In the 1890s, the Best-Selling Car Was … Electric - Freakonomics - "STANDAGE on the Electric Car in California in the 1990s: The batteries were still rubbish. G.M. didn’t want to sell them, so it just leased them to people in California. It’s a beautiful design of a car. It’s very aerodynamically efficient.
G.M. did lease the EV1 in a few other places, but California was the hot spot. Why? There were three good reasons: the California weather was neither too hot nor too cold, which was good for the batteries; California had recently passed extremely strict emissions standards; and California had the right kind of drivers to get behind an electric vehicle.
STANDAGE: They basically got a whole load of very evangelical, ecologically-minded techno-nerds in California who have leased these cars and absolutely love them and are prepared to look past their failings, which are that they haven’t got very good range and they take quite a long time to charge.
G.M. leased around 1,000 EV1s to drivers in California. The project was considered a success. But not long after, G.M. pulled the plug.
STANDAGE: The way this is usually told is that the oil companies and G.M. decided that this was bad... And I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I know it’s very easy to villainize them. But essentially, the main problem was that the more you talk about how virtuous the electric car is, by extension, you’re talking about how unvirtuous all the other vehicles you’re selling are. G.M. just realized that wasn’t a good look. Also, they could see that EV1 wasn’t a mass-audience vehicle. The technology genuinely wasn’t there yet. So, they ended the program, and they recalled these vehicles — which were not owned by the drivers but leased to them — and they literally took them away and crushed them. People held funerals for them. People were really attached to these cars."
How to Save a Stranger’s Heart - Freakonomics - "She wanted to understand if the benefits of A.L.S. ambulances — and the advanced care that they could provide on the scene — were outweighed by the risks of spending time away from the hospital... she could actually rule out that A.L.S. ambulances were being sent to sicker patients with cardiac arrest. She then ran two different analyses. In the first, she simply compared mortality outcomes of patients who received advanced versus basic care, and controlled for differences that might also affect mortality, things like age or certain chronic medical conditions.
SANGHAVI: We found that patients who receive basic life support had 43 percent higher survival up to hospital discharge than the ones who received advanced life support... these differences persisted out to two years after the cardiac arrest. So, at two years, the basic life support patients had 74 percent higher survival than the A.L.S. patients."
What is a Good Death — and Why Do So Few of Us Get One? - Freakonomics - "Up to 25 percent of annual Medicare spending goes to patients in their final year of life... No matter how much doctors try to predict it, death is largely unpredictable, even among the very sick. One study from the University of Chicago found that doctors overestimated how long hospice patients with cancer had to live — by a factor of five. As in, they might suggest you have 10 weeks, when it turns out you only have two...
JACKSON: Referring clinicians will conflate hospice and palliative care and say, “Well, they’re not ready for that yet.” And in my mind, I’m always thinking, “Not ready to feel better and to try to get extra support?” No one has to be dying to receive palliative care. Currently in the world of especially oncology right now, I graduate patients from my clinic, which I love! Because we’re getting better treatments that help patients live longer or be cured from these serious illnesses.
JENA: And just to clarify, you’re not — some patients are graduating to — to heaven, but not all of them, as they’re graduating somewhere else?
JACKSON: Oh no. I mean, they’re GRADUATED. They don’t need to come see me! They feel fine! Yeah, exactly. Exactly...
Patients who saw palliative care early in our study lived almost three months longer... They were less likely to get chemotherapy within the last 60 days before their death, which is interesting.
JENA: It suggests that for some patients that additional care perhaps is more harmful, than — than helpful. And the hard thing is for doctors to figure out, okay, what care falls into that bucket...
Just sitting there can be hard for patients too. A survey of cancer patients conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California found that 77 percent of them preferred a hopeful gamble on a treatment with a small chance to cure them — versus a treatment that guaranteed exactly two more years of life. The study suggested that patients’ value of hope — their willingness to take a chance — may be quite large. Now, hope and optimism are terrific to have. But it’s also crucial that patients understand the trade-offs in the process."
Bad News — It’s Your Surgeon’s Birthday - Freakonomics - "TSUGAWA: We still found that patient mortality was about 23 percent higher when the procedure is performed on a surgeon’s birthday compared with other days of the year."
