When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (27 page)

Every time Linda entered the room, without even trying, she became the center of gravity. One of the people at the Greatest Good had never met Linda before. He walked into a conference room and all his co-workers were “grinning ear to ear.” He wondered why. The answer was that Linda was there holding court.

The massiveness of her genius and creativity make the gaping hole of her absence all the greater.

Linda, we all miss you so much.

©iStock.com/doodlemachine

When you’re a Freakonomist, you’re a Freakonomist all the way. At least that is true for the two of us. We see economics everywhere we look, whether the subject is animated movies, baby formula, women’s happiness, or pirates.

On a recent trip to China, I found that there were typically five people doing the job that one American would typically do. At our hotel, for instance, there was a floor monitor, whose main job, it seemed, was to press the button for the elevator. Maybe she also did other tasks I didn’t notice, but
she could always be relied on to hit that elevator button. In restaurants as well, servers were everywhere, seemingly one per table.

On the main street in Nanchang, there were perhaps two hundred people standing around with handwritten cardboard signs. I guessed maybe they were unemployed and looking for work. It turns out they actually were working, but I didn’t realize it. Their job was to stand on the corner all day with a sign saying that they will buy used cell phones. Unfortunately for them, I saw perhaps three cell phones get sold in my week wandering up and down that street. It was the most competitive market I’ve ever seen. They must have been earning what they thought was a fair wage, though, or they wouldn’t have been out there.

When I went to a large grocery store to buy a can of formula for my daughter Sophie, I thought I had observed the most extreme case of excess labor. As I searched the aisle for the exact type of formula she had been using in her orphanage, four young women very eagerly attempted to help me. At first I thought they were just shoppers trying to aid me. Eventually (they didn’t speak English and I knew about fifty words of Mandarin) I realized they were working. Four of them huddled around me for roughly ten minutes before I finally purchased four dollars’ worth of formula. It made absolutely no sense to me.

Only later, back at the hotel, did my Chinese guide explain what was going on. These women weren’t employees of the grocery store; they were hired by rival formula
companies to try to direct customers to their particular brand of formula! Which explains why they were all so cheerfully and persistently suggesting so many different kinds of formula to me. The store didn’t care what kind of formula I bought—a sale was a sale. But to the formula manufacturers, stealing business from the rival brands was worth paying an employee to do.

I took my four children to the movie
Coraline
this weekend. After the movie, I asked them how they liked it. Their four answers: “great,” “good,” “okay,” and “Thank God it’s over.”

Coming from my kids, who always say the latest movie is their favorite, those are not very positive reviews.

I have never been in a movie theater full of kids as quiet as it was at
Coraline
. That quiet, along with the plodding pace of the movie, left plenty of time to ponder things.

First, I couldn’t get over the fact that the name of one of the children in the movie was Wyborn, known as Wybie for short, as in “Why be born?” Wybie didn’t seem to have any parents, although he did have a grandma who would yell for him from time to time. It made me think of the unwanted children/abortion argument in
Freakonomics
.

Second, two of the voices in this animated film were done by Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher. The last movie
I saw was
Bolt,
with voices by Miley Cyrus and John Travolta. The list of stars who have recently lent their voices to animated movies goes on and on: Eddie Murphy, Dustin Hoffman, Cameron Diaz, John Goodman, etc.

Why do big-name stars so dominate the voices in animated films?

One hypothesis is that they are better than other people at doing the voices. I’m almost certain that is not correct. I have to believe that there are a group of voice actors and books-on-tape readers who don’t have the faces to be movie stars but have great voices.

A second hypothesis is that the big stars don’t charge much for their voices. According to what I’ve read in
The New York Times
and elsewhere, doing the voice for an animated film doesn’t take much time or effort. If that is the case, then maybe the cost of the actors’ voices is just a small part of the total cost of the movie; but I don’t think that is the case, at least not always. I have read that Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers each got paid $10 million for their parts in
Shrek 2
.

A third explanation is that people really like to hear the voices of the stars. I tend to doubt that story as well. With a few notable exceptions, my guess is that audiences couldn’t even identify the voices of the stars if they didn’t see the credits.

A fourth hypothesis is one that sounds odd, but will be familiar to economists. Under this hypothesis, it isn’t that famous actors are better at doing voices, or even that
moviegoers like to hear their voices, or that stars are cheap. Rather, big-time actors are hired to read these parts precisely because they are expensive. In order to be willing and able to give multi-million-dollar deals to stars to do voices that a no-name could do for $50,000, a producer must be confident that the movie will be a big hit. Thus, the big star is hired solely to give a credible signal to outsiders that the producer thinks the movie will be a blockbuster.

Ultimately, I’m not sure any of these hypotheses really feel right to me.

An old friend came to town not long ago and we met for a late lunch on the Upper West Side. Trilby ordered a burger, no bread, with Brie; I ordered half a roasted chicken with mashed potatoes. The food was slow in coming but we had so much catching up to do that we didn’t care.

My chicken, when it arrived, didn’t look good but I took a bite. It was so rancid I had to spit it out into a napkin. Absolutely disgusting-gagging-rotten rancid. I summoned the waitress, a young and pretty redhead, who made a suitably horrified expression, then took the food away and brought back a menu.

The manager appeared. She was older than the waitress, with long dark hair and a French accent. She apologized,
said the chefs were checking out the dish now, trying to determine if perhaps the herbs or the butter had caused the problem.

I don’t think so, I told her. I think your chicken is rotten. I cook a lot of chicken, I said, and I know what rotten chicken smells like. Trilby agreed: you could smell this plate across the table, probably across the restaurant.

The manager was reluctant to concede. They had just gotten the shipment of chicken that morning, she said, which struck me as relevant as saying that “no, so-and-so couldn’t have committed a murder today because he didn’t commit one yesterday.”

