HBD Books

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

288 pp.  William Murrow 2008

Before the 2005 Freakonomics was published, the authors were told to put a disclaimer in the book saying that it had no unifying theme.  In the introduction to SuperFreakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner inform us that they lied.  The message of the book can be summed up as people respond to incentives, but not the way you always expect them to.  In other words, the law of unintended consequences is always with us.  SuperFreakonomics is the same book, but with the advantage of the authors, thanks to their fame, having more contacts and sources than they had when writing the original.  “Most of the stories fall into one of two categories: things you always thought you knew but didn’t; and things you never knew you wanted to know but do.”  Part of the goal is to get people to think like economists-cold and rational working under the axiom that people act rationally in their own interests.   

Walking Drunk

We’ve all been warned about the dangers of drunk driving.  Still, in the United States, 1 of every 140 miles is driven drunk.  An inebriated driver is thirteen times more likely than normal to cause an accident.  One of the reason that people still do it is that very rarely do they get caught.  Only one out of every 27,000 miles driven drunk results in an arrest.  That means you can drive five times back and forth across the whole country, drinking out of a canteen the whole time, without being taken in.

And the danger of death?  Say you’ve been drinking at the house of a friend who lives one mile away from you.  It seems a no-brainer that you should walk home.  Complicating things is that not only is drunk driving driving dangerous, but drunk walking is too.  The first leads to 13,000 deaths a year, the second 1,000.  It looks as if drink driving wins, until we consider that we walk so little: only four blocks a day outside.  If we assume that the same percentage of miles walked are walked drunk as miles driven are driven drunk, walking while drunk for a mile is five times more likely to lead to a death.  

What causes women’s liberation and plummeting birth rates?  Data from India seems to provide the best answer.  In that country, 51 percent of men, and 54 percent of women think that wife beating is sometimes justified.  Preference for sons has led girls to being aborted and India being rivaled only by China in its lopsided sex ratio.  But there are rural regional differences in attitude and behavior and the authors think that television is what caused them.  Between the years 2001 and 2006, around 150 million people in India first received cable TV.  Only some villages got it, and those that did did so at different times.  This allowed scholars to run a natural experiment.  Economists Emily Oster and Robert Jensen relied on a government survey of mostly rural households.  Women over the age of 15 with televisions were more anti-wife beating, less likely to say they had a son preference, and “more likely to exercise personal autonomy.”  The results from the survey seemed to be backed up by real world behavior.  Women living in rural areas with cable started to have less children and were more likely to be kept in school as youngsters.  It turns out that when I wrote that TV was to blame for destroying tradition, I was right.

HBD in Prostitution Solicitation

The pimp is a much maligned figure.  The girl does the work, so why does he get a cut? Like that of the merchant, the pimp’s reputation is a victim of economic illiteracy.  Sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh collected data from about 160 black prostitutes preforming more than 2,200 sexual acts over two years in three different South Chicago neighborhoods.  He paid the girls to record the type of act, the price and information on the buyer such as attractiveness and race.  At least 3 of the 160 died over the course of the study.  The majority of the violence came from the johns who couldn’t get finish or get erect and then demanded their money.

Soliciting a prostitute is less likely to get you arrested than even driving drunk is.  It only happens one out of 1,200 times.  Here are the prices of different sexual acts.

Prostitutes practice price discrimination.  Blacks pay about $9 less than whites per act with Hispanics in between.  Blacks are more likely to haggle, so the girls just give the price outright to avoid it.  When meeting a white customer, the prostitute asks him to name the price and hopes for a generous offer.  Wearing a condom only gets the man a $2 discount.  Condoms are only used 25% of the time during oral and vaginal sex and the average street prostitute has unprotected sex 300 times a year.  Three percent of the men who solicit prostitutes are HIV positive, meaning that the average prostitute on Chicago’s South Side has unprotected sex with 9 HIV-positive men a year.  Probably higher, because one would assume that repeat customers are the most likely to be diseased.  

Where does the pimp fit in?  An average john pays $16 more per act when he goes through one.  But the girl ends up much better off.  The data here come from the neighborhoods of Roseland and West Pullman.  Only in the second do prostitutes use pimps.  The pimpact can be isolated because many girls alternate between the two neighborhoods.  

The pimp pulls in higher quality customers: usually whites recruited from strip clubs and riverboat casinos.  These customers tend only to buy the higher priced acts.  Even after the pimp takes his 25% cut, the girl is still better off.  With a pimp, the average girl turns 6.2 tricks and makes $410 a week, compared to those working alone who turn 7.8 and make $325.  Girls employed by pimps are also less likely to be beaten up or forced to give gang members freebies.

Venkatesh got to know the six pimps in West Pullman.  All were black men in their 30s or 40s.  Some had regular jobs like car mechanic or store manager.  They handled the police, one of whom asked them to simply keep the prostitution business out of public view.  The police chief may want to stamp out the prostitution, but the cop on the street has no incentive to.  A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop then be arrested by one.  

Street prostitution isn’t a desirable career, but the pimp isn’t the villain.  

