When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (20 page)

8
.     Especially when compared to baseball, there is a real paucity of great books about football. One of the very best, however, Roy Blount Jr.’s
About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,
is about the Steelers.

9
.     Mike Tomlin, the current head coach, is a young and impressive man
brimming with smarts, balance, dignity, and surprise
. (At the press conference immediately after the Steelers beat the Baltimore Ravens to gain the Super Bowl, he quoted Robert Frost.) Tomlin was hired just two years ago. The Steelers’ previous two head coaches, Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher, lasted a combined thirty-seven years. These days, NFL coaches are chewed up and spat out with abandon, often within two or three years, but I have a feeling Tomlin may end up threatening Cowher and Noll for longevity awards.

10
.   The Steelers are one of the few pro sports teams named after what their respective cities actually do or did. Pittsburgh made steel just as Green Bay packed meat; the cardinal, meanwhile, is a perfectly nice bird, but it doesn’t do squat for Arizona (nor did it previously for St. Louis). Furthermore, the
Steelers’ logo
isn’t a cartoonish bird or patronizingly noble “redskin”; it is the actual
mark of steelmaking
—a trio of red, blue, and yellow hypocycloids in a black circle. Plus, the Steelers wear it only on one side of their helmets. Legend holds this is because the team was so frugal that it didn’t want to use up two decals on each helmet.

You are free, of course, to ignore all of the above and root for the Cardinals (a team that happens to comprise a bunch of former Steelers coaches, players, and even a onetime ball
boy). But if you do choose to cheer on the Steelers, know that there are some good reasons for doing so.

All the cheering may have done some good: the Steelers beat the Cardinals 27–23.

My son’s first-grade teacher recently held an open house to tell the parents what their kids will be learning this year. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. My favorite part had to do with turning the kids into first-grade (if not first-rate) empiricists.

The teacher, a wonderful veteran from Texas named Barbara Lancaster, described an upcoming project: collecting data on some or all of the twenty-two playgrounds in Central Park.

First, the kids will vote on their favorite and least favorite playgrounds in the park. Then they will collect data on a variety of metrics: number of swings, amount of open space, shady vs. sunny areas, etc. Then they will try to figure out the factors that make a good playground good and a bad playground bad. They will also consider the safety of each playground, and other measures.

We did not do this kind of project when I was in first grade; frankly, I am envious.

I recently played a game with my kids in Central Park that is along these same lines. We sat on one of our favorite
rocks overlooking
the Loop
, a six-mile road that runs through the park, and I asked if they thought there were more runners or cyclists going past. Both kids were certain that there were more cyclists—perhaps because, since the cyclists are so much faster than the runners, they make more of an impression. So we made a little bet (I took runners, they took cyclists), and started counting to see which would pass us first: a hundred runners or a hundred cyclists. I won, but not by much: 100–87.

That was early on a weekday evening. But a few days later, we played the same game on a weekend morning. The kids stuck to their guns and picked cyclists. This time they were right: the cyclists blew away the runners. I guess there are a lot of people who aren’t willing to unpack their bikes for a weekday evening ride, especially as the days are getting shorter, but are willing to go to the trouble on a weekend morning.

It was a good lesson for all of us, and it has us on the lookout for other fun things to measure. The even better lesson is that it’s probably a good idea to always combine teaching—whether yourself or your kids—with playing a game.

I’m not sure why, since I don’t think anyone should or does care, but every year I indulge myself by posting Kentucky Derby picks.

In contrast to the last two years, my computer model has some strong predictions for this year’s Derby. The two horses I like best from a betting perspective (i.e., the ones I think actually have a positive expected value if you place a win bet on them) are General Quarters and Papa Clem. Both are long shots, with morning-line odds of 20–1, but my model predicts their actual odds will be lower than this.

There are other horses who look pretty good, too, although not strong enough to yield a positive expected value on a bet: Friesan Fire, Musket Man, and Flying Private.

The favorite, I Want Revenge, looks okay also, but not good enough to bet.

