Freakonomics

Sunday Funday: The Social Role of Gossip

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Sunday Funday: The Social Role of Gossip

The topic of this week’s edition of Sunday Funday–gossip.  To most, gossip is simply idle praddle, but the Freakonomics Radio podcast explains that gossip serves a social function.

Here is a description of the podcast:

In the show, Stephen Dubner talks about what gossip is, or isn’t; about the characteristics of the people who produce and consume gossip; and about the functions of gossip, good and bad. You’ll hear from our usual assortment of professors and theorists but also from TV/movie star Adrian Grenier(talking about what it’s like to be the subject of gossip) and Nick Denton, the publisher ofGawker (whose tagline is “Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news”).

The episode begins with Tom Corley, a CPA and the author of Rich Habits. Corley spent five years surveying rich and poor people about their daily habits. Here’s what he claims to have found about gossip:

CORLEY: Six percent of the wealthy gossip, compare that to 79 percent of the poor who gossip. This is one of those habits that really sticks out like that Grand Canyon of differences that I saw. This is one that really sends that message home that wealthy people and poor people do certain things differently on a daily basis.

Next, Dubner visits Gawker Media headquarters, where we find that Denton, unsurprisingly, is staunchly pro-gossip. But he thinks Corley’s premise is entirely wrong:

DENTON: [This] is simply a matter of class prejudice. It’s simply a matter of saying the things that [poor people] talk about, the people that they talk about aren’t important. It doesn’t meet the standard or news so let’s call it gossip. It’s just fishwives; it’s fishwives chattering about their husbands or some infidelity. There’s no difference between that and power gossip, and money gossip, except that the people who decide what is news and what is gossip are the privileged people who look down on lower class.

You’ll also hear from Adrian Chen and Caity Weaver. Chen used to write for Gawker; Weaver still does. Weaver tells us about one of the more salacious gossip posts she wrote about a certain TV star’s anatomy. It got almost 1 million page views.

Jenny Cole, a psychology lecturer at Staffordshire University, tells us how gossip makes the gossiper feel. And Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton (and an author) talks about why he gossips.

GRANT: But beyond the social lubrication I think there’s another piece that’s quite important, which is gossip is a warning device.

Rounding out the episode: Steve Levitt on the juiciest economics gossip he can come up with; Nicholas DiFonzo, a professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who studies rumor; Stephanie Kelley, on gossip in wartime; and, rounding out the show, Adrian Grenier, currently shooting a film version of Entourage, tells us how gossip can be valuable if you’re willing to listen to it.

 

For more public policy related video/audio, be sure to check out the SLACE Archive for daily podcast recommendations.

Give Directly: Evidence and Poverty Alleviation

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

Give Directly: Evidence and Poverty Alleviation

I first heard about GiveDirectly, a charity that simply gives money to people in extremely poor villages in Africa, on an episode of This American Life several months back. GiveDirectly has challenged other charities to show that their donors that are getting their bang for their buck. 

Here is a description of that story, cleverly titled “Money for Nothing and Your Cows for Free”:

Planet Money reporters David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein went to Kenya to see the work of a charity called GiveDirectly in action. Instead of funding schools or wells or livestock, GiveDirectly has decided to just give money directly to the poor people who need it, and let them decide how to spend it. David and Jacob explain whether this method of charity works, and why some people think it’s a terrible idea. (28 minutes)  

 

More recently, the Freakonomics Radio Podcast discussed some of the data coming in on GiveDirectly as well as poverty alleviation more broadly.  

Here is a description of the Freakonomics show, entitled “Fighting Poverty With Actual Evidence”:

But one case study can’t definitively answer the larger question: what’s the best way to help poor people stop being poor? That’s the question we address in this new podcast. If features a discussion that Stephen Dubner recently moderated in New York City with Richard Thalerand Dean Karlan. Thaler is an economist at the University of Chicago, and a co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. (Both the British and U.S. governments now have “nudge” units, focused on using behavioral economics for policy improvements.) Karlan is a professor of economics at Yale and founder of the nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), which hosted the New York event. IPA, which Karlan founded, is trying to figure out how to best alleviate poverty. The answer, as you might expect, isn’t so simple. 

 

In some situations, giving money directly to poor people works well; in others, less so. IPA studied the efficacy of a cash-transfer experiment in Kenya run by the nonprofit GiveDirectly. For background, you might want to see how The Economist described the experiment, and also what NPR’s Planet Money had to say.

Freakonomics on College Part 2: Costs and Benefits

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Freakonomics on College Part 2: Costs and Benefits

Last week, we featured Part I on the Freakonomics episode on the economics of college.  This week Freakonomics discussed the costs and benefits of college education with students, economics, professors and recent grads.  

Here is a sampling of some of those guests interviewed: 

This episode looks at tuition costs and also tries to figure out exactly how the college experience makes people so much better off. . . . 

 

While there are a lot of different voices in this episode, including current and recent college grads, the episode is also a bit heavy on economists (d’oh!), including:

+ David Card at Berkeley, whose education papers are here;

+ Ronald Ehrenberg at Cornell, whose recent paper “American Higher Education in Transition” discusses tuition inflation;

+ Betsey Stevenson; her blog contributions are here, and she tweets too;

+ Justin Wolfers, whose blog writing is here; he too tweets; additionally, he and Stevenson are a matched pair — heading for the University of Michigan, by the way — who also appeared in our “Economist’s Guide to Parenting” podcast, along with daughter Matilda, whom they discuss again in this episode; and:

+ Steve Levitt, 

“Do Baby Girls Cause Divorce? “

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

“Do Baby Girls Cause Divorce? “

That was the question explored by economists on the Freakonomics podcast.

Here is a description of the podcast:

This episode was inspired by a question from a reader named John Dolan-Heitlinger, who wrote the following:

My wife has observed that in marriages where there is a son there is less chance of the husband leaving the marriage.

I wonder if that is true.

Thanks for your consideration.

Mr. Dolan-Heitlinger asks, and we deliver. And his wife, as it turns out, is right. In a paper called “The Demand for Sons,” the economists Enrico Moretti and Gordon B. Dahl examined differences in marital rates based on whether a first-born child is a son or daughter. Here are some of their findings:

  • Couples who conceive a child out of wedlock and find out that it will be a boy are more likely to marry before the birth of their baby.
  • Parents who have first-born girls are significantly more likely to be divorced.
  • Fathers are significantly less likely to be living with their children if they have daughters versus sons.
  • In any given year, roughly 52,000 first-born daughters younger than 12 years (and all their siblings) would have had a resident father if they had been boys.
  • Divorced fathers are much more likely to obtain custody of sons compared to daughters.