Busara is a state-of-the-art facility for experimental studies in behavioral economics and other social sciences, located in Nairobi, Kenya. The core of Busara is a pool of participants from the Nairobi slums, combined with a cluster of 20 networked computers with which researchers can investigate economic behavior and preferences. A central feature of the computer setup is that all computers have touchscreen monitors; together with specially developed paradigms, this allows for the participation of not only computer-illiterate, but entirely illiterate populations.

Johannes Haushofer, the Scientific Director of the Center, gave us a little more information:

The lab also includes a 20-person waiting room, 4 individual survey cubicles for private interviews, laboratory space for saliva and blood sampling (a phlebotomist is available), and desk space for visiting researchers and students. The subject pool will reach 1,000 members by the end of May 2012; available demographic information for each subject pool member includes age, ethnicity, education, marital status, number of children, cell phone number, and fingerprint. Participants are invited for studies by SMS; once in the lab, their identity is verified by fingerprint, and after the experiment they are paid through the mobile money system MPesa. The weekly capacity of the lab is 200 participants, and studies are run by a team of 5 full-time staff.

The Center is already running a variety of projects. Ted Miguel, Kjetil Bjorvatn, and Kelly Zhang are working on a project about the “implications of politicized ethnic identity on individual behavior”:

It builds on Ted Miguel’s previous work with Benn Eifert and Dan Posner, which finds that exposure to electoral competition increases the salience of ethnic identity across African countries.

We build on this finding in experimentally varying the salience of ethnic or national identity (through non-confrontational priming) in the run-up to the Kenyan national elections. The goal is to identify how each identity affects individual valuations of public goods and responsiveness to various politician attributes (i.e. ethnicity, education, prior office-holding position, record of public goods provision, promises of jobs, etc.). By conducting multiple rounds of these laboratory experiments in the months before and after the elections, we hope to document how individual behaviors vary within each cross-section, and over time. Our expectation is that the effects of ethnic identity will increase as election time draws near, and that national identity may have the potential to offset politicized ethnic identity.

Our study will be uniquely placed to examine this issue in the context of current Kenyan politics. We are drawing a representative sample from one of the slum areas worst afflicted by the 2007 post-election violence. This population is especially relevant for our study, as they tend to be the ones most targeted by ethnic appeals from politicians. Moreover, in the previous election, there were widespread reports of political mobilization within these communities along ethnic lines. Through this study, we hope to gain better insight as to the potential ramifications of ethnic appeals on the electorate, and to suggest potential ways to ameliorate these politically constructed ethnic divides.

Other interesting projects: an exploration of “the impact of visual information on judgment and decision-making in performance contexts” by Chia-Jung Tsay, a classical pianist and who just completed a Ph.D. from Harvard Business School; and a study by Haushofer on how market mechanisms in competitive markets operate differently in developing countries versus Western markets.

It will be interesting to see what the Busara Center produces, and especially how well it avoids the selection and bias problems that plague many lab experiments.

Perhaps the answer is similar to a story frequently told about sports fans.

Back in the early 1990s, a friend of mine declared his hatred of Charles Barkley.  At the time, Sir Charles was an All-Star for the Philadelphia 76ers.  Sometime after this declaration, though, Barkley was traded to the Phoenix Suns.  As a fan of the Suns, my friend changed his tune.  With Sir Charles in Phoenix, my friend was now a fan of Barkley.

More recently, LeBron James was an extremely popular athlete in Cleveland.  But when he changed his uniform to something from Miami, his popularity in Ohio plummeted.  

These stories are not uncommon among sports fans.  In fact, Jerry Seinfeld once observed that fans who behave like this are essentially “rooting for clothes.”

Although many fans – and I am one of these – are essentially “rooting for clothes,” the emotions sports generate are quite real.  When one of my teams wins, I am quite happy (at least for awhile).  And when my teams lose, I am unhappy (for more than just “awhile”).  Sports may just be entertainment, but the power to alter our perspective on life – if only for a short time — is quite amazing.

Such power reminds me of how people react to politics.

A few days ago Brendan Nyhan – a professor of political science at Dartmouth — was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition (discussing a paper Brendan wrote with Jason Reifler).  This interview noted the following: 

When pollsters ask Republicans and Democrats whether the president can do anything about high gas prices, the answers reflect the usual partisan divisions in the country. About two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices, and about two-thirds of Democrats say he can’t.

But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, the numbers were reversed: Three-fourths of Democrats said President Bush could do something about high gas prices, while the majority of Republicans said gas prices were clearly outside the president’s control.

The flipped perceptions on gas prices isn’t an aberration, said Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan. On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts. When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.