If I had to pick a last-place finisher (a bet they would never actually offer at the track because people involved with horse racing understand better than most that people respond to incentives), it would be Mine That Bird.

A FEW DAYS LATER
. . .

Thankfully, no one pays attention to my annual Kentucky Derby picks, because if they did, they would have read this prediction that I made Friday:

“If I had to pick a last-place finisher (a bet they would never actually offer at the track because people involved
with horse racing understand better than most that people respond to incentives), it would be Mine That Bird.”

And then they would read this headline in
The Boston Globe
’s Sunday sports page:

©iStock.com/ artishokcs

But it gets worse before it gets better. I named five horses that I did like. One of these horses finished dead last out of eighteen horses, another finished next to last!

The other three finished respectably: third, fourth, and tenth.

In light of this showing, will there be any demand for my Preakness picks? I think so. You see, when it comes to predictions, there is as much value in someone who can predict as poorly as I do as there is in someone who predicts the truth. You just take the bad predictor’s picks and do the opposite.

©iStock.com/Daniel Villeneuve

We have always been attracted to crime—not doing it, necessarily, but exploring it. One of the most-talked-about subjects in
Freakonomics
was our argument that the legalization of abortion was responsible for driving down crime twenty years later. Our love of crime almost landed us a network TV show, almost got one of us sent to Guantánamo Bay, and did inspire the title of this book.

I recently read about a man who robbed six banks in New Jersey but only on Thursdays. “No reason was given for choosing that particular day,” the article noted. Perhaps he knew
something about how the banks did business; perhaps his astrologist told him Thursdays were lucky; perhaps it simply fit his schedule.

In any case, it reminded me of
a story I heard
upon a recent visit to Iowa, about a local bank employee named Bernice Geiger. She was arrested in 1961 for embezzling more than $2 million over many years. The bank happened to be owned by her father. Bernice was reportedly very generous, giving away lots of the stolen money. Upon her arrest, the bank went bust. She was sent to prison, paroled after five years, and moved back in with her parents, who were apparently forgiving types.

By the time she was arrested, Geiger was said to be exhausted. Why? Because she never took vacations. This turned out to be a key component in her crime. As the story goes—this was told to me by a retired Sioux City cop, though I haven’t been able to confirm it—the reason she never took vacations was that she was keeping two sets of books and couldn’t risk a fill-in employee discovering her embezzlement.

The most interesting part, according to the cop, is that after prison Geiger went to work for a banking oversight agency to help stop embezzlement. Her biggest contribution: looking for employees who failed to take vacation. This simple metric turned out to have strong predictive power in stopping embezzlement. Like cheating schoolteachers or colluding sumo wrestlers, the people who steal money from banks sometimes leave telltale patterns—whether it’s a lack
of vacation or a string of Thursdays—that point the finger right at them.

All this made me curious about bank-robbery statistics in general. Maybe Thursday really is the best day to rob a bank?

According to the FBI, there are roughly 5,000 bank robberies a year in the U.S. Friday is easily the busiest weekday (there are relatively few robberies on the weekend), with 1,042 Friday robberies in a year; this is followed by Tuesday (922), Thursday (885), Monday (858), and Wednesday (842). But there is no evidence that any one day is more likely to be successful than another.

It also appears as though robbers are not very good at maximizing their return. Morning robberies yield far more money than afternoon robberies ($5,180 versus $3,705) and yet bank robbers are far more prone to strike in the afternoon. (Maybe they like to sleep in? And maybe if they were able to wake up earlier and go to work, they wouldn’t have to rob banks?) Overall, U.S. bank robbers earn an average of $4,120 when they are successful. But they aren’t successful as often as I would have thought: they are arrested 35 percent of the time! So the Jersey robber who made it to his sixth Thursday was ahead of the pack.

