Freakonomics Friends in the News, for Better and Worse
It was great to see some familiar names on this year’s list of MacArthur “genius” awards. They include Roland Fryer of Harvard, who has shown up many times on this blog as well as in Freakonomics and in the New York Times. His work on everything from the black-white baby-name gap to education incentives is well-deserving of MacArthur recognition, and I’m sure this is hardly the last award he’ll win. Another winner was Jad Abumrad of the wonderful radio show RadioLab. If you don’t know this show, you should. I was also very pleased to see Kevin Guskiewicz on the MacArthur list; he’s at the forefront of research into sports injuries, especially the kind of helmet-induced football injuries we’ve discussed in the past.
On the other side of the ledger is the very disturbing news that the online poker site Full Tilt Poker has been operating, in the words of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, as “a Ponzi scheme,” siphoning off customers’ money to make multi-million dollar payments to Full Tilt’s owners, who include Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Howard Lederer, and Rafe Furst, who has appeared on this blog multiple times. Yes, we live in a world of presumed innocence; but this Journal article and the lawsuit highlights don’t paint a pretty picture. FWIW, here’s Rafe’s public response.
The Debate over Teacher Merit Pay: A Freakonomics Quorum
The term “merit pay” has gained a prominent place in the debate over education reform. First it was former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee trumpeting it as a key to fixing D.C.’s ailing public schools. Then a handful of other districts gave it a go, including Denver, New York City, and Nashville. Merit pay is a big plank in Education Secretary Arne Duncan‘s platform; and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has just launched his own version of merit pay that focuses incentives toward principals.
There’s just one problem: educators almost universally hate merit pay, and have been adamantly opposed to it from day one. Simply, teachers say merit pay won’t work.
In the last year, there’s been some pretty damning evidence proving them right; research showing that merit pay, in a variety of shapes and sizes, fails to raise student performance. In the worst of cases, such as the scandal in Atlanta, it’s contributed to flat-out cheating on the part of teachers and administrators. So, are we surprised that educators don’t respond to monetary incentives? What makes teachers different?
For answers to these and related questions, we decided to convene a Freakonomics Quorum. Read More »
Killing What You Eat: The Dark Side of Compassionate Carnivorism
There’s a relatively new category of conscientious consumer on the rise known as the “compassionate carnivore.” These are meat eaters who have chosen, with good reason, to remove themselves from the horrific practices of factory farming. In her thoughtful book, The Compassionate Carnivore, Catherine Friend puts it this way:
I believe it’s possible to show compassion for animals and still eat them. For me, this means paying attention. It means learning more about the animals I eat and taking some responsibility for their quality of life.
A significant number of meat consumers have taken this message seriously enough to become meat producers. Indeed, the urban homestead movement in particular has inspired untold numbers of urbanites to take compassion to the extreme and become part-time animal farmers themselves.
The rationale for this transition is multifaceted, and often quite convincing. “Those of us that raise our own animals,” one of my critics concisely points out, “are doing so because we don’t want to be part of the industrialized agricultural machine that routinely abuses animals for the sake of the almighty dollar.” An urban homesteader from Oakland went one further: “the level of appreciation for nature and life when you slaughter your own meat creates a kind of ethic that I think is what we need to save the world.” Read More »
Will First-to-File Hurt Small Inventors?
The U.S. just passed the first major patent reform in nearly sixty years – which includes as a central provision a change to the patent priority rule. Instead of awarding a patent to the first person to invent, we will join other nations in awarding patents to the first person to file an invention.
David Abrams and Polk Wagner have a great paper looking at whether the proposed change in our patent system from a “first to invent” regime to a “first to file” regime is likely to disadvantage individual inventors. The concern is that corporate inventors will have an easier time than the individual in gearing up to draft and file a patent application.
The paper ingeniously looks to see what happened when Canada introduced a similar reform in 1989. The paper is also a great way to teach yourself about the difference-in-difference approach to estimation. The paper first estimates the pre-reform difference between the U.S. and Canada in the proportion of patents going to individual inventors. It then looks to see whether this difference changed – that is, whether there was a difference in the difference – after the Canadian first-to-file reform went into effect. Read More »
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 