The NPR story doesn’t provide “a range of issues”.  But it isn’t hard to come up with such a list.  For example, consider these two issues:

• The national debt seems to always trouble the party that isn’t in the White House.  When Bush was President (pick your Bush), Democrats were very troubled by the rising national debt.  Republicans, though, were relatively quiet.  Now that Obama is President, Republicans are extremely worried about the national debt.  However, Democrats don’t seem as alarmed.
• What about health care?  Mitt Romney implemented a plan from the Heritage Foundation while governor of Massachusetts.  Barack Obama backed a very similar plan.  Somehow, though, many Republicans are very troubled by Obama’s health care plan (even Mitt Romney!).  But many of these same Republicans (even Mitt Romney!) were not troubled by Romney’s health care plan. 

One might think that in sports fans are rooting for players.  But in reality, many fans are just rooting for clothes.  Likewise, we might think that voters are interested in issues.  But the above examples suggest that many voters are just rooting for parties.  The actual issues each party says they care about don’t seem to be very important.  What is important is that the party the voter follows actually wins the elections.

And when this doesn’t happen, as it did for Republicans in 2008, voters become very angry.  A Gallup poll seems to capture this point. 

Voters have been asked over time: “Do you think the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens, or not?” 

Over time, 46 percent of people generally say they believe the federal government poses such a threat.  But who voted yes –as the following graph indicates – changed quite dramatically over time.

As Jeffrey Jones noted:

The results suggest that Americans’ perceptions of the government as a threat may be less dependent on broader, philosophical views of government power, and instead have more to do with who is wielding that power. Throughout the Bush administration, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to perceive the government as a threat. Now that a Democratic president is in office, the reverse is true. 

One should note that while Democrats and Republicans changed their answer depending on whether their team was “winning”, independents (like me) didn’t change their view very much.  

All of this suggests two research questions (and these questions may have already been addressed by someone – in fact, some related research is referred to a recent New Yorker article by Ezra Klein). 

First, it appears that issues may not matter as much as pundits think.  So at least (and I am not sure how this can be done) I think we need to see how much voters are rooting for issues and how much voters are rooting for parties.  If the latter effect dominates, maybe we need to have sportscasters discuss our elections (and maybe many voters would be happier waving pennants instead of protest signs).

In addition, it would also be interesting to see if sports and politics are treated the same by the human brain.  Are these different activities mentally?  My sense is that sports and politics really are the same.  And again, that suggests the pundits often focus on the wrong issues in discussing why people are angry or happy about election results.  Pundits often seem to think it is the actual issues that are driving people’s reactions.  But in the end, it might be that the parties – or, following the sports analogy, “the clothes” — that drive people’s reactions. 

Let me close with one more observation.  If people are just rooting for parties, then efforts to “reach across the aisle” may be quite difficult.  Again, think about sports.  When LeBron left Cleveland, fans of the Cavaliers suddenly hated LeBron.  He was still the same player, but his clothes had changed.  The same story seems true in politics. 

Regardless of the policies he pursues, many Republicans are not going to be happy with Obama because he plays for “team Democrat.”  And the same may be true if Mitt Romney becomes President in November.  As long as he persists in playing for “team Republican,” Democrats will not be happy with Romney. 

If this is true, then “reaching across the aisle” may be pointless.  Fans of the opposite party are not against the President because he doesn’t agree with them on the issue.  They are against the President because he plays for the “wrong” team.  And unless he is willing to change teams (i.e. change clothes), he can try to “reach across the aisle” all day and he will never make the other team’s fans happy.   

(Photo: dailyjoe)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “You Eat What You Are, Part 1″ (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)

It’s about how American food got so bad, how it’s begun to get much better in recent years, and who has the answers for further improvement.

We begin at Union Square Green Market in New York City, a rustic oasis in the heart of the city, where Berkshire Berries has wonderful jams, Windfall Farms offers a cornucopia of greens, and Hudson Valley Duck Farm does all kinds of things with the modest duck. We also channel John McPhee and his wonderful essay “Giving Good Weight.”

But how much can the farmer’s market solve America’s food problems?

We talk to Tyler Cowen, whom you’ve heard from before. He’s a professor of economics at George Mason University, a blogger at Marginal Revolution, a food blogger at Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide, and the author, most recently, of An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. He argues that economists were historically very concerned with food, and describes the current “crisis”:

COWEN: If you are a foodie today you have more options than ever before. But there’s also more bad food than ever before. There’s more obesity. There’s more junk food. The food world is getting a lot worse and a lot better at the same time. That’s one way to think about the crisis. 