The success rate of bank robbers in the U.K. is about the same as in the U.S., but British robbers generally get a lot more money. The economists Barry Reilly, Neil Rickman, and Robert Witt got hold of a trove of robbery data from the
British Bankers’ Association and analyzed it for a paper in
Significance,
a publication of the Royal Statistical Society. They found that the average proceeds from all bank raids, including the unsuccessful ones, was roughly $30,000. Robberies with multiple robbers, they note, tend to yield considerably bigger jackpots. Overall, the average raid yields about $18,000 per robber. So that’s substantially higher than their American counterparts. But again, the likelihood of arrest is high. This leads the authors to conclude that “the return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish” and that “as a profitable occupation, bank robbery leaves a lot to be desired.”

So if we want to know when is the best time to rob a bank, the answer would seem to be . . . never. Unless, of course, you happen to work at one. But even then, the trade-off is steep—for you may have to give up vacations forever.

Official statistics would certainly suggest that crime in China is extremely low. Murder rates are roughly one-fifth as high as in the United States; according to the official crime statistics, all crimes are rare. China certainly feels safe. We walked the streets in rich areas and poor areas and not for a moment did I ever feel threatened. Graffiti was completely absent. The one instance where I thought I finally found some graffiti near a train station in the city of Shangrao,
the spray-painted message on a bridge turned out to be a government warning that anyone caught defecating under the bridge would be severely punished.

Yet there were all sorts of odd behaviors that made it seem like some crimes were a big problem.

First, there seemed to be an obsession with the risk of counterfeit money. Our tour guides felt the need to teach us how to identify fake money. Whenever I bought something with currency, the shopkeeper went through a variety of tricks to validate the legitimacy of the bills.

Second, when checking out of some of our hotels, there was a fifteen-minute delay while a hotel worker went to inspect the vacated hotel room, I presume to look for stolen clocks, towels, and mini-bar items. (Possibly I misunderstood why they checked the room, just as I struggled to understand why there was a fifteen-dollar fee associated with each lost key card, which couldn’t possibly have cost the hotel more than a few cents.)

Third, places that no sensible person would ever want to break into (for instance, orphanages) were protected by guardhouses and metal gates that had to be retracted to let vehicles in. I don’t think the gates were to keep the orphans in, but maybe they were!

Fourth, on the trains we took, they checked our tickets before we boarded, while we were riding the train, and also required that the ticket be produced on the way out of the station.

Finally, and most notably, public restrooms were completely
devoid of toilet paper, even in some reasonably nice restaurants. Again, maybe I’m completely missing something, but the impression was that a) toilet paper was a very valuable commodity; and b) if it were left in public restrooms it would be stolen.

Psychologists have long argued about the power of priming—i.e., the power of subtle cues and reminders to influence behavior. For instance, there are a number of academic papers that find that if you make a woman write down her name and circle her gender before taking a math test, she will do substantially worse than if she just writes her name. The idea is that women perceive that they are not good at math, and circling their gender reminds them that they are women and therefore should be bad at math. I’ve always been skeptical of these results (and indeed failed to replicate them
in one study
I did with Roland Fryer and John List) because gender is such a powerful part of our identities that it’s hard for me to believe that we need to remind women that they are women!

In an interesting new study called “
Bad Boys: The Effect of Criminal Identity on Dishonesty
,” Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal, and Thomas Noll find some fascinating priming effects. They went into a maximum security prison and had prisoners privately flip coins and then report how
many times the coin came up “heads.” The more “heads” they got, the more money they received. While the authors can’t tell if any one prisoner is honest or not, they know that on average “heads” comes up half the time, so they can measure in aggregate how much lying there is. Before the study, they had half the prisoners answer the question “What were you convicted for?” and the other half “How many hours per week do you watch television on average?” The result: 66 percent “heads” in the treatment where they ask about convictions and “only” 60 percent “heads” in the TV treatment.

How dishonest are prisoners versus everyday people? When they play the same game with regular citizens, the coin comes up “heads” 56 percent of the time.

So how powerful is that one question on conviction? The behavior of the prisoners who are asked the TV question is actually closer to that of regular citizens than it is to the behavior of the prisoners who were primed.

As an economist, I hate the idea that priming might work. As an empiricist, I guess I better get used to it.

