The Drawing Board: Corn Dogs

Why aren’t there more corn dogs? It’s a question scientists have been neglecting for years. It’s well known that we have an ample supply of corn, and you can make hot dogs out of just about anything, so what’s the hold up? I mean, sure, I’m not making any corn dogs, but then again I’m not the one complaining.

The history of corn dogs is a brief and uninteresting one. Basically, in around 1927, a guy invented them. How? Well, obviously he took a hot dog and figured out how to put corn around it. Then he got a little ahead of himself and tried it with other stuff:

An Alternative View from the Wing (and the hotel bed)

I never watch Larry King. If I were to have a dishonorable mention for retiree of the year, King would be it. Yet, recently while staying in a hotel, I watched nearly ten minutes of Larry King. I have other more systematic preference shifts when in different contexts. On airplanes, I almost always order tomato juice despite rarely ordering it on the ground.*

*I do remember taking a flight once in which they oddly took the drink orders before the plane left the ground. After regaining my composure, I believe I opted for no drink.

This phenomenon of changing preferences with changing environments is not limited to me. A German study found that tomato juice is incredibly popular on airplanes, for example. And, apparently, Ginger Ale is also disproportionately popular on airplanes.*

*A quick Google and Google Scholar search did not reveal anything on the hotel television preference issue. There is plenty, however, on Larry King’s awfulness.

Now, a shift to some classic economic theory: revealed preference theory holds that a consumer’s preferences are revealed by their behavior, or purchasing habits. So, if a woman usually buys two apples each week rather than two oranges, the revealed preference theorist would say that she prefers the bundle of two apples.*

Aught Lang Syne: The Decade in Nonfiction, Part II

In case you missed Part I of our analysis of the decade’s best nonfiction, you can check it out here.

9/11, Pirates and Emperors, Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, et. al. – Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky has always been prolific in his political writings, but the aftermath of 9/11 saw an increase in the relevance of his criticisms of American foreign policy. As an unabashed radical and critic of American interventionism, Chomsky’s writings express points of view that are virtually unrepresented in the mainstream discourse. For those who agree and those who disagree, Chomsky represents important challenges to American foreign policy that need to be addressed, given the country’s ongoing role in violent global affairs.

–John S

Moneyball - Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is arguably the best nonfiction writer of the Aughts, and Moneyball is one of the best nonfiction books of the Aughts. Lewis made Billy Beane and sabermetrics (i.e. baseball statistical analysis) into a superstar and super-method. No other book has had as much effect on the general management of a sport than Moneyball has had on baseball. OPS shifted from undervalued to properly or even overvalued (and, you know what’s next) and teams continued to hire Art Howe (well, that wasn’t a good thing). More than simply chronicling Beane’s (general) managerial philosophy, Lewis extracted meaningful themes from it such as capitalism’s push for efficiency as reflected in baseball and overcoming the deleterious effects of dogmatic insiders.

–Josh

Aught Lang Syne: The Rise of Popular Economics

One clear development in nonfiction during the Aughts has been the rise of popular economics. Popular economics nonfiction existed before this decade, but the genre proliferated in 2005 with the wild success of Freakonomics. Discover Your Inner Economist, More Sex is Safer Sex, Predictably Irrational, The Economic Naturalist, and SuperFreakonomics among others followed.

What is popular economics? Well, this nonfiction is popular in the sense that it’s written in a way that any moderately intelligent person could understand the material without any previous exposure to economics. While none of the authors of these books have writing skills as superb as Malcolm Gladwell’s or Michael Lewis’, several of the authors employ quite deft prose. Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics were co-written by a journalist, Stephen Dubner, which explains why they’re the best of the bunch in terms of writing style. Their focus on anecdotes to tease out concepts and findings is a method used to some degree by all of the authors to make their books accessible. But, perhaps the best part of their writing is their explication of their findings. For instance, they explain why the correlation between blacker names and lower income is not causal:

The Economics of Education

In this week’s New York Times Magazine—“The School Issue”—there is a short piece debating whether or not a college education is “worth it.” David Leonhardt outlines various schools of thought: On the one hand, people who earn a college degree earn substantially more than those who do not, far more than the cost of the degree itself. On the other hand, though, college-bound high school graduates are likely a more intelligent/driven bunch than those who don’t go to school at all; this group would probably be more successful even without college.

