It includes an interview with University of Chicago economist Matthew Gentzkow, who discusses a study he coauthored with Jesse Shapiro about newspaper bias. They used a sample of 433 newspapers and sorted the phrases favored by Congressional Democrats and Republicans.

Here, in visual form using Wordle, are the Democrats’ favorite words:

And the Republicans’ favorites:

(Photo: Nicholas La)

The following is a cross-post from our Football Freakonomics project at NFL.com. Check out the interactive graphic and, at the end of this post, the video.

In his first six NBA starts, Jeremy Lin averaged 24.3 points and 9.5 assists while leading the Knicks to six straight wins.

If those numbers were attached to someone like Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, you wouldn’t bat an eye. But until a couple weeks ago, Lin was little more than roster fodder, an undrafted player already cut by two teams and about to be cut by his third. That’s when a desperate coach who had run out of able-bodied point guards threw him into the fire. The rest – for the moment, at least – is history.

Let’s be honest: the reason we’re hearing so much about Lin is because he was overlooked. This might lead you to think he’s a true anomaly, a great game-time athlete who somehow slipped through a pro sports league’s finely-tuned talent-scouting machine.

But if you look closely at the NFL, you’ll find Jeremy Lins all over the place. And with the NFL Draft coming up in April, you have to wonder just how scientific the science of drafting football players really is. Is Andrew Luck really the golden goose that Indianapolis is banking on, or might he turn out to be yet another top-tier bust?

Our latest Football Freakonomics episode — the last one this season — argues that the draft is much more of a crapshoot than most of its practitioners would have us think. The evidence is everywhere. Consider the research of Cade Massey and Richard Thaler, who find top draft picks to be seriously overvalued. Consider the data presented in the interactive graphic here, which reveals the average draft position for the top five players this season in key categories. For instance:

2011 Passing Yards  (Avg. Draft Position for Top 5 Performers = 51.4)

2011 Rushing Yards (Avg. Draft Position for Top 5 Performers = 115.8)

* Rice was the MVB (Most Valuable Bargain) in our inaugural Dough Bowl.

** We generously counted each undrafted players as if he was the first player chosen after “Mr. Irrelevant,” the last player chosen in that year’s draft. In Foster’s case, that would make him pick No. 257.

2011 Tackles (Avg. Draft Position for Top 5 Performers = 78.6)

2011 Receiving Yards Leaders (Avg. Draft Position for Top 5 Performers = 118.2)

This year’s sack leaders represented the highest average overall draft position: 

2011 Sacks (Avg. Draft Position for Top 5 Performers = 32.7) 

Keep in mind that an average draft position of 100 is equivalent to a top pick in the fourth round. What’s most interesting is that in several major categories, the top five performers included at least one undrafted free agent. Or, put another way: One of the top five performers in these categories includes a player who wasn’t even thought to be among the top 250 players of his rookie class!

Granted, these numbers aren’t exactly encyclopedic. But they do a good job of showing just how much luck is involved in the draft — to say nothing of how much Luck — and how hard it is to forecast the future.

That’s why more and more teams, in all sports, are doing a deep statistical dive to try to identify undervalued players before spending too much money on the overvalued ones. So if you’re an NFL team looking to optimize your draft picks this year, maybe you’ll consider hiring a young guy to crunch the numbers for you. Maybe some economics major from Harvard who happens to know his way around the gym? Maybe someone like … Jeremy Lin?

This afternoon we heard a performance of Pagliacci, before which an announcer informed the audience that the soprano was ill, but would act the role while another—the designated soprano—sang from the side of the stage. The acting was better than usual, and so was the singing—an illustration here of comparative advantage.  The overall effect wasn’t good:  Opera is both acting and singing, and it was absurd and disconcerting to separate them.  The production function for opera requires one person doing both—division of labor makes no sense in this case.  

(HT to FWH)

Here’s another pair of stories. The first is from Philip Veysey, who lives in Madrid. He is looking for some advice:

Hi guys,
 
I listened with interest to your podcast about commitment devices and I thought I would share my own which I devised as a way to curb my unnecessary clothes shopping.  I found that I was buying simply more clothing that I needed and although this wasn’t causing me any major problems, I realized that it was really wasteful and I decided to think of incentives to make me stop.
 