The manager left and, five minutes later, returned. You’re right! she said. The chicken was bad. The chefs had checked the chicken, found it rotten, and were throwing it away. Victory! But for whom? The manager apologized again, asked if I’d like a free dessert or drink. Well, I said, first of all let me try to find some food on your menu that doesn’t seem disgusting after that chicken. I ordered a carrot-ginger-orange soup, some french fries, and sautéed spinach.

Trilby and I then ate, fairly happily, though the taste of the rancid chicken remained with me; in fact, it remains with me still. Trilby had had a glass of wine before we ordered, and took another with her meal, sauvignon blanc. I drank water. When the waitress cleared our plates, she asked again if we wanted complimentary dessert. No, we said, just coffee.

As Trilby and I talked, I mentioned that I had not long ago interviewed Richard Thaler, the godfather of
behavioral economics, which seeks to marry psychology and economics. Thaler and I had considered some small experiments at lunch—offering the waiter a gigantic tip, perhaps, in exchange for special considerations—but we didn’t get around to it. Trilby was interested, so we kept talking about money. I mentioned the behavioralists’ concept of “anchoring” (which used-car salesmen in particular know so well): establish a price that may be 100 percent more than what you need in order to ensure that you’ll still walk away with, say, a 50 percent profit.

Talk turned to what we might say when our check came. There seemed two good options: “We don’t care for any free dessert, thanks, but considering what happened with the chicken, we’d like you to comp our entire meal.” That would establish an anchor at 0 percent of the check. Or this option: “We don’t care for any free dessert, thanks, but considering what happened with the chicken, would you please ask the manager what you can do about the check.” That would establish an anchor at 100 percent of the check.

Just then the waitress brought the check. It was for $31.09. Perhaps out of shyness, or haste, or—most likely—a desire to not appear cheap (when it comes to money, things are never simple), I blurted out Option 2: Please see what the manager “can do about the check.” The waitress replied, smiling, that we had already been given the two glasses of wine for free. To me in particular this felt like slim recompense, since it was Trilby who had drunk the wine while it was I who still radiated with the flavor of rancid chicken. But
the waitress, still smiling, duly took the check and headed toward the manager. She zipped right over, also smiling.

“Considering what happened with the chicken,” I said, “I wonder what you can do about the check.”

“We didn’t charge you for the wines,” she said, with great kindness, as if she were a surgeon who had thought she would have to remove both my kidneys but found instead that she had only had to remove one.

“Is that the best that you’re prepared to offer me?” I said (still unable to establish an anchor at 0 percent).

She looked at me intently, still friendly. Here she was making a calculation, preparing to make the sort of gamble that is both financial and psychological, the sort of gamble that each of us makes every day. She was about to gamble that I was not the kind of person who would make a scene. After all, I had been friendly throughout our dilemma, never raising my voice or even uttering aloud the words
vomit
or
rancid
. And she plainly thought this behavior would continue. She was gambling that I wouldn’t throw back my chair and holler, that I wouldn’t stand outside the restaurant telling prospective customers that I’d gagged on my chicken, that the whole lot was rancid, that the chefs either must have smelled it and thought they could get away with it, or, if they hadn’t smelled it, were so detached from their job that who knows what else—a spoon, a sliver of thumb, a dollop of disinfectant—might find its way into the next meal. And so, making this gamble, she said “yes”: as in yes, that is the best that she was prepared to offer me. “All right,” I said,
and she walked away. I added a five-dollar tip to bring the total tab to $36.09—no sense penalizing the poor waitress, right?—walked outside, and put Trilby in a cab. The manager had gambled that I wouldn’t cause trouble, and she was right.

Until now.

The restaurant, should you care to note, is called
French Roast
, and is on the northeast corner of Eighty-Fifth and Broadway, in Manhattan.

Last I checked, the roast chicken was still on the menu. Bon appétit.

The e-mail reprinted below, which is circulating incredibly widely, may represent a new low in economic thinking. It declares September 1 “No Gas Day”:

IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF EVERYONE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA DID NOT PURCHASE A DROP OF GASOLINE FOR ONE DAY AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME, THE OIL COMPANIES WOULD CHOKE ON THEIR STOCKPILES
.

AT THE SAME TIME IT WOULD HIT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH A NET LOSS OF OVER 4.6 BILLION DOLLARS WHICH AFFECTS THE BOTTOM LINES OF THE OIL COMPANIES
.

THEREFORE SEPTEMBER 1ST HAS BEEN FORMALLY DECLARED “STICK IT TO THEM DAY” AND THE PEOPLE OF THESE TWO NATIONS SHOULD NOT BUY A SINGLE DROP OF GASOLINE THAT DAY
.

THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN BE DONE IS IF YOU FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN AND AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN TO GET THE WORD OUT
.

WAITING ON THE GOVERNMENT TO STEP IN AND CONTROL THE PRICES IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REDUCTION AND CONTROL IN PRICES THAT THE ARAB NATIONS PROMISED TWO WEEKS AGO?

REMEMBER ONE THING, NOT ONLY IS THE PRICE OF GASOLINE GOING UP BUT AT THE SAME TIME AIRLINES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES, TRUCKING COMPANIES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES WHICH EFFECTS [SIC] PRICES ON EVERYTHING THAT IS SHIPPED. THINGS LIKE FOOD, CLOTHING, BUILDING MATERIALS, MEDICAL SUPPLIES ETC. WHO PAYS IN THE END? WE DO!

WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. IF THEY DON’T GET THE MESSAGE AFTER ONE DAY, WE WILL DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN
.

SO DO YOUR PART AND SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND MAKE SEPTEMBER 1ST A DAY THAT THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA SAY “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”