When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (24 page)

        
Q
. How do you think prostitution would change if it were legalized? Would you want your own child to become a prostitute?

        
A
. If the social and legal ramifications were gone, I think that being an escort might be like being a therapist (I have never been a therapist, so my knowledge is obviously limited). Like most escorts, a therapist sells his or her skills by the hour. A therapist also has to meet people for the first time not knowing who is walking in the door. Many have their own offices and work alone. In addition, the session is generally private and requires discretion. I imagine that many times therapists have patients that they like and some they don’t. A therapist’s revenue, like almost all other occupations, probably increases if the client feels that the therapist likes them. I don’t mean to imply that I have the skills of a trained therapist, or to in any way
demean what they do; I’m just observing some obvious similarities. If I had a child, I would hope that they would feel empowered, and have the opportunity to do whatever they desire to do, and that they would be in charge of their own sexuality. This job has its downsides, though, and can take a high toll on a person. I know that it’s made many aspects of my life and my relationships more difficult. So, like any parent, I would always want more for my child than I had for myself.

        
Q
. So are you in favor of legalization?

        
A
. I feel that prostitution should be legal. If a couple meets for dinner and a bottle of wine, and have sex, that’s a date. If they meet for dinner and a bottle of wine, and have sex, with money in an envelope left on the dresser, that’s illegal. I realize that there are women in prostitution who are there because they feel like they have to be. These women work in a different part of the industry than I did. Many have drug or abuse issues, among other problems. I think, instead of spending time and finite resources on arresting and criminalizing these women, we should spend our resources on making sure that these women have other opportunities and a place to go for help. The women who don’t want to be prostitutes shouldn’t have to be, and they should be able to get the help they need. Women who want to be should be able to. I feel that no
one should have to take a job to make a living that is against his or her own moral judgment.

        
Q
. How would legalization affect your business model?

        
A
. I’m sure it would cause me to lower my rates. I’m sure more people would take up prostitution as a profession, and I am sure more men would partake in the activity. That said, legalization does not remove all the barriers to entry. The job still would have a huge negative stigma associated with it, both for the escorts and the clients. In countries like Canada, enforcement of prostitution laws is extremely lax, and while rates are lower, they aren’t wildly different. So there would still be men out there afraid of their wives finding out, and I still wouldn’t want to share my job title with my family.

        
Q
. Dubner and Levitt wrote that you have some economics training. Has that informed the way you think about your occupation?

        
A
. Sure, here are some examples:

             
Dinner with friends = opportunity cost

             
Perfect information = review sites

             
Transaction cost = setting up an appointment

             
Repeated game = reputation

             
Product differentiation = not a blonde

             
Seriously, I wish I had known then what I know now.

It’s nice to have a podcast that is popular, but it’s another thing to have a podcast that actually changes the world. Can you guess which of our recent episodes changed the world? Maybe the one about how drivers are legally allowed to
kill pedestrians
? The one called
“Fighting Poverty with Actual Evidence
”? Or maybe the one about how the avocados we buy in the U.S.
help fund Mexican crime cartels
?

Nope.

Here’s an e-mail from a listener in Cincinnati named Mandi Grzelak:

True story: while listening to your Feb. 6 podcast “
What You Don’t Know About Online Dating
,” I thought to myself, “I should try online dating!” After all, if NPR employees are on sites like OKCupid, I might have a shot with one! How amazing would that be?!

Long story short: I signed up that afternoon, started with some e-mails, and went on my first date (from the site, not ever) on Feb. 10. Tim and I have been inseparable ever since, bring each other endless amounts of happiness, and last night he proposed. I, obviously, said yes. We plan to elope in NYC this
August, to avoid a large dramatic wedding. But you and your families are welcome to join us.

And it’s all thanks to you!!!

We can die happy now. We may never move the needle on big social or policy issues, but as long as Mandi and Tim are together, we can take some satisfaction in that.

©iStock.com/ninochka

The previous ten chapters have been organized according to theme, which makes this book of blog posts different from the blog itself—because it has no organization whatsoever. One of us decides to write something on a given day and then—click!—it’s published. One post bears no relation to the others before or after it. This tends to give blog reading a kaleidoscopic quality—a quality we have tried to capture in this chapter, which has no discernible theme. A less charitable (or more discerning?) view might be that we found ourselves toward the end of this book with a supply of unrelated posts—a pile of miscellany—and decided to shoehorn them into a chapter that might have been more honorably titled “Miscellaneous.” That would also be true.

I’ve loved the chicken at KFC ever since I was a kid. My parents were cheap, so KFC was splurging when I was growing up. About twice a year my pleading, perhaps in combination with a well-timed TV advertisement, would convince my parents to bring the family to KFC.

