When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (10 page)

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In
SuperFreakonomics,
we identified one of the most dangerous activities any person can engage in: walking drunk. Seriously. The data show that walking one mile drunk is eight times more dangerous than driving one mile drunk. But mostly people just laughed and ignored us. When it comes to evaluating risks, people stink for all sorts of reasons—from cognitive biases to the media’s emphasis on rare events. Over the years that has generated blog fodder on subjects as diverse as the fear of strangers, running out of oil, and horseback riding.

Matthew Broderick
recently broke his collarbone
while riding a horse. This makes Broderick the fourth or fifth person
I’ve heard about in recent months who was injured while riding a horse. This got me to thinking: How dangerous is horseback riding, especially compared to, say, riding a motorcycle?

A quick Google search turns up
a 1990 CDC report
: “Each year in the United States, an estimated 30 million persons ride horses. The rate of serious injury per number of riding hours is estimated to be higher for horseback riders than for motorcyclists and automobile racers.”

Interestingly, the people who get hurt riding horses
are often under the influence of alcohol
, just like the people who get hurt (and hurt others) while driving motor vehicles.

So why don’t we hear about all this horseback danger? I have a few guesses:

        
1
. A lot of horse accidents occur on private property, and involve just one person.

        
2
. Such accidents probably tend to not generate police reports, as a motorcycle or drag-racing accident inevitably would.

        
3
. The kind of people who might typically call attention to unsafe activities like horses more than they like motorcycles.

        
4
. A big motorcycle accident is more likely to make the evening news than a horse-riding accident—unless, or course, the victim of the horse-riding accident is a Matthew Broderick or a Christopher Reeve.

I may be wrong on this, but I don’t recall that Reeve’s tragic accident was taken as a call to ban or regulate horseback
riding—whereas when Ben Roethlisberger, e.g., was injured while riding his motorcycle without a helmet, all the discussion was about the foolishness of his act. I’m not saying Big Ben wasn’t being foolish; but, as a Steelers fan, I guess I’m glad he wasn’t riding a horse.

On
his official government blog
, U.S. secretary of transportation Ray LaHood dismissed my research on child safety seats. This research found that car seats are no better than seat belts at reducing fatalities or serious injuries among children aged two to six; it was based on nearly thirty years’ worth of data from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System as well as from crash tests that Dubner and I commissioned.

My favorite quote from the secretary:

“Now, if you want to slice up the data to be provocative, have at it. As a grandfather and as secretary of an agency whose number one mission is safety, I don’t have that luxury.”

Reading the secretary’s blog post, I am struck by just how differently he is reacting to a challenge than Arne Duncan did when I first told him about my work on teacher cheating.
Duncan, now the U.S. secretary of education, was in charge of the Chicago public schools at the time. I expected Duncan to do what LaHood did: dismiss the findings, circle the wagons, etc. But Duncan surprised me. He said that all he cared about was making sure the children were learning as much as possible, and teacher cheating was getting in the way of that. He invited me into a dialogue, and we ultimately made a difference.

If the ultimate goal in this case is really child safety, here’s what LaHood might have written on his blog:

For a long time, we’ve been relying on car seats to keep our children safe. The existing academic literature up until recently confirmed the view that car seats are very successful in that goal. But in a series of papers in peer-reviewed journals, Steven Levitt and his co-authors have challenged that view using three different data sets collected by the Department of Transportation, as well as other data sets. I’m no data expert, and I have an agency to run, so I don’t have the luxury of analyzing the data myself. But I am a grandfather and my agency’s number one mission is safety, so I’ve asked the researchers in my agency to do the following:

        
1
. Take a close look at the data sets we collect here in my agency, which are the basis for Levitt’s work. Is it really the case that in these data there is little or no evidence that car seats outperform adult
seat belts in protecting children ages two and up? Our benchmark for measuring the effectiveness of car seats has always been versus children who are unrestrained. Maybe we need to rethink this going forward?

        
2
. Demand that the physicians at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who have repeatedly found that car seats work, make their data publicly available. It is my understanding that these physicians have refused to share their data with Levitt, but in the interest of getting to the truth, other researchers should have the chance to review what they have done.

        
3
. Carry out a series of tests using crash-test dummies to determine whether adult seat belts do indeed pass all government crash-test requirements. In
SuperFreakonomics,
Levitt and Dubner report on their findings with a very small sample of tests; we need much more evidence on the data.

