125) A economia não-convencional de Steven Landsburg
Possible Side Effects
By DAVID LEONHARDT
The New York Times, July 8, 2007
MORE SEX IS SAFER SEX: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.
By Steven E. Landsburg.
275 pp. Free Press. $26.
Before there was "Freakonomics," before there was "The Tipping Point" or "Blink," Steven E. Landsburg wrote a regular column for Slate magazine called Everyday Economics. The column started in the summer of 1996 with an article headlined "More Sex Is Safer Sex," in which Landsburg argued that H.I.V. would spread less quickly if relatively chaste people each took on a few more sexual partners. At a given bar on a given night, he wrote, these disease-free singles would then make the pool of sexually active adults safer. The article was based largely on an academic paper by another economist, Michael Kremer, theorizing that the spread of AIDS could be slowed in England if everybody with fewer than about 2.25 partners got around a bit more.
This research was one of the early examples of the economics profession's imperialist movement. For the last decade or so, economists have been increasingly poking their fingers into other disciplines, including epidemiology, psychology, sociology, oenology and even football strategy. These economists usually justify their expansionism on two grounds: They say they're better with numbers than most other researchers and have a richer understanding of how people respond to incentives.
Arrogant as this sounds, there is some truth to it. Besides, the public seems hungry for the kind of real-world social science economists are practicing. "Freakonomics," by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, has spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, while Malcolm Gladwell, the author of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," has become perhaps the nation's most popular nonfiction writer by artfully explaining the science behind everyday human interactions.
Landsburg, a professor at the University of Rochester, has now come out with his own entry in the field, "More Sex Is Safer Sex," based largely on his Slate columns. The opening chapter is an expanded version of the first column. From there, he jumps into a series of counterintuitive arguments based on his own observations or on research by other economists.
"Here's an odd fact," Landsburg writes. "Throughout the industrialized world, unemployment and home ownership go hand in hand." Unemployment is low in Switzerland, where renting is the norm, and high in Spain, where most people own their homes. The pattern also holds within different regions of individual countries, and it persists over time. As home ownership rises, so does joblessness. Landsburg considers a couple of harmless explanations -- coincidence, bad statistics -- but also some causal ones. For instance, people who own their homes may be less willing than renters to move after they lose a job, making it more difficult to find new work. Another possibility is that countries or states with a lot of regulations, like rent control and strict labor laws, may be simultaneously encouraging home buying and discouraging hiring. "It's not easy to sort out causes from effects," he says. But "it's not always impossible either."
In a similar vein, he cites the familiar statistic that tall people earn more than short people, but adds a twist. According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, tall men who were short in high school earn no more than short men. Landsburg theorizes that tall adolescents develop more self-esteem, which makes them more likely to join teams, clubs and other high school activities. All else being equal, the Penn researchers found, people who participated in extracurricular activities made more money than those who did not.
At his best, Landsburg helps us see the world in new ways and confront some of our assumptions. In one chapter, he argues that you should give all your charitable donations to the single cause you deem most worthy. If you think the most important thing you can do is help a starving child by giving $100 to CARE, you should give all your donations to CARE. Your first $100 is not going to cure hunger, and the next $100 you could give -- money that might now be going to another cause -- will help just as many children. When I started reading the chapter, I was rolling my eyes. When I finished it, I couldn't decide how I felt.
Still, I suspect this book will command a much smaller audience than some of the economics-tinged best sellers, mostly because it is short on the nuance that comes from real human stories. Landsburg's characters tend toward the hypothetical -- Benny the Burglar and Manny the Mugger; Jane the A student and Mary the B student; Albert and Alvin, two imperfect altruists -- and his arguments, as he puts it at one point, can sound like "idle Sunday dorm-room chitchat."
This problem plagues many of the new economic imperialists: like the overly chaste singles who are supposedly contributing to the H.I.V. epidemic, they don't get out enough. They are asking good questions about epidemiology and psychology, but they are not spending much time with epidemiologists and psychologists, let alone with the people who are the subjects of their academic research. As a result, they arrive at conclusions that can be clever but lack wisdom, as the economist David Colander points out in his recent book, "The Making of an Economist, Redux."
Citing the doctrine that good incentives lead to good outcomes, Landsburg, for example, argues that commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration should be paid with the stock of pharmaceutical companies (to prevent them from being "overly cautious" about approving new drugs). Furthermore, he says the president of the United States should be paid with a "diversified land portfolio," since the price of land is the best measure of how many people "want to live here and plan their futures here." He also suggests that the postwar looting of museums isn't really a problem and, of course, that more sex equals safer sex. Perhaps the better conclusion is that fewer ideas would make for better ideas.
David Leonhardt writes a weekly economics column for The New York Times.