For as long as I have been eating KFC, the service has always been terrible.

Yesterday was a good example. I went with my daughter Amanda. From the moment we entered the store to the time we left with our food, twenty-six minutes had elapsed. The line was so slow inside the restaurant that we eventually gave up and went through the drive-thru. We eventually got our food, but no napkins, straws, or plastic ware. That was still better than the time I went to KFC only to be told that they were out of chicken.

What is so ironic about the poor service at KFC is that, at the corporate level, they seem to try so hard to achieve good service. The name tag on the guy behind the counter yesterday said that he was a “customer maniac,” or something like that, as part of KFC’s “customer mania.” A few years back, I seem to remember they were focused on total quality improvement. At another point, I think they had posted on the wall a list of ten customer-oriented service mantras all workers were supposed to strive for.

So why is it that KFC’s service remains so bad? I have two mutually consistent hypotheses as to why:

1
.     KFC doesn’t have enough people working. The next time you are at McDonald’s, count the number of workers. It always stuns me how many people are on duty. It is not uncommon to see fifteen to twenty people working at a time in a busy McDonald’s. There seem to be many fewer people working at KFC. I think there were only four or five workers yesterday when I visited.

2
.     KFC’s clientele is poorer than the customers at other fast-food outlets, and poor people are less willing to pay for good service. There is no question in my mind that service is generally terrible in places frequented by the poor. Whether it is because poor people care less about service, I’m not sure. I do know that I virtually never saw bad service in the entire year I spent visiting Stanford, which I’ve always attributed to the fact that there are so many rich people in the area.

Well, I survived my appearance on
The Daily Show.
Some random reflections on the experience:

First, Jon Stewart sure seems like a fantastic guy. Smart, friendly, down-to-earth, funny the whole time on and off
the camera. Maybe he should run for president sometime. I would vote for him. His only problem is that he is not so tall, and Americans grow their presidents tall.

Second, sitting in the studio, no matter how hard you to try, it is impossible to imagine that 2 million people are watching what you are doing (actually in my case 2,000,002 because my parents don’t usually watch, but they were watching last night). Which is good if you are someone like me who is inherently anti-social and frightened by crowds. It certainly would be more nerve-racking to do an interview in front of a live audience of 2 million people stretched out over the Mall in Washington.

Third, television, except maybe
Charlie Rose,
is a terrible medium for trying to talk about books. I had a long interview—over six minutes—but Stewart was asking hard questions that I couldn’t give real answers to (essentially he wanted me to explain regression analysis, but to do it in fifteen seconds). One key point in
Freakonomics
is that we try to show the reader how we get our answers, not just assert that we are right. On TV, there just isn’t time to follow that path.

Fourth, it sure is nice to be in front of an audience that is dying to laugh at and respond to anything you say. (For instance, I’m not sure why, but the audience burst out laughing when I mentioned crack cocaine.) I wish the students in my 9
A.M.
undergraduate lecture were so responsive. Of course, if my lectures were one-tenth as entertaining as
The Daily Show,
I bet my students would be plenty responsive.

I really like my dentist, Dr. Reiss. He’s in his late sixties, maybe even in his early seventies. To say that he knows his way around the mouth is an understatement. But that’s not the only reason I like him. He recently told me how he solved a particular problem. Because he’s getting on in years, a lot of his patients were asking him if he was retiring soon. He didn’t like this question; he’s a guy who plays tennis twice a week, reads a million books, and keeps up on NYC’s cultural and political scenes with great vigor. So instead of deflecting these annoying retirement questions one at a time, he found a relatively inexpensive way to signal his intentions to anyone who cared: he bought new furniture and equipment for his office. Suddenly the questions stopped.

As much as I generally dread the dentist’s chair, I always wind up learning something. Yesterday was no exception. I was asking Dr. Reiss about the causes of tooth decay—genetics vs. diet, etc. etc.—when he began explaining why toothpaste is such a bogus product. Any claims that toothpaste makes about preventing decay, whitening teeth, etc., are totally fallacious, Dr. Reiss told me, because the FDA can’t and won’t allow the ingredients necessary to perform those chores in an over-the-counter product that children can easily get hold of. (That’s why he recommends an antibacterial product like Gly-Oxide, a fairly foul-tasting but apparently effective means of killing the bacteria that cause decay.)

The other thing I learned yesterday was far more interesting, with far greater implications. He told me that tooth decay in general, even among wealthy patients, is getting worse and worse, particularly for people in middle age and above. The reason? An increased reliance on medications for heart disease, high cholesterol, depression, etc. Many of these medications, Dr. Reiss explained, produce dry mouth, which is caused by a constricted salivary flow; because saliva kills bacteria in the mouth, a lack of it means increased bacteria, which leads to increased tooth decay. Given the choice of taking these medicines versus having some tooth decay, I’m sure most people would still choose the medicines—but I am guessing that most people haven’t thought about the link between the two.