In fact, 15 percent of Americans are said to be “food insecure,” while 35 percent are obese. Cowen argues that the typical finger-pointing is often directed at the wrong people:

COWEN: I think agribusiness and consumerism are seen as the great villains. I think both are essential; we can’t do without them. They feed the seven billion people in the world. We do need to improve them, but I would work on them through innovation. The biggest food problem in the world today is that agricultural productivity is slowing down and for a lot of the world food prices are going up. And for that we need more business, technology and innovation, not locavorism.

We also speak with food philosopher Michael Pollan, who has been thinking and writing about food for years, perhaps most notably in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals:

POLLAN: The phrase “the omnivore’s dilemma” is an anthropological terms for an omnivore that can eat so many different things, some of which are not good for you, some of which will kill you, and deciding between what is good and what is bad is a big part of why we have these giant brains we have. And that anxiety afflicts us. It doesn’t afflict the cow or the koala. They eat that one thing, and if it’s not that one thing, it’s not lunch. And things are pretty simple. You don’t need a big brain; you just need a big stomach to digest all those leaves. So it’s part of our existential predicament to worry first do we have enough food and second do we have the right food.

You’ll hear from slow-food godmother Alice Waters (who has appeared on Freakonomics Radio before). She owns the famed Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse (where Pollan happened to be heading for dinner the evening we interviewed him). To Waters, the priorities for the food future are clear:

WATERS: I think that the work of the farmer needs to be elevated to a very important and vital place, and we need to consider the people that take that on as precious as the people who educate us in schools. And when that happens, when we begin to value our farmers, you’d be surprised how many people will answer that call, who will really be encouraged to take on that profession. It’s happening already, just among young people who are concerned about the future of this planet, and know that we’re headed to a dead end if we don’t think about where our food comes from and take care of that land that produces our food.   

Along the way, you’ll also get to hear some World War II-era tape of New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia talking about how to stretch the meat budget. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, WNYC has a massive archive of historical tape; furthermore, it also maintains a Mayor LaGuardia Twitter feed.

And that’s all just Part 1 of “You Eat What You Are.” In two weeks, we’ll release Part 2, which focuses on the local-food movement.

Hope you enjoy.

(Photo: Martin Garcia)

A study on the taxi market in Lima, Peru examines price differences between men and women. Taxi prices in Lima are set by bargaining, and the market of sellers is extremely competitive. The authors initially found, surprisingly, that “men face higher initial prices and rejection rates.”

However, when the experiment was performed again with a strategic move, the discrimination disappeared:

Passengers in this study begin by rejecting a first taxi to send a signal of low valuation to a second (waiting) taxi which they then negotiate with. Despite passengers otherwise using an identical bargaining script, we find that negotiated outcomes at the second taxi are gender blind. The second taxi treats men and women the same.

The authors conclude:

One interpretation of our finding is that drivers in this market do not have preferences for the gender of the passenger that they are transporting. Another interpretation is that the competitive pressure and associated low earnings prevent drivers from expressing any bias they may have against a certain type of passenger.

We believe this is because marriage provides an implicit social insurance since the spouses are able to share their income. However, if divorce rates are higher in a society, women have a higher incentive to obtain work experience in case they find themselves alone in the future. The reason the incentive is higher is because in our data, women happen to be the second earner in the household more often than men. European women anticipate not getting divorced as often and hence find less reason to insure themselves by working as much as American women.

Chakraborty and Holter use U.S data to run a model testing their theory; their findings are interesting:

We find that stable marriages lead to a reduction in labour supply. Both in the data and in the model the effect is on the extensive margin, i.e. whether women will choose to work or not. In our counterfactual economy, if just marriage stability in US were the same as in the European countries, it explains 24% of the cross-country variation in hours worked for females. When we also introduce European taxes, we are able to explain 43% of the variation in female work hours across the continents.

 The authors also point out that Americans started working more in the 1970′s, right around the time the US started passing “no-fault” divorce laws and well before Europe started adopting such laws.

(Photo: flippy whale)

Is there a role for hope in poverty alleviation programs?  According to a recent speech by economist Esther Duflo, there is. Duflo looked at a BRAC program in West Bengal; program participants were given a “small productive asset” (a cow, a goat, or some chickens) and a small stipend to encourage participants not to immediately eat the animal. The results were significant:

Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the BRAC programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot. The effects were so large and persistent that they could not be attributed to the direct effects of the grants: people could not have sold enough milk, eggs or meat to explain the income gains. Nor were they simply selling the assets (although some did).

