I picked up Freakonomics, by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dunbar. Levitt’s the economist, Dunbar’s the author. I already had Feynman’s letters in hand, just released as Perfectly Reasonable Deviations. I was counting on Feynman's influence to steady me against Freakonomics. The cover quote on Freakonomics is, after all, from speculative driveller extraordinaire Malcolm Gladwell: “Prepare to be Dazzled” Yeah.
First chapter: Roe v Wade caused crime to drop a generation later. Obvious right? Fewer kids born into disadvantaged homes makes fewer criminals. Why hasn’t anyone else voiced legal abortion as the reason for crime drop?
Hmmm... maybe not. Maybe this is a very interesting primer on economics. Mathless, neutered, but interesting because it’s approachable, like a lion in a cage. Inspirational and instructional, but limited, being taken out of it’s native habitat. Let’s read... Trading moral, social, and economic incentives are the basis for much of human governance. People respond strongly to strong incentives: lynching was a powerful disincentive against blacks. Terrorism makes a lot people think hard about visiting Arabia. What Stetson Kennedy really did was give information to the public to create a social disincentive for the KKK.
Similarly, the introduction of Quotesmith.com drove down the price of term life insurance. In both cases, the gain was due to closing the gap between the expert and everyone else. This is a profound point for any medical student who presents the argument “why do I have to learn this? I can look it up.” So can Joe Public. They don’t need you if they can look it up. They need you when they don’t have time to look it up. Same thing with military maneuvers. All that training only matters when you’ve run out of time to train. Same with lawyers in the court room. “Hold up, Judge, I’ve got to consult Lexus-Nexus on this point...” Same thing with the priest, psychologist, or other counselor negotiating with a homicidal, suicidal, or just plain psychotic patient.
A particularly disturbing quote from David Hillis, an interventional cardiologist at Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas “If you’re an invasive cardiologist and Joe Smith, the local internist,is sending you patients, and if you tell them they don’t need the procedure, pretty soon Joe Smith doesn’t send patients anymore.” And, a couple of pages later, an issue relevant to me: real-estate agents sell their own homes, on average, for 3% more than they sell their clients houses for. Good for buyers, bad for sellers, who pay the agents! S&S relate the tale of a Stanford prof who’s realtor told him the market was zooming when he was buying, and, five minutes later, in the same conversation, when approaching the possibility of selling the professor’s old home, the agent tells him the market is tanking. And, five terms that generate higher sales prices: Granite, State-of-the-Art, Corian, Maple, and Gourmet. Five that generate lower sales prices: Fantastic, Spacious, !, Charming, Great Neighborhood. Why? Three of the top five are statements of fact, and good facts, things you want in your home. Lesson: tell, and avoid empty adjectives.
Levitt’s one-year-old son, Andrew, died of pneumococcal meningitis. So what makes a good parent? A home pool is 100 times more likely to kill your child than a gun. But pools are light blue, ‘swimmy’. The thought of your child with a bloody hole in her chest is horrifying. So people buy pools and kill their kids. Or keep them inside. Turns out grassroots peer pressure shapes kids more than top-down obsessive parenting. (Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption, 1998). Of course, that’s comparing one suburbanite to another. What about North Philadelphia vs Annapolis? Or Chicago? Those who opted to enter the lottery in Chicago’s public schools in 1980 did better. Not those who went to better schools, only those who opted to leave their neighborhood schools. Why those were the more ambitious students to begin with. Actually, turns out the die is cast earlier than high school. The lottery intervention would work better if it was at kindergarten. Interesting paper on this, “The Economics of ‘Acting White’, by Rroland G. Fryer, Jr. Basically black kids learn to ‘act black’ in the neighborhood because it is the cultural norm for the other kids to punish academic achievement, or stop ‘acting white’ in school entirely, which is really the bigger sell-out? For a ten-year old?
Books help too. Right? Kids with lots of books at home do better in school. But what other variables are in play? Turns out, just as slaves were far more likely to find themselves on large plantations with other slaves, so their descendents find themselves in bad schools with little PTA funding or parent involvement (of course, the working poor have a tough time spending time with the teachers, particularly when dad was killed last year in a robbery, or an industrial accident, or, or, or...). So, the gem: eight factors that are correlated with test scores:
The child has highly educated parents (IQ, g, is genetic, and society gives people with high g more education)
The child’s parents have high socioeconomic status
The child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth.
The child had low birthweight (does poorly in school)
The child’s parents speak English in the home
The child is adopted (does poorly in school - prenatal care may be lacking if she knows she won’t raise it. That’ll make you cry...)
The child’s parents are involved in the PTA
The child has many books in his home
Those that aren’t:
The child’s family is intact
The child’s parents recently moved into a better neighborhood (patience, note #2 above)
The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten (relax, do three days a week!)
The child attended Head Start (low birthweight babies tend to be from poor mothers who don’t know or don’t care to care for the child in utero. Incidently, they are eligible for Head Start, which pays uneducated teachers $21,000. Application anyone?)
The child’s parents regularly take him to museums
The child is regularly spanked (would you admit to a government researcher, face to face, that you spanked your child? Is congenital honesty good? See the real estate example above: facts sell)
The child frequently watches TV (but recall the JACP article: there’s conflicting evidence)
The child’s parents read to him nearly every day (g is inherited, and smart parents read themselves)
So what’s it mean? By the time you pick up a parenting book, it’s too late.
