Retirement Kills: a New Marketplace Podcast
Are you bummed out that you might have to postpone retirement for financial reasons?
Well, there may be a silver lining: it looks like retirement may be bad for your health. That’s the topic of our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, “Retirement Kills.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
The Great Recession has put a lot of retirement plans on hold, often at the behest of governments who can’t afford to pay pensions. Germany, the U.K., and France have all upped their retirement ages. And the U.S. is seeing a lot more older workers as well. Lisa Boily of the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that people 55 and older are expected to represent 25 percent of the labor force by 2020.
Part of this is simple demographics — the graying of the baby boom — but Americans are also working longer. Read More »
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The Economics of For-Profit Prisons
The Times-Picayune reports on Louisiana’s prison ecosystem — and the perverse incentives for sheriffs to keep inmate numbers high:
Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.
The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.
Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations.
If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.
The article has some excellent infographics, including one that shows world and state incarceration rates.
(HT: Katherine Wells)
FREAK-est Links
1. Is a new cut of steak worthy of a patent? (HT: Eric M. Jones)
2. First there were metrosexuals; now meet the urban datasexual. (HT: Jeff Bladt)
3. Is flopping a problem in the NBA?
4. Fighter pilot Mary Cummings explains robotic crop dusting.
5. Corporate takeovers: they trim the fat, including corporate jets.
6. Does the ability to feel guilt make for great leaders?
7. Evidence that director John Waters still hitchhikes.
Read More »
Mark Cuban on the “College Bubble”
Mark Cuban, who answered reader questions here a while back, compares rising college tuition costs to the housing bubble in a recent blog post. Here’s his argument:
Read More »It’s just a matter of time until we see the same meltdown in traditional college education. Like the real estate industry, prices will rise until the market revolts. Then it will be too late. Students will stop taking out the loans traditional Universities expect them to. And when they do tuition will come down. And when prices come down Universities will have to cut costs beyond what they are able to. They will have so many legacy costs, from tenured professors to construction projects to research they will be saddled with legacy costs and debt in much the same way the newspaper industry was. Which will all lead to a de-levering and a de-stabilization of the University system as we know it.
And it can’t happen fast enough.
Who Owns Red? Maker’s Mark and Jose Cuervo Fight It Out
A few months ago we wrote about whether shoemaker-to-the-stars Christian Louboutin ought to have a monopoly over red shoe soles. Last week, in Kentucky, a similar issue arose concerning red wax. The red in question was on the neck of bottles of booze—specifically, Maker’s Mark bourbon and Jose Cuervo’s Riserva de la Familia tequila, which both feature a bottle cap seal made of red, dripping wax (Cuervo has since shifted to a straight-edged red wax seal). Maker’s, which used the dripping wax seal first, sued Cuervo, claiming trademark infringement. Read More »
How Economics Explains The Rising Support for Gay Marriage
President Obama’s personal evolution toward accepting same-sex marriage has certainly made plenty of headlines. But perhaps the bigger—and untold story—is the evolution of marriage itself, and how the generational shift in how we experience marriage underpins rising toward support for same-sex marriage. At least that’s the idea that Betsey Stevenson and I explore in our latest column:
Read More »For our grandparents’ generation, marriage was about separate roles, separate spheres and specialization. Gary Becker, an economist at the University of Chicago, won the Nobel Prize partly for describing the family as an economic institution — a bit like a small firm that employs people with different skills to produce both income and a well-run household.
Jonathan Haidt Answers Your Questions About Morality, Politics, and Religion
We recently solicited your questions for social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Below are his responses about confirmation bias in religion, the “score” of our morals, the power of branding, how his research has made him a centrist, and how the search for truth is hampered by our own biases. Big thanks to him and all our readers for another great Q&A. Read More »
Evidence That Myopia Has a Strong Environmental Cause
Time reports on a new study on why Asians have a higher rate of nearsightedness:
Read More »It has long been thought that nearsightedness is mostly a hereditary problem, but researchers led by Ian Morgan of Australian National University say the data suggest that environment has a lot more to do with it.
Reporting in the journal Lancet, the authors note that up to 90% of young adults in major East Asian countries, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, are nearsighted. The overall rate of myopia in the U.K., by contrast, is about 20% to 30%.
The Economics of a Ransom
In The Atlantic, Megan McArdle traces the economics of ransom negotiation:
Read More »Economists would describe hostage negotiation as a bilateral monopoly price negotiation that is structurally just a special case of chicken. That is, unlike a barrel of oil or a freight car full of soybeans which can trade on an extremely liquid market with innumerable buyers and sellers, a hostage has exactly one seller (the kidnappers) and exactly one buyer (the employer and/or family of the hostage). When there is only one buyer, the opportunity cost for ransoming the hostage is zero.
Don’t Be Deceived by Carmelo Anthony’s Scoring Totals
Here is how the Associated Press led the story describing the Miami Heat’s elimination of the New York Knicks in the 2012 NBA Playoffs:
The final horn sounded, and LeBron James wrapped his arms around Carmelo Anthony in a warm embrace.
Their head-to-head scoring matchup in this series was even, 139 points apiece.
Just about everything else tipped Miami’s way — so the Heat are moving on and the New York Knicks are going home.
Such a lead gives the impression that Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James played about the same in this series. If we delve a bit deeper, though, we see that the scoring totals are quite deceptive. Read More »
Portugal’s Budget Cut: Public Holidays
The BBC reports that Portugal will be cutting 4 of its 14 public holidays as an “austerity measure”:
Read More »Two religious festivals and two other public holidays will be suspended for five years from 2013.
The decision over which Catholic festivals to cut was negotiated with the Vatican.
It is hoped the suspension of the public holidays will improve competitiveness and boost economic activity.
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