At first I thought of a fine system, possibly based on the price of the item: if I spent 20 Euros on another T-shirt I would put the same amount into a fund for my new nephew for his education or something worthwhile. But then I quickly realised that this might prove to be a justification for buying stuff I don’t need, in a similar way that the tax levied on cigarettes might create an incentive for governments to keep people smoking.

So I thought of the reverse: I should put say 5 Euros aside a week for my nephew’s education anyway and if I broke my commitment to not buy unnecessary clothing I would retain the weekly amount for myself, the incentive being that I would create an additional sense of guilt when making the purchase.  The paradox being a reward for failure.
 
You may not be surprised that I haven’t put this into place yet… the season changed and I needed winter clothing,  but I was wondering if there were any other examples of this kind of scheme?  Perhaps when I devised it, my innate British sense of guilt overpowered my reason. 

The second is from Matt Bachmann:

I just listened to your podcast on commitment devices and I thought I would share mine with you. I have been fat all my life and have tried various methods to lose weight. One day I decided enough was enough so I went and made a website and announced it to all my friends and family over Facebook and Google+. It tracks all sorts of data like my weight, my exercise, my food intake, etc. The idea being that the long-term problems of being overweight become short-term problems of my friends and family knowing right away what I am doing.

I am trying to make this as public as possible! That way, if I quit I will lose face with a lot of people. If I stick with it, I continue with this plan. I get tons of support though comments and emails from people who see it or read the blog I write along with it.

It is not just a commitment device. It works to support me as well. It is a stick and a carrot. So far it has been working as I have almost lost 60 pounds!

Thanks for the podcast. It is a great listen!

It looks like Matt has by now lost 71 pounds, from 444 down to 373. Congratulations! I particularly like the “travel radius” he created — a great visual representation of exercise over time:

It is really interesting, and heartening, to get this kind of feedback. Please keep it coming!

Two experiments were undertaken. For the first, 65 men and 65 women, all of an average age of 21, anonymously played a cooperation game where they could donate money via a computer program to a group fund. Donations were selfless acts, as all other players would benefit from the fund, whilst the donor wouldn’t necessarily receive anything in return.

Players did not know who they were playing with. They were observed by either someone of the same sex or opposite sex — two physically attractive volunteers, one man and one woman. Men were found to do significantly more good deeds when observed by the opposite sex. Whilst the number of good deeds made by women didn’t change, regardless of who observed.

For the second experiment, groups of males were formed. Males were asked to make a number of public donations. These increased when observed by an attractive female, where they were found to actively compete with one another. When observed by another male, however, donations didn’t increase.

Iredale compares good deeds to peacock tails and sees room for intervention: “The research shows that good deeds among men increase when presented with an opportunity to copulate. Theoretically, this suggests that a good deed is the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail. Practically, this research shows how societies can encourage selfless acts.”

Ladies, we’re curious: since Tuesday was a day of love, did you perhaps notice more good deeds being done by the men in your life?  

(HT: Eric M. Jones)

(Photo: Jon S)

When it comes to politics and media, the left argues that the right is more biased than the left while the right argues that the left is more biased than the right. Who’s right?

That’s what we try to answer in our latest podcast, “How Biased Is Your Media?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) In a way, this episode is a follow-up to a podcast we put out a few months ago called “The Truth Is Out There, Isn’t It?,” which examined how we choose to believe what we believe about a variety of important issues. In this episode, we apply that same idea in a small-bore fashion, going after media bias.

You’ll hear from a variety of media practitioners and academic scholars who’ve been brave (foolhardy?) enough to wade into the media-bias debate. Among the practitioners: Glenn Beck (who’s been on Freakonomics Radio before), Ann Coulter, Juan Williams, and Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor at The New York Times.

Everyone of course has his opinion about media bias, but we were trying to get beyond opinion. As Steve Levitt points out, this is no simple matter:

LEVITT: Measuring media bias is a really difficult endeavor because unlike what economists usually study, which are numbers and quantities, media bias is all expressed in words.

