A Rose is a Rose is a Preference Signal
A rose by any other name is just as sweet, isn’t it? Even virtual roses used in Korean online dating experiments. In a new working paper by main author Soohyung Lee of the University of Maryland, economists studied the impact on preference signaling – signals sent to a select few.
In the study, a major online dating company in Korea organized dating events with 613 participants, half men and half women. Everyone was given two free “virtual roses” that they could attach to an e-mail to a fellow participant, and a few were given 8 virtual roses. Although these roses cost nothing, attaching a rose to an e-mail drastically increased rates of acceptance, even among different “desirability” groups. Read More »
Mandating Calorie Counts: Has Libertarian Paternalism Gone Too Far?
Staring at the menu board on a recent and rare trip to a California fast-food chain, I was stunned by the cost of a milk shake: 880. Eight dollars for a milk shake, really? Well, no. That was the cost in terms of calories. But I would have gladly traded that in dollars and cents to be spared the knowledge of how many calories my post-triathlon race reward would cost me. Feeling sufficiently guilty once confronted with the calorie content, I downsized and saved a couple hundred calories. But I left feeling dissatisfied and unambiguously worse off.
This kind of experience could be coming to a restaurant near you by January, when the FDA plans to roll out mandatory calorie labeling regulations approved by Congress in the same bill that authorized ObamaCare. At chain restaurants with more than 20 locations, you won’t be able to avoid the calorie information, which is prescribed to be posted on menus and menu boards near prices and printed at least as large. So much for the days of blissful ignorance.
While the calorie labeling law is intended to improve health outcomes for individuals, it is effectively a government-mandated guilt trip and a sign that libertarian paternalism—the seemingly benign notion that “choice architects” can “nudge” people to make better decisions for themselves—has gone too far. Read More »
FREAK-est Links
This week, do bees have feelings? Deaths in Yosemite are twice the normal amount this year; evidence that El Nino causes tropical civil wars; surgeons’ cells are adapting to regular, safe doses of x-rays; and Australia’s strange strategy to combat the dengue fever virus. Read More »
John Adams Said it First
I’m back to 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 researches.
Daniel Greenwald asked:
“If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head.’ OR
‘If my son is not a liberal when he is twenty, I will disown him; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, I will disown him then.’
And other variants, I am sure.”
One of the pleasures of compiling the Yale Book of Quotations was tracing and cross-referencing different versions and precursors of famous quotes. This one is usually credited to Georges Clemenceau, but W. Gurney Benham‘s Book of Quotations cites French premier and historian Francois Guizot (1787-1874), translating his statement as “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.” Benham asserts that “Clemenceau adopted this saying, substituting ‘socialiste’ for ‘republicain. ‘”
But I was delighted to find that John Adams had expressed a similar idea well before Guizot entered adulthood. Thomas Jefferson preserved this quip, writing in a 1799 journal that Adams had said: “A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20.”
Do any readers have any other quotations whose origins they would like me to attempt to trace?
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 