where near your car payment. You could still afford the car and the apartment. Now its the exact opposite. Today, the minute you graduate college you face the challenge of debt against a college education whose value is immediately “underwater”

Shame Works

"...parking for a very handicapped person or a very inconsiderate (unscrupulous) person."

Full story over at Freakonomics.

Everything is Inflated

The Economist, via Freakonomics, is reporting on a trend that many of us have been grumbling about for some time: inflation. Servings are bigger, clothes are bigger, evaluations are bigger, and on and on.

When everything from grades to clothing sizes are inflated in the name of avoiding harsh realities, information is compromised.

They are calling this phenomenon 'panflation'.

Ironically, in these depressed economic times the only thing that is not inflating out of control is money.

Celebrating Tax Day

Dan Ariely; Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics, author, and friend of Freakonomics wrote an interesting post about his perspective on taxes as a new immigrant to the US--and then how it changed.

I was very intrigued by and excited about the tax system and tax day. I envisioned it as a matter of civic engagement, a yearly ritual where citizens reflected on their contribution to the common pool of resources—for better and for worse.

Imagine if all (or most) citizens could muster a little excitement for civic engagement in their everyday lives.

School, Girls, and Math?

I have a daughter in middle school and unfortunately I think her experience supports this study.

"teachers discount the math skills of white females, even when girls’ grades and test scores indicate a comparable level of skill"

Women are disadvantaged at shipwreck survival

  

Freakonomics: Did women and children go off the Titanic first?

"Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared to men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers."

Weird names aren't doing you any favors

If you have one of those names that people are always struggling to pronounce, we have some bad news for you. 

Link to the post at Freakonomics.

Freakonomics: ball hogs and meeting hogs

espn.com

This post from Freakonomics.com made me think of every Army meeting I've ever sat in.

"If I want you to think I am competent, I need to talk."

If there was a way to block all comments that don't contribute directly to a meeting's intent we would all be much better off. Maybe the stand-up meeting is a start.

Conventional Wisdom: more lanes are better

economicdisconnect.blogspot.com

On my way to work this morning I heard Mayor Villaraigosa of LA make the following statement on NPR's Morning Edition the Marketplace Morning Report:

"That HOV lane that we will build will relieve the most congested freeway in the United States."

He of course, was talking about the major expansion project on the 405 freeway and the resulting Carmageddon. But I was struck by how such a bold statement could go unquestioned. I didn't think it was accurate so I dug into the interwebs until I found this: