Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?

March 19, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

A fundamental skill which all good lawyer possess is the ability to effectively communicate ideas. According to the most recent episode of the Freakonomic Radio podcast, “the brain’s greatest attribute is knowing what other people are thinking.” This attribute is key to communication.

This episode, although not explicitly about public policy, is helpful for any lawyer or layman in understand how the brain works and how to better communicate and negotiate.

Here is a description of the show:

In the episode, Stephen Dubner talks to Nicholas Epley. Here’s how Epley introduces himself:

EPLEY: I’m a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. I’m in the Booth School of Business, and I study mind-reading.

What’s a B-school professor doing studying mind-reading? Well, as he says:

EPLEY: If you can’t understand what other people think [and] how you’re being seen by other people, it’s very hard to lead or manage them effectively.

Epley has written a book on research in the field of mind-reading, including some of his own studies. It’s called Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. A few things you’ll learn in the episode that you never thought you wanted to know, but do:

A Barry Manilow t-shirt can teach us a lesson about the spotlight effect.
Stephen Dubner is a “fanilow” (sort of).
“Another One Bites the Dust” — when played backward — contains a secret message that, in the end, may help people communicate better.

Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?

March 19, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?

This episode, although not explicitly about public policy, is helpful for any lawyer or layman in understand how the brain works and how to better communicate and negotiate.

Here is a description of the show:

In the episode, Stephen Dubner talks to Nicholas Epley. Here’s how Epley introduces himself:

EPLEY: I’m a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. I’m in the Booth School of Business, and I study mind-reading.

What’s a B-school professor doing studying mind-reading? Well, as he says:

EPLEY: If you can’t understand what other people think [and] how you’re being seen by other people, it’s very hard to lead or manage them effectively.

Epley has written a book on research in the field of mind-reading, including some of his own studies. It’s called Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. A few things you’ll learn in the episode that you never thought you wanted to know, but do:

A Barry Manilow t-shirt can teach us a lesson about the spotlight effect.
Stephen Dubner is a “fanilow” (sort of).
“Another One Bites the Dust” — when played backward — contains a secret message that, in the end, may help people communicate better.

Freakonomics on Marriage Part I

February 20, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / 1 Comment

Freakonomics on Marriage Part I

Recently, the Freakonomics podcast release the first part of a two part episode about the economics of marriage. One of the fascinating features of the show is how much of the common wisdom about marriage is false. For instance, the divorce rate is actually at an all time low since it peaked in the 1960s/1970s.

Here is a description of the show:

This episode is about all the ways that marriage has changed over the last 50 years. We begin by challenging some of the myths of modern marriage. For instance:does marriage make you happier? Is divorce as common as we think? The discussion then moves on to how the institution of marriage is perceived these days, and to what degree it has outlived its original purpose.

We begin by hearing the voices of people all around the country, talking about why they got married or want to. As you might imagine, their reasoning runs from pure romance (love!) to hardcore pragmatic (a visa, a pregnancy, to conform).

Stephen Dubner spends a lot of time talking with Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution. Along with his partner/co-economistBetsey Stevenson, Wolfers has done significant research on marriage, divorce, and family. He explains one dramatic change to marriage over the past half-century — from a factory-style model of “production complementarities,” where the mister went off to work and the missus ran the household, to something very different:

WOLFERS: We’ve moved to what economists would call consumption complementarities. We have more time, more money, and so you want to spend it with someone that you’ll enjoy. So, similar interests and passions. We call this the model of hedonic marriage. But really it’s a lot more familiar than that. This is just economists giving a jargon name to love. So you want someone who’s actually remarkably similar to you or has similar passions that you do. So it fundamentally changes who marries who.

But this new model hasn’t just changed the way marriage looks; it has also changed the numbers. In 1960, two-thirds of all Americans aged 15 and older were married. By 1990, that number had fallen to 58.7 percent. Now? It’s dropped to around 50 percent. Harvard economistClaudia Goldin, who has done extensive research on women’s career and family attainments, tells us what accounts for this drop:

GOLDIN: In the U.S., one group of individuals who eventually marry, marry late. And one group is not marrying — the lower-educated, lower-income Americans are not marrying for lots of different reasons. So I wouldn’t say that marriage is still the institution that it once was.

Freakonomics on Marriage Part I

February 20, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / 1 Comment

Freakonomics on Marriage Part I

Here is a description of the show:

This episode is about all the ways that marriage has changed over the last 50 years. We begin by challenging some of the myths of modern marriage. For instance:does marriage make you happier? Is divorce as common as we think? The discussion then moves on to how the institution of marriage is perceived these days, and to what degree it has outlived its original purpose.

We begin by hearing the voices of people all around the country, talking about why they got married or want to. As you might imagine, their reasoning runs from pure romance (love!) to hardcore pragmatic (a visa, a pregnancy, to conform).

Stephen Dubner spends a lot of time talking with Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution. Along with his partner/co-economistBetsey Stevenson, Wolfers has done significant research on marriage, divorce, and family. He explains one dramatic change to marriage over the past half-century — from a factory-style model of “production complementarities,” where the mister went off to work and the missus ran the household, to something very different:

WOLFERS: We’ve moved to what economists would call consumption complementarities. We have more time, more money, and so you want to spend it with someone that you’ll enjoy. So, similar interests and passions. We call this the model of hedonic marriage. But really it’s a lot more familiar than that. This is just economists giving a jargon name to love. So you want someone who’s actually remarkably similar to you or has similar passions that you do. So it fundamentally changes who marries who.

But this new model hasn’t just changed the way marriage looks; it has also changed the numbers. In 1960, two-thirds of all Americans aged 15 and older were married. By 1990, that number had fallen to 58.7 percent. Now? It’s dropped to around 50 percent. Harvard economistClaudia Goldin, who has done extensive research on women’s career and family attainments, tells us what accounts for this drop:

GOLDIN: In the U.S., one group of individuals who eventually marry, marry late. And one group is not marrying — the lower-educated, lower-income Americans are not marrying for lots of different reasons. So I wouldn’t say that marriage is still the institution that it once was.

Economics and Online Dating

February 14, 2014 / Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

Economics and Online Dating

Happy Valentines Day, dear SLACERs! In case your are alone, looking for love this Valentines Day, SLACE has you covered. I recently listened to a Freakonomics podcast about online dating. The program discusses how economic principles can improve your online profile.

Here is a description of the podcast:

The episode is, for the most part, an economist’s guide to dating online. (Yes, we know: sexy!) You’ll hear tips on building the perfect dating profile, and choosing the right site (a “thick market,” like Match.com, or “thin,” like GlutenfreeSingles.com?). You’ll learn what you should lie about, and what you shouldn’t. Also, you’ll learn just how awful a person can be and, if you’re attractive enough, still reel in the dates.

First you’ll hear Stephen Dubner interview Alli Reed, a comedy writer living in Los Angeles, who conducted an experiment of sorts on OkCupid:

REED: I wanted to see if there was a lower limit to how awful a person could be before men would stop messaging her on an online dating site.

So she created a fake profile for a woman she called “AaronCarterFan” (Aaron Carter, for the uninitiated, is the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy.) Reed loaded her profile with despicable traits (see the whole list below) but used photos of a model friend. In the episode, you’ll hear how this works out. (For more, see Reed’s Cracked.com article “Four Things I Learned from the Worst Online Dating Profile Ever.“). . . .

Then you’ll hear from Paul Oyer, a labor economist at Stanford and author of the new book Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating. Oyer hadn’t thought much about online dating until he re-entered the dating scene himself after a long absence and was struck by the parallels between the dating markets and labor markets. If only people approached dating like an economist, he thought, they’d be better off.

One brave soul took the challenge. PJ Vogt, a producer of the public-radio show On The Media and co-host of the podcast TLDR. Vogt opened up his OkCupid profile to let Oyer dissect and, theoretically, improve it. You’ll hear what Vogt had done right, what Oyer thinks was wrong, and what happens when you update your profile, economist-style.

Finally, the economist Justin Wolfers points out one of the most revolutionary benefits of online dating — finding matches in traditionally “thin” markets:

WOLFERS: So I do think it’s a really big deal for young gay and lesbian men and women in otherwise homophobic areas. It’s also a very big deal in the Jewish community. J-Date. All my Jewish friends talk about being under pressure from mum to meet a good Jewish boy or girl, but they don’t happen to be everywhere, but they’re all over J-Date. And I imagine this is true in other ethnic communities. And certainly there are, it’s enormously easy to match on very, very specific sexual preferences.

And since online dating occasionally leads to offline marriage, we’ll look into that topic in next week’s podcast, in the first of a two-parter called “Why Marry?”