Is Rainy Day Joint Pain All in Your Head? - Freakonomics - "SHMERLING: I think maybe the most common one I have heard is that it’s kind of a mind-body psychological connection — that we know the weather can have an effect on our psychological outlook, and we also know that our psychological state can alter our perception of pain. All of that is sort of well-accepted dogma. So, if that’s true, then why shouldn’t the weather be able to change our perception of pain, whether it’s osteoarthritis or tendonitis or something else?... you know when people say, “Is it all in your head?” Well, all pain is in your head, because that’s how we perceive pain"
Your Doctor Has to Go Home. Now What? - Freakonomics - "ROTHSCHILD: We showed that the shorter duration shifts resulted in reduction in medical errors. So, that was the good side of that study. But there were some unintended consequences... hen you have to cut back on the amount of hours in a shift, you still need the same person power. So, we had a lot more handoffs as a result of that study... Poorly done handoffs resulted in more errors and adverse events...
CHAN: If you arrive near the emergency doctor’s end of shift, you’ll end up spending 67 percent less time in the emergency department. You’re more likely to be transferred upstairs and admitted. And as a result, much more money is going to be spent on you, more tests are going to be done. The emergency department doctor could have just watched you longer, but instead appears to be rushing patients out the door as they’re nearing their end of shift."
Why Is July a Bad Month to Visit the Hospital? - Freakonomics - "When patients arrive at the hospital, they expect their doctor to make decisions — the right decisions. And as we all know, sometimes, on your first day at a new job, you don’t always know what to do. That’s not a huge problem in some professions. But in a hospital, it can be the difference between life and death.
WACHTER: There’s no way to have a system where everybody’s experienced without going through a stage where they’re not. That is the July conundrum that we face every year...
“Okay, if there is a July effect at teaching hospitals, I’ll just go to a non-teaching hospital in July.” But this might be a mistake. That same study showed that heart-attack patients have better outcomes in teaching hospitals most of the year – and in July, the outcomes just become equal to those in non-teaching hospitals. In other words, the July effect reduces the benefit of being treated at a teaching hospital — but it doesn’t eliminate it...
New hires or transfers aren’t only learning new medical procedures – they also have to learn how their new hospital works...
WACHTER: There have been studies that looked at this July Effect and showed that it was as powerful in more senior people who moved sites as it was in where the issue was simply experience...
Rob and his co-authors compared major teaching hospitals to minor and non-teaching hospitals. They found that in the months leading up to the July turnover, operational performance gradually decreased in major teaching hospitals...
HUCKMAN: When you’re doing something new for the first time – those who are supervising you may be in a position where they’re willing to let you take a little more time to do something.
For instance, in the spring, before the cohort turns over, an attending doctor might allow a first-year resident to handle the responsibilities of a second-year resident, to simulate what they’ll be doing when they move up the ladder in a few months. And you’d think this would be a worthwhile investment because it’s helping to train doctors ahead of the July transition.
HUCKMAN: Other pieces of it, however, might be inefficiency, and that’s really the tough part for us to parse out. But what we can say in our study is that the effects of this turnover, at least in our opinion, seem to be occurring before the turnover itself.
If you’re listening and starting to think wait — you’re telling me July isn’t the only time I should be a little more concerned with my care? Well, Rob’s team found something encouraging:
HUCKMAN: Our results suggest that the July phenomenon is most pronounced for length of stay in the hospital, which is our proxy for resource utilization. And are significantly less pronounced for risk–adjusted mortality, which is our measure of patient outcome.
In other words, Rob’s study found that the July effect mostly meant that patients ended up staying in the hospital for longer — but they weren’t significantly more likely to die in the hospital."
“A Fascinating, Sexy, Intellectually Compelling, Unregulated Global Market.” - Freakonomics - "RESCH: All the players combined — all the galleries around the world, and all the auction houses — their revenue combined is around $60 billion U.S. Let’s put this into perspective. FedEx makes more than $60 billion. And there is FedEx, UPS and so many other companies. So we are really talking about an industry where a lot of people are involved, nobody’s really making money.
DUBNER: I’ve read there are 100,000 art advisors in the world. What’s an art advisor and what value do they add?