The analysis of terrorists clears up just as many common misconceptions.  We’re told that terrorism is the result of poverty and deprivation.  Criminals have low IQs-shouldn’t suicide bombers also?  The economist Alan Krueger searched through the Hezbollah newsletter The Oath and collected information on 129 dead martyrs.  While 33 percent of Lebanese come from poor families, only 28 percent of the dead shahideen do.  47 percent had at least a high school education, compared to 38 percent of young men in the country as a whole.  A similar study was carried out on Palestinian suicide bombers.  16 percent came from poor families vs. 30 percent of Palestinians overall.  Only 15 percent of the populace had an education beyond high school, compared to over 60 percent of the bombers.  All this is because unlike regular crime, terrorism is a political act.  Blowing yourself up is the Middle Eastern equivalent to voting.  “Think of terrorism as civic passion on steroids.”

Terrorism can be effective even when it fails.  Thanks to the shoe bomber, we now all have to remove our shoes before getting on a plane.  If you assume that taking off your shoes takes one minute and total up all the times people fly a year, you find that Richard Reid costs America 14 person-lives annually.  

What makes society so vulnerable is that people don’t think in statistical terms.  In October 2002, there were about 50 murders in the Washington, D.C. area.  That was typical for the region.  But ten of them were the work of the sniper killers.  After the first few killings, schools were closed, outdoor events were cancelled and some wouldn’t even leave their homes.  The authors tell us to imagine that if instead of the nineteen 9/11 high-jackers flying planes into buildings, they had gone to 19 different areas of the county and sniped people at gas stations and schools.  Even if one or two were caught, the others would continue their business.  The country would’ve been completely paralyzed.  This never happens because there are virtually no terrorists.  Yet think about how prominent “national security” issues are in our electoral politics.  

Human sentiment stops us from seeing common sense solutions to our problems.  In 1983 doctor-entrepreneur Barry Jacobs went before Congress and explained his plan for ending the problem of kidney shortages.  His group would bring Third Worlders to the US voluntarily, take out their kidneys, pay them and send them back.  Congress was horrified and passed the National Organ Transplant Act, which made it illegal to transplant human organs as part of an economic transaction.  You can either give a kidney for free or you don’t give one at all.  The result is that tens of thousands of Americans die needlessly a year.  Meanwhile, a citizen of the more progressive nation of Iran can get $1,200 for his kidney plus a sum from the recipient.  There are no waiting lists and anyone who needs a kidney can get one.  

The Global Warming Religion

Dubner and Levitt don’t doubt global warming, but think that the problem is greatly exaggerated.  We simply don’t know what we’re doing to the earth.  Not the most complicated computer simulation currently available can accurately tell us.  The temperature could rise two degree or ten degrees.  It could be an inconvenience or the end of civilization (or according to the former head of NASA, the James Watson of climate science, even beneficial).  

In the 1970s, global cooling was all the rage.  The New York Times and Newsweek ran articles on life as we know it coming to an end.  The average ground temperature in the Northern Hemisphere had dropped .5 degrees Fahrenheit  between 1945 and 1968.  Newsweek wrote that the temperature drop had “already taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.”   Some scientists even recommended that we cover the arctic ice cap with black soot in order to melt it.  Today, the doomsday crowd worries that the world is getting too warm.

First, there are some misconceptions about what human activities experts believe contribute to global warming.  Cud-chewing animals called ruminants such as cow and sheep are responsible for sending out about 50 percent more greenhouse gas through their farts, belches, and manure than the entire transportation sector combined.  Liberals who buy locally grown food often actually end up hurting the environment.  Such products generally come from small farms and are thus less efficiently produced than the food products which come from larger ones and travel farther.  Only 11 percent of food emissions come from transportation.  

If we can’t get people to trade in their SUVs, forget about them giving up their burgers.  

Even if we grant that global warming is true and that humans contribute to it, it doesn’t follow that the most rational way to deal with it is changing our lifestyles.  Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, wonders if human action has accidentally caused the globe to warm, might we be able to purposely cause it to cool?  

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted.  During the nine hours that the volcano erupted, 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide were shot into the stratosphere.  It acted like a sunscreen and lowered the amount of sun radiation reaching the earth.  Over the next two years the earth cooled by two degrees Fahrenheit, reversing all the global warming of the past hundred years.  Myhrvold wonders, why not simply pump sulfur dioxide high enough into the atmosphere and simulate the effects of the volcano?  The solution would be simple and cheap (compared to other ways of dealing with global warming at least).  Because we have the natural experiment of the volcano eruption, we know it would work.  If pumping sulfur dioxide far into the atmosphere had unforeseen consequences, we could always stop.  People wouldn’t be forced to remain in poverty based on computer models of what would happened if they could afford cheeseburgers and cars.  And if by some chance the plan didn’t work, money could be spent on other ideas from the growing field of geoengineering.  A handful of ideas to reverse or mitigate the effects of climate change are given in SuperFreakonomics and they could all be tried for a fraction of the cost of the lifestyle change solutions.  But if using technology to tinker with the atmosphere worked, it would mean that we sinners, who’ve eaten and bred too much, would never suffer for our sins against Mother Earth.  According to Levitt and Dubner, Al Gore has said,  “If we don’t know enough to stop putting 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, how in God’s name can we know enough to precisely counteract that?”

But, as the authors point out, we do know how to stop pumping the pollutants into the atmosphere.  We just don’t think it’s worth it.  Physics may be hard, but getting humans to act against their own self-interest on a large scale is harder.  

As a race and sex realist, I see Levitt and Dubner as kindred souls.  Stupid sentimentality is the source of both left wing economics and political correctness.  May SuperFreakonomics be widely read and help dispel some of the myths that still stand in the way of human liberty and progress.