        
4
. Try to understand why, even
after thirty years
, the great majority of car seats are still not properly installed. After all this time, can we really blame it on the parents, or should the blame be put elsewhere?

        
5
. After exploring all these issues, let’s figure out the truth, and let’s use it to guide public policy.

And if Secretary LaHood has any interest in pursuing any of these avenues, I stand at the ready to offer whatever help that I can.

Update: Secretary LaHood never did take me up on my offer to help.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about security overkill. This includes not just the notion of “
security theater
,” but the many instances in which someone places a layer of security between me and my everyday activities with no apparent benefit.

My bank, for instance, would surely argue that its many and various anti-fraud measures are valuable. But in truth, they are a) meant to protect the bank, not me; and b) cumbersome to the point of ridiculous. It’s gotten to where I can predict which credit-card charge will trigger the bank’s idiot algorithm and freeze my account because it didn’t like the zip code where I used the card.

And security overkill has trickled down into the civilian world. When the class parents at my kids’ school send out a parent contact list at the start of each school year, it comes via a password-protected Excel spreadsheet. Keep in mind that this list doesn’t contain Social Security numbers or bank information—just names, addresses, and phone numbers of the kids’ parents. I can imagine the day several months hence when someone actually needs to use the list and will find herself locked out by the long-forgotten password.

The most ridiculous example of security overkill I’ve run across recently was at Thirtieth Street Station, Philadelphia’s main train terminal. I took a photo of something I saw in the men’s room:

Stephen J. Dubner

Yes, it’s a diaper-changing station that has been fitted with a padlock. The handwritten message at the top says “see attendant for combination.” I’m sure we could dream up some bad things that might happen on an unlocked diaper-changing tray, and I’m guessing as with most security overkill this was inspired by one anomalous event that scared the jeepers out of someone (or got that someone’s lawyers involved). But still . . .

The best strategy I have found for reducing the aggravation of security screening is to pretend I am a terrorist and think about where the weaknesses are in security, and how I might slip through. I think I figured out a way to get a gun or explosives into the White House during the George W. Bush administration. But I was only invited to the White House once, so I never got a chance to test my theory for real on a return visit.

Traveling to Ireland recently, I learned of a new anti-terror method. The security personnel in Dublin demand that you remove from your carry-on bag not only your laptop but another item that I hadn’t previously known to be dangerous: your umbrella. For the life of me, I cannot think of what evil I would do with an umbrella—or more to the point, what evil I could do with an umbrella that would be prevented by having me take it out of my carry-on and put it directly on the conveyor belt. I asked the screener why umbrellas go directly on the belt, but her accent was quite thick so I couldn’t understand her answer. I think I heard the word
poking
in there somewhere.

Learning about the possible dangers posed by umbrellas has dramatically reduced my utility. Now, every time I fly in the U.S., where the security treatment of umbrellas is so cavalier, I will spend the entire flight in fear that a rogue umbrella has made its way onto the plane.

One thing is for sure: if I ever see a passenger pull an umbrella out of her carry-on bag while a flight is airborne, I will tackle her first and ask questions later!

This post was published on August 21, 2005. It would have been difficult to find anyone then willing to predict that ten years hence, technological advances in petroleum extraction would allow the U.S. to overtake Saudi Arabia as the
biggest oil producer in the world
. But that is exactly what happened.

A recent
New York Times Magazine
cover story
, by Peter Maass, is about “peak oil.” The idea behind peak oil is that the world has been on a path of increasing oil production for many years, and now we are about to peak and go into a situation where there are dwindling reserves, leading to triple-digit prices for a barrel of oil, an unparalleled worldwide depression, and as one oil-crash website puts it, “Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.”

One might think that doomsday proponents would be chastened by the long history of people of their ilk being wrong: Nostradamus, Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, etc. Clearly they are not.

What most doomsday scenarios get wrong is the fundamental
idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets generally figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Which is exactly the situation with oil right now. I don’t know much about world oil reserves. I’m not even necessarily arguing with their facts about how much the output from existing oil fields is going to decline, or that world demand for oil is increasing. But these changes in supply and demand are slow and gradual—a few percent each year. Markets have a way of dealing with situations like this: prices rise a little bit. That is not a catastrophe; it is a message that some things that used to be worth doing at low oil prices are no longer worth doing. Some people will switch from SUVs to hybrids, for instance. Maybe we’ll be willing to build some nuclear power plants, or it will become worth it to put solar panels on more houses.