RESCH: So art advisor is almost everyone who studied art history and doesn’t know what to do. The role of an art advisor is to have a client and navigate the client through the jungle of galleries and artists and point at artists that the client should buy. There are probably even more than 100,000 art advisor because everyone can call themselves an advisor. I probably know 2,000 art advisors.
RESCH: And of those, maybe three are actually selling works...
Art is a bad investment. There are only a few artists that are really worth investing in. 99.9 percent of the artists that you see at galleries and exhibitions, their value will never increase. The art market has too much supply, meaning there are way too many artists meeting very little demand.
DUBNER: And yet, if all one does is reads the headlines, one would think the art market is the best it’s ever been because we hear about record sales at the auction houses. Christie’s, Sotheby’s, even Phillips just had a massive record.
RESCH: What we’re seeing are two art worlds. One is at the very top. Twenty artists are making 40 percent of the value of the auction art world while everyone else is struggling. Same on the gallery side, you have a few galleries that are dominating the art market, while all the other galleries are failing...
The biggest problem in the art world today is that not enough people are buying art. Two hundred years ago, it was very common to have 20 to 30 artworks per household. Now, look around you. How many artworks do you have at home? We somehow lost our love for art. We enjoy viewing it in museums, but we don’t enjoy buying it.
DUBNER: And your argument is that we’ve lost our love in part because most of us have been priced out?
RESCH: We lost it because gallerists made it incredibly difficult to buy art. They established this aura of exclusivity. They established the story that art will go up in value quite dramatically. So everyone is on the hunt for the next Basquiat and Picasso, but they can’t find it. So they get lost. Why don’t we buy art because we love it, and we are supporting a community? We need to change it. And I think we can bring that change by making the art market more transparent. The primary market, where most of the artworks are sold, is a complete black box...
PRENDERGAST: Most markets are anonymous. If I have the money to buy a Mercedes, I get the Mercedes. But that is not true for many, many artists. It’s a good that gets assigned to those in the know. Much of the information is held in very narrow social networks. Work is priced in ways that just feel so strange, relative to any other market. It’s also not like a regular market in that, for most of us, if we buy something and we decide we don’t like it, there’s recourse for this. If I buy a car and I don’t like it, I can sell it. If I buy a house and I don’t like it, I can sell it. Unfortunately, that’s very much not true for most art. It’s the most illiquid market that I’ve ever seen. And I think it has a very unfortunate side effect, that only those people who can spend $25,000, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work — I think the market structure itself helps to lead to what’s a very elitist good...
CAPPELLAZZO: A work of art is worth whatever someone will pay for it — until it resells and then you know what it’s really worth. If you go to Santa Fe and you’re shopping in some gallery and they say, “This wonderful artist from Santa Fe, this work is $50,000.” And you’re like, “Well, gee, that’s a lot.” They say, “Okay, I’ll sell it to you at $45,000.” Great. You buy it for $45,000. Then you go to an auction house and you say, “Hey, I need to insure this object, um, what do you think the value is?” And we say, “Well, it’s worth $8,000. It really just has decorative value and it’s kind of big and colorful. So we’ll give you eight.” It’s like, “Whoa, what happened?”
PRENDERGAST: There’s a pricing model that seems to be used by galleries where, unless you price high, collectors will think, “This is not a great artist.” And what happens is: You walk into a gallery. A painting is $100,000. It’s somebody you’ve never heard of before. It’ll probably not sell. But in the view of the art world, this is the only thing that I can do, or else the collector won’t take it credibly. And this is the reason why the secondary market essentially discounts a lot of work so much."
“I’ve Been Working My Ass Off for You to Make that Profit?” - Freakonomics - "PRENDERGAST: Most forms of contemporary culture could legitimately claim to change people’s beliefs, change political discourse, or whatever. That’s certainly true for music over the last 30 years. I think it’s true for film. I think the great failing of contemporary art is that it leaves no mark, essentially, on the public. And I think it’s because the public simply doesn’t understand it, because the public simply doesn’t interact with it... And I think what’s so striking is how many artists are trying to have that impact, but instead end up in an art warehouse in Switzerland."
