Fred Brooks, the computer scientist who 35 years ago wrote the still-relevant The Mythical Man-Month, has written a new book, The Design of Design, and Kevin Kellyinterviews him in Wired. It’s interesting throughout, but the following struck me as particularly insightful:
The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.
I believe Brooks’s point about money often not being the scarcest resource is spot-on; as Stella Adlerused to say, “your talent is in your choice.”
A new report, based on the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy’s Individual Giving Model (IGM), estimates that individual charitable giving was down 4.9% percent in 2009. The model incorporates measures of household net worth and income, and as such provides an informative picture of household economics during the recession. The report’s authors also point out the model has certain limitations — namely that it fails to account for psychological and social factors that affect giving: “On the positive side, people may give more because they empathize with those with increased need in a bad economy. On the negative side, people may give less because they are anxious about their own, their families’ and perhaps their workers’ financial well-being.” (3)
A recent trip to Madrid included a lecture at the Universidad Europea de Madrid (which features, among other things, a dentistry school, at right). The best part was a short film that had been made before my arrival: a spoof in which an economics class at the university is taught freakonomics instead of economics (sorry, no translation available):
Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research. Here is the latest round.
Francois asked:
We were wondering recently who first said “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
The Yale Book of Quotations traces this to Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966): “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” However, Charles Doyle of the University of Georgia has found versions of it further back, the earliest usage being by Abraham Kaplan in 1962. Details will appear in the forthcoming Yale Book of Modern Proverbs.
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
Soccer referees have taken some hits lately, thanks to a controversial call in the England-Germany World Cup match (among many others). Economists have already gotten involved; now here come the psychologists. The BPS Research Digest reports that “[a] simple perceptual bias could influence football referees’ judgments about whether a foul occurred or not.” Alexander Kranjec, Matt Lehet, Bianca Bromberger and Anjan Chatterjeeshowed 268 images of player tackles to 12 soccer players for half a second each; 134 of the pictures were mirror images of the other 134. ”The key finding was that more fouls (66.5 vs. 63.3 – a statistically significant difference) were judged to have occurred when assessing the images in which movement was captured in a leftward direction than when assessing the same images mirror-reversed and therefore featuring implied rightward motion,” writes the BPS Digest. “The researchers think this anomaly may have to do with our bias (at least in cultures that read from left to right) for rightward motion.”(11)
Economics is sometimes ridiculed as a science that uses complex math to argue the obvious. That complaint may be valid toward the following paper, but it’s still interesting (to me at least): in “Binge Drinking & Sex in High School” (abstract here; PDF here), Jeffrey S. DeSimone argues that “binge drinking significantly increases participation in sex, promiscuity, and the failure to use birth control, albeit by amounts considerably smaller than implied by merely conditioning on exogenous factors.” In a related essay about an earlier paper on binge drinking and risky sex among college students, DeSimone writes:
“I conclude that binge drinking does not make students become sexually active when they would not otherwise be, but does leads to some promiscuous sex that would not otherwise take place. This implies STD infection and unwanted pregnancy are potential external costs of binge drinking that could justify restrictive alcohol policies on college campuses.”
Meanwhile, Susan Averett, Hope Corman, and Nancy Reichman have a new paper (abstract here; PDF here) titled “Effects of Overweight on Risky Sexual Behavior of Adolescent Girls.” It finds that “overweight or obese teenage girls are more likely than their recommended-weight peers to engage in certain types of risky sexual behavior but not others.”
One of my German colleagues has access to €30,000 for Gleichstellung—a German version of an EU-wide initiative to achieve equality between healthy white males and various “disadvantaged” groups, including women. Cleverly, the German government does not want people to substitute these moneys for other funds; as with any subsidy, there is a concern that people will spend it on activities they would have undertaken anyway.
The problem is that the restrictions on using the funds are severe: for example, they can’t be applied to such things as research assistance or travel, as these expenditures are potentially covered by other funds. She did use the money to rent an office in the summer while visiting her parents, who will take care of her kid while she escapes the house to work in peace. But beyond this, she is having a hard time spending it legitimately and the restrictions are such that in most of her faculty the money is not being spent. What is to be done?
This fall I will be teaching a class on African politics. For the class, each student will be responsible for being the class expert on one African country. There will be about 30 students, and there are more than 50 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, so there are enough countries to go around. I want each student to represent a different country, and I also want to make sure that certain “important” countries will definitely have a representative.
In allocating countries to students, I would like to balance fairness, choice, and speed. The fairest and fastest approach would be for me to just randomly assign my preferred countries to the students, but I want to give them some choice in the matter. I think that students will be more engaged if they are representing a country they already have an interest in. Unfortunately, by introducing choice, I also introduce the possibility that multiple students will want to be the expert for the same country, and there is probably some trade-off between fairness and time in determining which student will actually get that country and which countries the losing students will get. The fairer the process – perhaps something involving multiple rounds of bidding – the more class time will be eaten up.
Does anybody have ideas for a fair and relatively fast way of allocating countries that still gives the students some choice in the matter?
Kathryn Schulz, the author of Being Wrong, has been guest-blogging for us about being wrong – and admitting our mistakes. Her latest post examines the historical culture of error in the United States.
The United Mistakes of America
By Kathryn Schulz
A radical proposition: the United States is the natural homeland of the gravely mistaken.
