• Stephen J. Dubner
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Are Architects Still Worth It?

A reader named Marc Krawitz writes in with a question. Does anyone have an answer for him?

I’m a recent architecture school graduate, and just wondering:

Given laws in America that don’t specifically require an architect to stamp drawings (as opposed to Europe), are architects economically valuable to a housing and building market/culture that strives for bottom dollar and cheap/fast returns?  Assuming that hiring an architect has a positive impact on a project, is the time and financial investment on the part of the client worth it in the long run?

Related: Michael Graves writes about the death of drawing in architecture.

• Stephen J. Dubner
• 09/07/2012 | 1:27 pm
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Modesty Glasses

Men in the ultra-Orthodox religious community in Jerusalem object to women walking on the street in short skirts or sleeveless blouses, even attacking those who venture out in such unacceptable outfits.  Very few women will dare to go out dressed that way in certain sections of this magnificent city.  News of the Weird reports a solution that shifts the cost of enforcing the policy to the men: Members of “modesty patrols” are now selling ultra-Orthodox men glasses that blur distant images, thus preventing them from seeing “immodestly dressed” women.  This is a neat application of the Coase Theorem, and it seems a fair one: With these glasses, the costs of enforcing the men’s religious beliefs will be borne by the men rather than by women who choose how they wish to dress.

• Daniel Hamermesh
• 09/07/2012 | 11:32 am
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FREAK-est Links

1. Do images of babies help curb crime? A graffiti social experiment in southeast London. (HT: Alex Berezow)

2. Stanford startup Maykah creates toys for girls that encourage them to study math and science.

3. Amazon’s election map. (HT: Flowing Data)

4. Brown University’s student radio show also looks at whether college is worth it.

5. FREAK-shot: an ATM machine that offers risk-free gambling. (HT: Lou Wigdor)

• Freakonomics
• 09/07/2012 | 10:25 am
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How to Make Millions By Doing Nothing

Fascinating article in today’s Times by Richard Sandomir about how the owners of the old American Basketball Association team the St. Louis Spirit are still being compensated for an agreement forged in 1976, when the Spirit were excluded from joining the NBA. Those owners, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, were given a share — in perpetuity — of future TV revenues:

In 1980-81, the first year the Silnas were eligible to get their share of TV money, they received $521,749, according to court documents filed by the N.B.A. For the 2010-11 season, they received $17,450,000. The N.B.A.’s latest TV deal, with ESPN and TNT, is worth $7.4 billion over eight years. Soon, the Silnas’ total take will hit $300 million. …

• Stephen J. Dubner
• 09/07/2012 | 9:28 am
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Happiness Up, Poverty Down

This is a crosspost from Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP).

There was plenty of encouraging information shared at the recent “Reaching the Poorest 2012” meeting, convened by CGAP and the Ford Foundation. Together with my fellow researchers, I was among the panelists who presented the findings of well over five years worth of randomized control trials evaluating the impact of the Graduation Model. The projects that were evaluated in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Honduras, and India showed an impact on the livelihoods of the poorest that were targeted. The results were mostly heartening – they showed that Graduation Program participants typically improved their food security, stabilized and diversified income, and increased their assets.

The benefits we’re seeing in the lives of the poorest are big and important. The results are strong evidence that the Graduation Model can work. (We’ll know even more in a couple years when we have full results from seven pilots, with more sites and longer term results to see if results sustain themselves.) One of the most intriguing, and I believe important, results is the simplest: happiness went up in the two sites where “happiness” was measured (Honduras and West Bengal).  As part of the surveys to measure the impact of the program on their livelihoods, participants were also asked a series of questions on their general level of happiness and mental health. Often we talk about consumption and income as a measure of wellbeing. Read More »

• Dean Karlan
• 09/06/2012 | 1:01 pm
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Love Behavioral Economics? Want to Work for the British Government? All Right Then …

A lot of people write to us looking for work — which, sadly, we are nearly always unable to provide. But once in a while we do hear of a good opportunity for the Freakonomically inclined. To wit:

The U.K. Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Team — better known as the Nudge Unit because of its allegiance to the excellent Richard Thaler/Cass Sunstein book Nudge — is looking to expand. Here’s the job listing. Some relevant excerpts:

Successful candidates will need to show that they:
1. have a good understanding of the behavioural science literature
2. have an understanding and ideally ability to conduct randomised controlled trials to test policy interventions; and
3. are highly motivated individuals capable of developing innovative solutions to often complex policy problems.
4. are strong team players

Candidates should be prepared to work on potentially any aspect of government or wider public sector policy. For example, over the past year the team has led work on health, energy, fraud, electoral registration, charitable giving, consumer affairs, the labour market, and access to finance for SMEs [that's Euro-speak for "small and medium enterprises"]

• Stephen J. Dubner
• 09/06/2012 | 10:58 am
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Why Knockoffs Can Help Build a Strong Brand

Here is an excerpt from The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation , which has just been published by Oxford University Press. Next week, we’ll be taking questions from Freakonomics readers in a Q&A. We’ll also run a contest for the wackiest photo of a knockoff item.

THE KNOCKOFF ECONOMY
CONCLUSION

The traditional justification for trademark law, which protects brands, has little to do with innovation. Instead, trademark law’s justification is that brands help consumers identify the source of products, and thereby buy the item they want–and not an imitation. And yet brands—like Apple, or J. Crew–play an important and often unappreciated creativity-inducing role in several of the industries we explore in The Knockoff Economy.

Put in economic terms, trademarks reduce the search costs associated with consumption. If you’ve had a positive experience with basketball shoes from Adidas, then marking them with the trademark-protected three-stripes helps ensure that you can quickly find their shoes the next time you are shopping. And of course it also lets everyone else know which shoes you prefer.  Read More »

• Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman
• 09/05/2012 | 1:34 pm
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Announcing a New (Online Economics) University

Wowie kazowie! The Marginal Revolution blog, whose excellence is routinely noted on this blog, is launching a free, online Marginal Revolution University (MRU). From the announcement:

We think education should be better, cheaper, and easier to access.  So we decided to take matters into our own hands and create a new online education platform toward those ends. We have decided to do more to communicate our personal vision of economics to you and to the broader world. …

Here are a few of the principles behind MR University:

• Stephen J. Dubner
• 09/05/2012 | 12:12 pm
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Trying to Make His First At-Bat Not His Last

In the forthcoming book Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame , edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy, I wrote a chapter about Adam Greenberg, a baseball player whose first Major League at-bat ended in tragedy. There is now a movement afoot, called One At Bat (more here), to take the edge off that tragedy, but so far it has been unsuccessful. There’s a petition to sign if you’re so inclined.

(HT: M.T.)

• Stephen J. Dubner
• 09/05/2012 | 11:29 am
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Timing Matters for Armstrong, Clemens and Lin

One of the great lessons of contracts (and of the law more generally) is that the timing of actions can dramatically change legal consequences.  An offeree who says “I accept” a moment after the offer is withdrawn is in a very different position than an offeree who says the same thing a moment before an attempt to withdrawn.

This past summer three sports stories seemed to turn on matters of timing. Les Carpenter writes that Lance Armstrong could have avoided is downfall if he had stayed retired:

The irony is that Armstrong could have remained a hero. He could have been a saint, as well as a beacon of light to millions who never would have thought he had cheated throughout his career. All he had to do was stay retired.

• Ian Ayres
• 09/05/2012 | 10:32 am
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