So we look at some of the recent empirical work on media bias, in which research scholars use words as data to better understand whether a) media bias exists; b) if so, to what degree, and in what directions; and c) what purpose/s it serves. In a 2004 paper, Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo took a stab at media bias; that paper became the launching point of Groseclose’s book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. You’ll hear from Gloseclose about his methodologies and findings, and you can read an earlier Q&A with him here.  Here’s how Levitt has described the Groseclose-Milyo analysis:

LEVITT: Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo estimate how left-wing or right-wing media outlets are based on what research by think tanks they mention in their stories. They then compare that to the think-tank research that elected officials cite when they talk on the House or Senate floor, to calibrate where the media fits relative to the Congress. They find some interesting answers: most of the media does have a liberal bias (throwing out the editorial page, the Wall Street Journal is the most liberal of all, even beating the New York Times!). Fox News is one of the few outlets that is right of center.

Here’s how 20 major media outlets rank on Groseclose and Milyo’s slant scale, with 100 representing the most liberal and zero the most conservative:

And here’s a chart of some well-known Congressmembers’ “Political Quotients,” based on their voting records. Again, 100 represents the most liberal, zero is the most conservative. (In the episode, you’ll hear where Levitt, Groseclose, and I rank on this “PQ” scale. You can take a quiz to find out your own PQ here.)

University of Chicago economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro have also done some interesting research on media bias. In a 2010 study, they used text as data to look at common Democratic and Republic phrases in Congress to help determine which way newspapers lean — and, most important, why. Here are some common Democratic phrases:

And some of the phrases favored by Congressional Republicans:

In this episode, you’ll also hear from Danny Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, on why bias is hard for each of us to see.

I thought you might be interested in this little experiment in economics. People cannot be sent to jail, under the Constitution, for being poor — i.e., being unable to pay their fines.  They can be sent to jail if they “willfully refuse” to pay.  In order to find someone is doing that, the judge must hold a long and complex hearing.  As a result, people are rarely found to have willfully refused to pay.  Instead, the judges have come up with dozens of work-arounds — time payments, delayed pleas to gather the money, community service.  None of these work on a regular basis.  

One judge, however, has a great solution.  He offers them a fine “sale.”  Suppose the fine is $500. He will tell them “the fine is $1,000, but if you pay within the next two weeks, we will accept $500.”  In my thousands of cases and eight-plus years, no one has ever failed to pay under that scenario. And it requires no administrative costs like the others do, no extra hearing…nothing.  Perfect example of a study in incentives, right? Leave it to those old, smart, practical Yankee judges in small town NH to solve this intractable problem.

Meanwhile, the New York Post reports that in the court of child support, officials are also taking a new approach to collecting payments:

Officials reported collecting a record $731 million in child-support payments last year, up about 4.5 percent, and part of the reason was that the city adopted a customer-friendly approach toward some parents who haven’t been paying up. Some received counseling, others job preparation skills — a far cry from the usual threats of legal action and possibly jail time.

The “electric eel” obstacle in training: the yellow wires contained electricity and would shock the person when they touched it. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class David Owsianka).

A podcast listener named Amber writes in to say:

I recently listened to your podcast on commitment devices, which finally gave a name to something that I recently had been contemplating and finally contracted myself to.

There is a lot of background to this story that neither would interest you nor better illuminate the value of my commitment device, so I shall skip that and instead tell you that I recently enlisted in the U.S. Air Force with the hope that the training and experience will not only make me into a better person for the benefit of my country and my state, but that it would replace some of my bad habits with more honorable ones.

The ideal outcome of this device is that, by the end of basic training, I would be a more compassionate leader, a more resilient individual, and a more capable collaborator. There is something tremendously beautiful about surrendering to such an extreme situation as basic training.

I hope that at end of my experience I will be able to say that the device triggered the kind of change I desired in my life. Levitt made a great point about commitment devices being a farce. To paraphrase, humans are very resistant to change, even change that is meant for their own well-being. I appreciate that comment because it illuminates the sad state of American ingenuity.

There was a time when I was satisfied being who I was and was unwilling to submit to the pain of transformation. When the momentum began to shift, and I was inspired to change, I wanted to commit to permanent change. I believe that a commitment device acts as an energy source when our momentum begins to decrease.

I have many thoughts on the value and potential of the U.S. Air Force to act as a commitment device in my life. I would continue, but you are both busy men and I don’t want to steal any more of your time.

Amber will report to basic training in April and attending tech school at Wright-Patterson AFB for public health. Good luck to her! As the proud brother of a former Air Force pilot, I can very much attest to the life-changing discipline he gained during his service.