By DAVID LEONHARDT
The New York Times, July 8, 2007
MORE SEX IS SAFER SEX: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.
By Steven E. Landsburg.
275 pp. Free Press. $26.
Before there was "Freakonomics," before there was "The Tipping Point" or "Blink," Steven E. Landsburg wrote a regular column for Slate magazine called Everyday Economics. The column started in the summer of 1996 with an article headlined "More Sex Is Safer Sex," in which Landsburg argued that H.I.V. would spread less quickly if relatively chaste people each took on a few more sexual partners. At a given bar on a given night, he wrote, these disease-free singles would then make the pool of sexually active adults safer. The article was based largely on an academic paper by another economist, Michael Kremer, theorizing that the spread of AIDS could be slowed in England if everybody with fewer than about 2.25 partners got around a bit more.
This research was one of the early examples of the economics profession's imperialist movement. For the last decade or so, economists have been increasingly poking their fingers into other disciplines, including epidemiology, psychology, sociology, oenology and even football strategy. These economists usually justify their expansionism on two grounds: They say they're better with numbers than most other researchers and have a richer understanding of how people respond to incentives.
Arrogant as this sounds, there is some truth to it. Besides, the public seems hungry for the kind of real-world social science economists are practicing. "Freakonomics," by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, has spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, while Malcolm Gladwell, the author of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," has become perhaps the nation's most popular nonfiction writer by artfully explaining the science behind everyday human interactions.
Landsburg, a professor at the University of Rochester, has now come out with his own entry in the field, "More Sex Is Safer Sex," based largely on his Slate columns. The opening chapter is an expanded version of the first column. From there, he jumps into a series of counterintuitive arguments based on his own observations or on research by other economists.
"Here's an odd fact," Landsburg writes. "Throughout the industrialized world, unemployment and home ownership go hand in hand." Unemployment is low in Switzerland, where renting is the norm, and high in Spain, where most people own their homes. The pattern also holds within different regions of individual countries, and it persists over time. As home ownership rises, so does joblessness. Landsburg considers a couple of harmless explanations -- coincidence, bad statistics -- but also some causal ones. For instance, people who own their homes may be less willing than renters to move after they lose a job, making it more difficult to find new work. Another possibility is that countries or states with a lot of regulations, like rent control and strict labor laws, may be simultaneously encouraging home buying and discouraging hiring. "It's not easy to sort out causes from effects," he says. But "it's not always impossible either."
In a similar vein, he cites the familiar statistic that tall people earn more than short people, but adds a twist. According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, tall men who were short in high school earn no more than short men. Landsburg theorizes that tall adolescents develop more self-esteem, which makes them more likely to join teams, clubs and other high school activities. All else being equal, the Penn researchers found, people who participated in extracurricular activities made more money than those who did not.
At his best, Landsburg helps us see the world in new ways and confront some of our assumptions. In one chapter, he argues that you should give all your charitable donations to the single cause you deem most worthy. If you think the most important thing you can do is help a starving child by giving $100 to CARE, you should give all your donations to CARE. Your first $100 is not going to cure hunger, and the next $100 you could give -- money that might now be going to another cause -- will help just as many children. When I started reading the chapter, I was rolling my eyes. When I finished it, I couldn't decide how I felt.
Still, I suspect this book will command a much smaller audience than some of the economics-tinged best sellers, mostly because it is short on the nuance that comes from real human stories. Landsburg's characters tend toward the hypothetical -- Benny the Burglar and Manny the Mugger; Jane the A student and Mary the B student; Albert and Alvin, two imperfect altruists -- and his arguments, as he puts it at one point, can sound like "idle Sunday dorm-room chitchat."
This problem plagues many of the new economic imperialists: like the overly chaste singles who are supposedly contributing to the H.I.V. epidemic, they don't get out enough. They are asking good questions about epidemiology and psychology, but they are not spending much time with epidemiologists and psychologists, let alone with the people who are the subjects of their academic research. As a result, they arrive at conclusions that can be clever but lack wisdom, as the economist David Colander points out in his recent book, "The Making of an Economist, Redux."
Citing the doctrine that good incentives lead to good outcomes, Landsburg, for example, argues that commissioners of the Food and Drug Administration should be paid with the stock of pharmaceutical companies (to prevent them from being "overly cautious" about approving new drugs). Furthermore, he says the president of the United States should be paid with a "diversified land portfolio," since the price of land is the best measure of how many people "want to live here and plan their futures here." He also suggests that the postwar looting of museums isn't really a problem and, of course, that more sex equals safer sex. Perhaps the better conclusion is that fewer ideas would make for better ideas.
David Leonhardt writes a weekly economics column for The New York Times.
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