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Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner uncovers the hidden side of everything. Why is it safer to fly in an airplane than drive a car? How do we decide whom to marry? Why is the media so full of bad news? Also: things you never knew you wanted to know about wolves, bananas, pollution, search engines, and the quirks of human behavior.
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To law in 1990 by president George Bush the first. The Americans with Disabilities Act expanded civil rights protection meaning you could not fire or refuse to hire or pay less on the basis of a disability. And what disabilities were included in the first version of the ADA? Well, it's not concrete. You know, that was one of the things that had to get figured out. And there was a lot of litigation about what could be counted. It's tricky because maybe the employer doesn't know you're disabled. So there's always a lot of litigation in the US when a new policy comes in, the courts kind of decide. And ultimately, the courts gave a fairly broad interpretation. So but covers a wide range of physical disabilities, including some that might not be obvious to an employer like back pain, The other thing is and this was relatively novel. The ADA requires employers to accommodate disabled workers. It was not clear what that means. The law says it has to be reasonable. So, for example, if you're construction worker building Skyscrapers and you're in a wheelchair, I don't have to accommodate that you can work on the 110th floor. But if you work at MIT, I do have to accommodate that you can get into your space and do your work. And here is how president Bush put it at the time. With today's signing of the Landmark Americans for Disabilities Act, every man, woman, and child with a disability can now pass through once closed doors into a bright new era of equality, independence, and freedom. That sounds pretty great, doesn't it? At least from the employee side, it might make things more complicated and expensive from the employer's side, but, hey, there are trade offs everywhere, right, for a society intent on providing good employment opportunities for everyone, The ADA seemed to say that it was worthwhile to ask employers to make
And generalizes them and formalizes them, so that they can be tested and expressed in a way that is academically respectable. But I think what they actually are doing is they're laughing at stupid things people do. Amos was asked once by somebody says, oh, does the work you and Danny, do have any bearing on artificial intelligence? And Amos said, I'm much more interested in natural stupidity than I am in artificial intelligence. It wasn't a mocking spirit in which they operated. They were laughing also at themselves, at the sort of things that they did that struck them as irrational, and they were mining that for gold. They have a really a rattle bag of ideas that they end up trying to classify. Ideas that all revolved around the central realization, that when most of us make decisions, we essentially ignore the laws of probability and even logic, that we rely instead on primitive rules of thumb and shortcuts, or heuristics in the language of academia, that are prone to error. One such heuristic that Kahneman and Tversky explored is known as anchoring. Anchoring is the idea that your mind can be swayed by totally irrelevant information when you're making a judgment. And they tested it by creating a wheel of fortune that had numbers 1 to a 100 on it. You, the subject, the lab rat, would spin the wheel of fortune, and some number would come up, 20 or 47. And then you were they asked you to estimate what percentage of the countries in the United Nations came from Africa. And what they showed is people who spun a higher number on the Wheel of Fortune placed a higher estimate there. And the people who spun a lower number on the Wheel of Fortune guessed lower. And they were anchored by just this number that had been mentioned before. The idea that you could have that kind of effect on a totally irrelevant judgment by just putting a number in front of it, I think it's totally original. Although, every used car salesman sort of understands. Right? Or
He's at this one firm who moved from a manager with a poor rating to one with a high rating. That's associated with an attrition drop of about 60%. That is huge. And within that huge effect was an important nuance. What we see then is that managers help retain better employees more than worse employees, which shows that the impact of being a better manager is strongest where it matters the most. So a good boss seems capable of keeping the best employees happy and presumably productive. Conversely, a bad boss might drive away the best employees. The Tidelis Hoffman paper was published in 2021 in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the best econ journals. So, okay. The economics literature on bosses and management just got a little bit deeper. But remember, employee retention was the only outcome where it seemed to matter whether a boss was good or bad. And if outcome where it seemed to matter whether a boss was good or bad. And if you ask Steve Tadellis a more fundamental question, like what does a good boss actually do to instill this loyalty? This is where I have to take a step back and say that there are certain things that may be outside the scope of what economists should be dealing with. If you were to make a list of things that you would like to measure, were it possible given the data, what would some of those things be? Really good question. Something that's very hard to measure, that I believe is important is compassion. I guess if this is gonna be on the radio, I might lose my economist card. Steve Dadellis is not the only economist who's been frustrated by the lack of evidence for what makes a good boss good. Maybe compassion is as important as he suspects, but we just don't have any large scale empirical evidence yet. The Stanford Economist
So my sense of reading you overall, particularly reading your new book, Age of Revolutions, is a sense of sadness and surprise that the world finds itself today in a state of peril, that the powers of populism and darkness and closed thinking are battling hard and maybe winning against what seemed to be the liberal trend or a trend toward openness and relative peacefulness. Is that too dark a read of your views? No. I think you put it exactly right. It's a sadness. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed as though many of the great enlightenment, liberal, progressive projects in the world were moving forward and being embraced by people from Eastern Europe to Latin America to Africa opening up, holding elections, many of them free and fair, Markets that were often closed, opening up so that people had many more opportunities to move up. Trade between countries growing, tourism between countries growing, and then the information revolution, which was bringing us all together, binding us together. All these forces seem to be moving forward. They were each reinforcing the other in a kind of virtuous cycle. And then what we've seen over the last 10 years is every one of the trends I just mentioned has reversed. We are in a democratic recession. We are in an age of rising trade and tariff barriers and protectionism. We are in an age where information systems that were once open are increasingly being cordoned off, monitored, regulated. And all of it is fueled by a certain degree of popular sentiment, which says, stop this train. We're moving too fast, and I need to protect myself. That is Fareed Zakaria. I host a show on CNN, write a column for The Washington Post, and write books like this one. This one, age
Describe how anomalous a place like New York is in terms of immigration compared to the rest of the US? So 35 to 36% of New York's population is foreign born, which is quite a bit above the national average of 14%. Nice. Okay. Let's give Faye another question. So, Faye, you just mentioned undocumented immigrants, so I'm gonna ask you a question about that. How long do you think the average undocumented immigrant has lived in the United States? I'll say 10 years. Wow. Very good guess. Very good guess. Spot on. It's a little it's somewhere between 1014. Wow. Faye, can you walk us through your thought process there? Are you just innately brilliant? No. Not at all. What my thought process was, when I think about people I know who have used undocumented workers, not me, like but nannies or people who work landscaping or construction. You know, they're here for a while. It's not like they come and go. And maybe it would be different if it was, you know, kicking fruits and vegetables. I don't know that landscape at all. But, you know, I know that people have jobs and stay here and do those jobs for a very long time. And it's not easy to get home, so they often stay here, obviously, because they can't go back and forth. Good reasoning. Okay. Zeke, one more question for Faye. So the average native born American receives about $8,000 in welfare benefits. What is that number for immigrants in your estimation? I bet it's low. I bet it's like Why do you think it's low? Because now this might be falling into some sort of stereotype, but I think of immigrants as, like, extremely hardworking. Is that reckoning based to some degree on having seen Hamilton? I have to ask. No. No. It's because, you know