While it seems obvious to me, and to Leonhardt by the end of the piece, that a college degree is worth the hefty price, it’s less clear to me how the price should affect the choice of a particular school.

A Sign of the Apocalypse? Maybe Not

For as long as I can remember reading Sports Illustrated, I’ve always looked forward to the “Sign of the Apocalypse” section. This week’s sign is “A Long Island company is offering insurance to fantasy football owners that allows them to recoup their league fees if a player on their team gets hurt.” Sports Illustrated isn’t the only one not showering the new insurance scheme with praise. Deadspin isn’t a fan either.

The Wall Street Journal offers a solid description of Fantasy Sports Insurance’s (FSI) scheme:

What Happened to the Baseball Card?

Through the 1990s, elementary school cafeterias across the country were pervaded with ambitious young children frantically flipping through multiple binders full of baseball cards. Many children also had the Beckett Baseball Price Guide, which listed the value of virtually every card and was often consulted during a trade to determine whether one was about to get ripped off.* Children became young economists in addition to sports fans, trading based on market value.

*One problem with the Beckett Price Guide is that it encouraged children to trade not based on their preferences but on some dubious market value. But frankly, for more than almost anyone, preferences really do matter for children. A Mets fan is going to get way more pleasure out of a Jason Isringhausen rookie card (this was my favorite card as a child) than a Yankees fan. The fact that this card may be fifty cents less in value than a Jimmy Key rookie card does not mean I shouldn’t have traded for it. Yet, Beckett sometimes would promote this non-pleasure maximizing behavior. (H/T to John S. for reminding me of this Beckett criticism.)

When to Honk

“I think we should only get 3 honks a month on the car horn, because people honk the car horn too much. 3 honks, that’s the limit. And then someone cuts you off, ffffft, you press your horn, nothing happens. You’re like, “shit! I wish I wouldn’t have seen Ricky on the sidewalk!”
-Mitch Hedberg

We have posted about traffic and driving etiquette before and, clearly, we don’t plan to end this trend. Honking, like tipping, is an inexact science: Some people are more liberal honkers whereas others show more restraint. Below is my own common-sense guide to honking:

Appropriate Uses of the Honk:

-To prevent a car from merging INTO your car. If you have ever driven on a highway, you know what I’m talking about. A car puts its blinker on, you are in the adjacent lane slightly in the back of the car (presumably in the car’s blindspot), and they start to change lanes without considering you and your vehicle. A honk as a preventative measure is not only appropriate but necessary in this type of situation for the sake of preventing a collision.

Alternative Journalistic Models

John writes, “Technology has so dramatically decreased the lag-time between one person knowing something and everyone knowing it (Brown himself has a joke about re-tweets counting as plagiarism), that I wonder if ‘breaking a story’ is eventually going to be one of those outdated achievements….”  This is an interesting question, but I think just as interesting of a question is if the net amount of journalistic information available will decrease as the result of aggregation, blogging, and other technological developments. We already are seeing newspapers, magazines, and other news organizations cutting back on foreign correspondents and new hires. But, this doesn’t necessarily indicate that, in the long-run, less information will be available. It may simply be provided through a different means. The journalistic model will change. Here are four possible alternatives to the current model for information gathering*:

The Blame Game

For anyone interested in what happened at AIG last year, Michael Lewis’ Vanity Fair story is a must-read. Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, is very good at making complicated investment procedures intelligible to the uninitiated.

The most interesting thing about the story is how it illustrates the grand lesson of last year’s economic collapse: Everyone screwed up and no one person is to blame.

Compare, as Lewis does, the AIG collapse, which has largely vanished from the public memory, to the Bernie Madoff case, which arouses everyone’s ire. Madoff is a simple, if tragic, story: One guy conned a bunch of people into giving him money, and then used the money for himself and his family, leaving nothing for his clients. Madoff is a thief and a criminal and deserves to serve every year of the 150 on his sentence.