Unfortunately, I have to go back to Dr. Reiss today. At least I’ll probably learn a little something.

Last year the book
On Bullshit
by philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt was a surprise bestseller, even reaching number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list for one week. That is an amazing commercial success for my friends at Princeton University Press.

The success of that book apparently inspired some other authors:

The golfer John Daly has an autobiography out this week entitled
My Life in and out of the Rough: The Truth About all the Bullshit You Think You Know About Me.
This book is published by HarperCollins, the same people who published
Freakonomics
. They were scared to death of the title “Freakonomics” when my sister Linda Jines first thought it up. I guess they have loosened up a bit.

Then there is
100 Bullshit Jobs . . . And How to Get Them
by Stanley Bing
. This book was also released just this week. Guess who the publisher was? HarperCollins!

Then there was
The Dictionary of Bullshit
,
published two weeks ago. At least that one wasn’t HarperCollins. Be careful not to confuse
The Dictionary of Bullshit
with
The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit,
published in February.

Then there is
Bullshit Artist: The 9/11 Leadership Myth,
which came out in paperback in March;
Bullets, Badges, and Bullshit,
also out in March; and
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,
from last September.

Is this enough bullshit? Apparently not.

On the horizon for release later this month are
The Business of Bullshit
(not
The Dictionary of Business Bullshit,
although you could be forgiven for the mistake) and
Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit
.

At least there is a few months’ respite before
“Hello,” Lied the Agent: And Other Bullshit You Hear as a Hollywood TV Writer,
due out next September.

All I can say is, what the f--- is going on here?

This post was published on November 25, 2006, roughly five months before Obama announced he would run for president. It is one of the few correct predictions we have ever made.

This is not a political blog. I have no interest in politics. But I have been reading a great book that happens to be written by a politician.

The first time I heard of Barack Obama is when I saw his name springing up on those political signs people put in their front yards in election years. I knew nothing about him except that he was affiliated with the University of Chicago law school and he was running some hopeless campaign for the U.S. Senate. I figured the support he was getting in my hometown at the time was probably the only support he would get in the whole state. The city I lived in, Oak Park, is left-wing to the point of comedy at times. For instance, as you cross into the city, a sign informs you that you are entering a nuclear-free zone. I thought it would take little more than him having a name like “Barack Obama” to win over the folks in Oak Park.

I was not paying any attention to the Senate race when I happened to get called at random for a poll being
conducted by the
Chicago Tribune.
They asked me who I was going to vote for in the upcoming Senate election. Just out of sympathy and loyalty to the University of Chicago, I said I would vote for Obama. That way, when the results of the poll came out, he would have a few percent of the electorate behind him and he wouldn’t feel so bad. I was flabbergasted when I saw the results of the poll on the front page of the newspaper a few days later: Obama was in the lead for the Democratic primary! (This, of course, was well before he got tapped to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.)

Because I am not very into politics, I didn’t pay much attention to the Senate race (which eventually was a landslide with Obama crushing—of all people—Alan Keyes). I did see him give two speeches: the Democratic convention one and his acceptance speech the night he won. Both times, I felt like he cast some sort of spell over me. When he spoke, I wanted to believe him. I can’t remember another politician ever having that effect on me. One friend, who knows Barack and who also knew Bobby Kennedy, said he had not seen anyone like Kennedy until he met Barack.

Anyway, all of this is just a long prelude to the fact that I picked up his book
The Audacity of Hope
and was blown away at how well written it is. His stories sometimes make me laugh out loud and at other times well up with tears. I find myself underlining the book repeatedly so I can find the best parts quickly again in the future. I am also
almost certain he wrote the whole thing himself, based on people I know who know him. If you aren’t giving
Freakonomics
as a Christmas gift this year, this would make a great gift.

I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised at what a good writer he is because I read his first book
Dreams from My Father
two years ago and loved that one as well. But unlike that first book, written fifteen to twenty years ago before he had political ambitions, I thought this new one would just be garbage. Rarely does a book so exceed my expectations. Also, I should stress that I don’t agree with all his political views, but that in no way detracts from the enjoyment of reading the book.

If he has the same effect on others as he does on me, you are looking at a future president.

Some friends of mine recently were trying to get pregnant with the help of a fertility treatment. At great financial expense, not to mention pain and inconvenience, six eggs were removed and fertilized. These six embryos were then subjected to Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), a process that costs $5,000 all by itself.