Furthermore, the researchers found that recipients worked 28 per cent more hours and that their mental health improved.  Why was the program so successful?  Duflo thinks that optimism played a role.  ”She argues that it provided these extremely poor people with the mental space to think about more than just scraping by. As well as finding more work in existing activities, like agricultural labour, they also started exploring new lines of work,” writes The Economist. “Ms Duflo reckons that an absence of hope had helped keep these people in penury; BRAC injected a dose of optimism.”

You can of course subscribe via iTunes (where Freakonomics Radio occasionally hits the No. 1 ranking) or listen via our RSS feed.

Hope you enjoy; feedback welcome.

(Photo: Kisha Bari)

If you remember our podcast “Boo…Who?” (which was included in the hour-long special “Show and Yell“), you’ll know we love the topic of booing. David Herman, our sound engineer at Freakonomics Radio, experienced some first-hand booing last week. He wrote it up as a guest post: 

How Does It Feel to Get Booed?

By David Herman

Last weekend, I visited the Bell House in Brooklyn to hear the Budos Band, an afrobeat-inspired 10-piece instrumental group from Staten Island.  According to the venue’s online ticket page, the show was slated to start at 9:00 PM. But 9:00 came and went, and then 10:00… 10:30… Granted, I’ve come to accept that no band will ever go on less than 30 minutes late, but this seemed to be pushing the bounds of good taste. 

At about 10:45, the band made its way onstage from the wings. The (sold-out) house was packed with around 300 people, each of whom had paid $15 plus drinks. So as soon as the group got into position, almost two hours late, what happened? 

“BOOOOOO!”

I’m not talking about just one or two drunk hecklers in the back. The whole crowd let loose a mighty, drawn-out boo. Even three fan girls in front of me (and about two feet from the stage) started screaming “APOLOGIZE!” (they left in protest halfway into the first song). I should make it known that I, too, got caught up with the crowd and lent my voice to the boo, albeit with a smile on my face. 

So what went wrong? I spoke with Jared Tankel, baritone sax player and “I guess de facto band leader” of the Budos Band, who told me the reasons behind the late start were pretty pedestrian – a series of miscommunications between label, venue, and band. But of course, no one in the crowd knew that. They were just sick of standing around waiting for the band to show up.

Budos powered through the boo and into their set, and before the first tune had finished the crowd seemed to be firmly back on their side and having a great time. Later, during some between-song banter, Tankel quipped to the audience, “I heard you guys were a little early.”

According to Tankel, that was the first time Budos had ever been booed onstage. It turns out that for a band like Budos, who take on the collective stage persona of a rowdy gang of misfits, booing can work in one’s favor: 

JT: We’re very much into the crowd being there with us, and going crazy, and swearing, and inciting some amount of chaos. So in that way the booing almost fueled the fire and we would never want the crowd to be polite because they felt like they owed us some amount of respect because we’re the band.

And not only can the boo be a positive, but Tankel says that the boo – the in-your-face, direct democracy, vote-with-your-voice boo – when seen as a critique of the band’s performance (or lack thereof), is actually less impactful than, say, reading nasty things about oneself on the internet:

JT: I have read a few negative fan reviews. Not so much reviews reviews, but, you know, fans posting on message boards. And yeah, I’ve seen a few of those here and there. I think those have a longer-lasting impression than a boo at a show. I guess maybe what it means is that somebody has internalized their negative experience more. More than an initial booing in the heat of the moment. I don’t think that it’s necessarily more valid. So maybe that’s where I can not necessarily show my support for the rampant internet message board usage, but at least it’s a more internalized experience because they’ve been stewing about it and really thinking about it and maybe they’re really bothered about it.

DH: So the heat of the moment sort of gives someone a pass to express themselves freely, even if that expression is really negative, it becomes almost less impactful because it’s so off-the-cuff. 

JT: Yeah. And if people were still booing by the end I might be singing a different tune.

In a paper recently published in the PLoS One journal, researchers from Warwick Business School, the University College London and Dartmouth College, USA, carried out a series of experiments to see if people made decisions to trust others based on their faces.

They found people are more likely to invest money in someone whose face is generally perceived as trustworthy, even when they are given negative information about this person’s reputation.

“Trustworthiness is one of the most important traits for social and economic interactions and our study examines whether people take potentially costly actions in line with their face-based trustworthiness judgments,” said Dr. Chris Olivola, one of the study’s authors. ”It seems we are still willing to go with our own instincts about whether we think someone looks like we can trust them.”

Now the only trick is for people who aren’t in fact trustworthy at all to appear as if they are. Or, as it’s been said before: Once you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.

(HT: Naked Capitalism)