Why Do Most Ideas Fail to Scale? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: I remember reading a paper, it must have been 10 years ago, about these other mass-media, anti-drug ads. I’m not sure which ones exactly, but do you remember that Partnership for a Drug-Free America T.V. ad campaign: “This is your brain.” And then they crack an egg in a sizzling pan. “And this is your brain on drugs.”... the paper, as best as I recall, showed a similar result — and this was a nice experiment because, if I recall, the ad would roll out in different markets at different times, which let researchers like you measure the effect. And it turns out that drug use, or abuse, or whatever was being measured, didn’t fall and in some cases may have actually increased... And I was trying to figure out, like, why on Earth could it have backfired? And then I was thinking about it, like: If I’m a 16-year-old high schooler who sometimes goes to school and, maybe a little bit more frequently, smokes weed, and I’m getting up in the morning, and I’m thinking about going to school, and then I see that T.V. ad, and really what they’re showing me is a fried egg, and I think, “Ooh, that looks good. I think I’m going to smoke some weed and eat some eggs.”...
LIST: With U.B.I., my biggest concern scaling-wise would be: I want to make sure that there are not important general-equilibrium effects. And what I mean by that is: You can do a small-scale study, and have a small group of people involved in U.B.I. And that’s great, it will show great results. But what happens when 10, 20, 40, 50 percent of the local labor market is part of U.B.I.? If we scale it up, what I’m talking about here, now, are spillover effects on the local labor market, or spillover effects in the local community and whether we understand those at scale."
What Do Broken-Hearted Knitters, Urinating Goalkeepers, and the C.I.A. Have in Common? - Freakonomics - "I can’t think of a single superstition I believe in. I don’t knock on wood for good luck. Black cats do not scare me; I think they’re beautiful. And I think it’s silly when tall buildings pretend they don’t have a 13th floor, and call it 14 instead — and yet, according to the Otis Elevator company, about 85 percent of tall buildings in the U.S. do this! “Triskaidekaphobia” — that’s a fear of the number 13...
VYSE: There are some studies that suggest that among college students, humanities majors and art majors are more likely to be superstitious than natural science majors... Studies of athletes can only be correlational. The studies that have been done show that the better-performing athletes are more likely to be superstitious than the ones who are not doing well. But that doesn’t really show us that superstitions work. It just shows us that good players have them.
In other words, mediocre and bad athletes probably have superstitions as well; we just don’t hear about them."
Meme - "jordan @JordanUhl: "Who wants to tell him?"
Western Traditionallst @Western_Trad: Prague = Perfection
Western Traditionallst @Western_Trad: We live in a Hell of our own making."
Former ST political desk journalist: We were not allowed to report on good opposition candidates or highlight anything good about them - "I get super worked up when I hear people say "opposition candidates are not good". I also feel bad because as a journalist on the Straits Times political desk, I was part of the media machinery that helped perpetuate this image. There always have been really good opposition candidates who dared to put themselves up for election - you just never heard about them because we were not allowed to report on good opposition candidates or highlight anything good about them. But news of silly minor things that made them look bad - those we played up. (Photos of them with eyes half closed, mouths open, looking sweaty etc were encouraged.) There were, of course, a fair number of real nutjobs that emerged during elections. Those we played up. A lot. To build up the image that opposition is ridiculous and have no real candidates. If you still feel that way, it means you fell for the ploy. My favourite opposition candidate was Dr Wong Wee Nam who has since passed away. I covered his candidacy in 1997. If you've never heard of him and still think "opposition" never had good people... well, that's thanks to mainstream media. I tried my best to give Dr Wong and his team fair coverage. Once even managed to get a full page coverage for his party then - National Solidarity Party. It actually went to print... but boy was there hell to pay the next day. Editors had to scramble to explain to the "higher ups" why opposition candidates were given so much coverage."