Sudhir Venkatesh has become a familiar figure to Freakonomics readers. During graduate school in Chicago, he embedded himself for several years with a crack gang; this research formed the backbone of our book chapter called “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” He
continued to do fascinating research at the lowest and highest ends of the economic spectrum, often writing about it for the Freakonomics blog.

Ever since I began watching HBO’s
The Wire,
I felt that the show was fairly authentic in terms of its portrayal of modern urban life—not just the world of gangs and drugs, but the connections between gangland and City Hall, the police, the unions, and practically everything else. It certainly accorded with my own fieldwork in Chicago and New York. And it was much better than most academic and journalistic reportage in showing how the inner city weaves into the social fabric of a city.

A few weeks ago, I called a few respected street figures in the New York metro region and asked them to watch the show’s new season. I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure quality control.

For the first episode, we gathered in the Harlem apartment of Shine, a forty-three-year-old half-Dominican, half–African-American man who managed a gang for fifteen years before heading to prison for a ten-year drug-trafficking sentence. I invited older guys like Shine, most of whom had retired from the drug trade, because they would have greater experience with rogue cops, political toughs, and everyone else that makes
The Wire
so appealing. They affectionately named our gathering “Thugs and Cuz.” (“Cuz”—short for “cousin”—was me.)

There was plenty of popcorn, ribs, bad domestic beer,
and fried pork rinds with hot sauce. The pork rinds, apparently the favorite of the American thug, ran out so quickly that one of the low-ranking gang members in attendance was dispatched to acquire several more bags.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of the evening’s highlights:

1
.     The Bunk is on the take. Much to my chagrin (since he is my favorite character), the consensus in the room was that the Bunk was guilty. In the words of Shine, “He’s too good not to be profiting. I got nothing against him! But he’s definitely in bed with these street [thugs].” Many had known of Bunk’s prowess as a detective from past episodes. The opening scene, in which he craftily obtains a confession, reinforced their view that the Bunk is too good not to be hiding something.

2
.     Prediction number one: McNulty and the Bunk will split. The observation regarding Bunk’s detective work led to a second agreement, namely that McNulty or Bunk will be taken down—shot, arrested, or killed. This was closely tied to the view that McNulty and Bunk will come into conflict. The rationale? Everyone felt that Marlo, Proposition Joe, or another high-ranking gang leader must have close (hitherto unexplained) ties with one of these two detectives. “Otherwise,” said Kool-J, an ex–drug supplier from northern New Jersey, “there ain’t no way they could be meeting in a Holiday Inn!” Orlando, a Brooklyn based
ex–gang leader, believed the ambitions of Bunk and McNulty would run into each other. “One of them will be taken down. Either the white boy gets drunk and shoots some [guy] ’cause he’s so pissed, or Bunk gives him up to solve a case!”

3
.     The greatest uproar occurred when the upstart Marlo challenged the veteran Prop Joe in the co-op meeting. “If Prop Joe had balls, he’d be dead in twenty-four hours!” Orlando shouted. “But white folks [who write the series] always love to keep these uppity [characters] alive. No way he’d survive in East New York more than a minute!” A series of bets then took place. All told, roughly $8,000 was wagered on the timing of Marlo’s death. The bettors asked me—as the neutral party—to hold the money. I delicately replied that my piggy bank was already full.

4
.     Carcetti is a fool. Numerous observers commented on the Baltimore mayor’s lack of “juice” and experience when it came to working with the feds. The federal police, in their opinion, love to come in and disrupt local police investigations by invoking the federal racketeering statutes (“RICO”) as a means of breaking up drug-trafficking rings. “When feds bring in RICO, local guys feel like they got no [power],” Tony-T explained, offering some empathy to local police who get neutered during federal busts. “White boy [a.k.a. Carcetti], if he knew what he was doing, would keep them cops on Marlo just long enough to build a case—then he would trade it to the feds to get what
he wanted.” Others chimed in, saying that the writers either didn’t understand this basic fact, or they wanted to portray Carcetti as ignorant.