I don’t mean this as a criticism, and still less as jingoism. Nor do I mean that Americans are more wrong than anyone else (doubtful) or more right, either (ditto). I mean that respect for error was a driving force in the founding of our nation. We are a young country built on a mature idea: that all of us must be at liberty to make mistakes. We are free to say things our fellow citizens think are untrue, worship gods our neighbors regard as idols, hold fast to convictions that contradict those of our leaders.
We think of these liberties as embodying the American tolerance for dissent. But our nation’s founders were not simply some kind of 18th century ACLU, fighting to protect everyone’s right to express even the fringiest beliefs. Instead, they protected minority opinions for a pragmatic reason: they recognized that, over time, the fringe rather than the mainstream might prove right. What they inscribed in the Constitution was an awareness of the perpetual possibility that we are mistaken. Read more…
In Hollywood, a lot of people make a good living by making TV pilots that never end up on the air. (There’s also a strong market for writing film scripts that are never turned into films.) According to Variety, roughly one-third of pilots end up on the air; here’s a primer about the process. With each pilot costing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, that’s a lot of money spent so that a handful of TV executives can give something a thumbs-down and consign it to the trash.
A recent Times blog post carried news of the departure of Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment. One commenter on the post, Benny F. from New York, wrote this:
i wish networks would televise all their pilots and let viewers really pick them.
While the vast majority of states have energy codes in place, policymakers are now attempting to legislate energy codes at the federal level to help address more recent concerns about energy efficiency and climate change. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about whether energy codes are an effective way to reduce energy consumption in practice. This paper provides the first evaluation of an energy-code change that uses residential billing data on both electricity and natural gas, combined with data on observable characteristics of each residence. The study takes place in Gainesville, Florida, and the empirical strategy is based on comparisons between residences constructed just before and just after Florida increased the stringency of its energy code in 2002. We find that the increased stringency of the energy code is associated with a 4-percent decrease in electricity consumption and a 6-percent decrease in natural-gas consumption. The pattern of savings is consistent with reduced consumption of electricity for air-conditioning and reduced consumption of natural gas for heating. We also estimate economic costs and benefits and find that the private payback period for the average residence is 6.4 years. The social payback period, which accounts for the avoided costs of air-pollution emissions, ranges between 3.5 and 5.3 years.
My friend Pete Leeson is one of the most original and creative economists I know. First, he wrote about pirate economics (he was even kind enough to write three guest posts on the Freakonomics blog).
Then he tackled “ordeals” –- the medieval method of trial in which one’s guilt was assessed by whether an arm that was plunged into boiling water got burned. His conclusion: it was not a miracle when the accused emerged unscathed from the boiling water treatment. As long as everyone believed that the boiling water would reveal guilt, it made more sense to confess than to have one’s arm get boiled and then be punished for the crime on top of that. So the only people who were willing to go through the ordeal were those who were falsely accused. Consequently, it appears that the people who carried out the ordeals didn’t really boil the water (it’s not clear whether they did this on purpose or accidentally –- I suspect on purpose).
Now, he has moved on to gypsies. Apparently, gypsies believe in all sorts of strange things, like that the lower half of the human body is polluted and non-gypsies are spiritually toxic. These bizarre beliefs, he argues, substitute for traditional institutions of law and order. Like all of Leeson’s best work, when I start reading it I don’t really believe it, but by the end I’m not only convinced, I feel like running out and telling everyone I know about it.
Atul Gawande, excellent as always, tackles the difficult issues around end-of-life care, arguing that modern medicine has failed people facing the end of their lives. ”The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task,” writes Gawande. ”Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.” Expensive end-of-life care (and cancer treatment costs), of course, also contributes to runaway health-care costs.(10)
The digital revolution with its increasing storage of terabytes of data often leaves behind electronic traces of malfeasance. A cell phone thief left behind call records that I used to get my phone back. Justin Wolfers analyzed data sets on college and professional basketball games to uncover residue of point-shaving and racial bias. I once called on the NBA to release more data to “give Freakonomics a chance.” Steve Levitt led the way in this new field of forensic Freakonomics with his famous discoveries of cheating by school teachers and sumo wrestlers.
Now statistical forensics is playing a central role in claims of fraud leveled at the polling firm Research 2000 (“R2K”).
A political consultant, a retired physicist, and a wildlife researcher walked into a bar…no, wait – it only sounds like the beginning of a joke. Actually, in June, they checked the internal consistency of Research 2000’s polling data because “on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results”: Read more…
What do a pint of Guinness and the Great Recession have in common? The Irish Independent found out in a recent interview with Dubner during a recent U.K. tour. In August, he'll be appearing in Johannesburg; he gave an interview in advance. Eight months after its release, SuperFreakonomics remains on the N.Y. Times best-seller list, and is the No. 3 paperback in England. Freakonomics, meanwhile, is in its tenth month on the Times paperback list. You can hear the Freakonomics Radio podcast on iTunes and via RSS. And the Freakonomics documentary hits theaters in autumn 2010. Varietycalls it “a revelatory trip.” IndieWIREsays “a television series or a sequel could follow without much resistance.”Dubner and the filmmakers discuss the movie here. Blog posts about the SuperFreakonomics global-warming controversy are collected here.
Freakonomics Radio explores 