Meme - "Youtube in 2009 *funny videos*"
"Youtube now *talking heads*"
Why Do Employees Stay? A Clear Career Path and Good Pay, for Starters - "Employee turnover is expensive. Replacing an employee who quits costs, on average, 21% of their annual pay. While it’s tempting to dismiss turnover as a fact of life in today’s fast-moving job market, new research shows otherwise. Many reasons employees jump ship are surprisingly simple, and business leaders who don’t ask why workers want to go may be unnecessarily losing people who are pricey to replace... One of the drivers of turnover is easy to overlook: allowing workers to stagnate in their current role. Even after controlling for pay, industry, job title, and many other factors, we find workers who stay longer in the same job without a title change are significantly more likely to leave for another company for the next step in their career. Stagnating in a role for an additional 10 months raises the odds that employees will leave the company for their next role by about one percentage point, a statistically significant effect... By providing clear paths for employees, moving them through job titles on a regular progression over time, employers can help boost perceived career opportunities and limit this type of harmful stagnation. However, our research finds that escalating workers through new job titles over time isn’t enough; making sure pay is competitive is also essential to retaining talent. We found that 10% higher base pay is associated with a 1.5-percentage-point increase in the likelihood that workers will stay at their current company the next time they move to a new role, a statistically significant link... workplace culture matters for employee retention. This will come as little surprise to leaders who are well aware of the research showing the benefits of positive company culture. When employees switch employers, we find they usually move to companies with higher Glassdoor ratings... raising a company’s overall rating on Glassdoor by one star (on a one-to-five scale) was associated with a four-percentage-point higher chance that employees would stay for their next role. Similarly, we found statistically significant links between two detailed measures of workplace culture: higher career opportunities ratings and higher culture and values ratings. In each case, raising a company’s Glassdoor rating on these two dimensions by one star (out of five) was associated with a five-percentage-point higher chance that workers would stay for their next role... We found that some workplace factors don’t seem to matter for employee turnover. The first is the quality of a company’s senior leadership. This suggests to us that workers who are deciding whether to remain with an employer do so based on their own prospects for growth in a job, or perhaps based on their relationship with their manager. Even the most inspiring CEOs may not increase worker loyalty if individual employees feel that their careers have stagnated. Second, we find that work-life balance doesn’t have any statistical link to whether employees stay or leave... On average, we find workers earn a 5.2% raise in base pay each time they transition to a new role. But more often than not, employees find it necessary to leave for a new employer to achieve that career progression: Among the résumés we examined, 73% of job transitions were workers leaving their employer, while just 27% stayed for their next role."
6 Nations That Had No Problems Invading Russia in the Winter - "For some reason, history tends to overlook the many times Russia has lost in the cold, despite their home-turf advantage...
The Japanese — Russo-Japanese War
The Finns — Continuation War
The Swedes — Ingrian War
The Poles — Livonian War
The Central Powers — WWI
The Mongols — The Golden Horde conquests"
The Poles also invaded in 1610
Should We Have to Pay for Our Sins? - Freakonomics - "MACLEAN: When you increase the tax of a cigarette, you actually can change the way that people consume the product. There’s a really interesting study from about, say, 15 years ago, that shows when you increase the tax, smokers smoke the cigarette more intensely. That is, they smoke it right down to the butt where you’re consuming the most harmful portion of the cigarette. What we see is that we’re not really improving health. People are just getting more bang out of each cigarette and maybe those last draws are even more harmful to an individual’s health...
There’s a study from the 2000s showing that people will substitute cheaper cigarettes — which tend to have more tar in them — when cigarettes are taxed...
Many sin taxes are regressive, meaning that they hit poorer people harder than wealthier people. That’s one of the primary reasons that taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages are controversial. And it’s true that sin taxes can be regressive — but, so can illness... Putting this revenue back into the communities potentially most harmed by higher taxes can try to offset some of their regressive nature...
ALCOTT: In our quantitative estimates, we find that soda taxes are actually progressive because the health benefits that accrue to low-income people outweigh the fact that they pay more in tax payments."
Are More Expensive Hospitals Better? - Freakonomics - "When it comes to our health care, do prices tell us anything about quality?
Ateev MEHTROTRA: The No. 1 financial concern for Americans is not their education, food, housing. It is healthcare...
In the studies that we have done on the impact of price transparency tools, in net we have not seen any substantive impact on both where patients get care and overall spending...
The measure of market consolidation is known as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index — let’s call it H.H.I. A market with an H.H.I. of less than 1,500 is considered a competitive marketplace — multiple sellers are vying for your business. An H.H.I. above 2,500 is considered to be concentrated. It turns out that almost 70% of the hospitals in the US are located in highly concentrated markets with an H.H.I. greater than 4,000. And lots of hospitals in smaller cities can have an H.H.I. as high as 10,000, which implies a 100% market share. So, what does this mean? It means that hospitals in these regions don’t face any local competition and their prices may reflect that...
In competitive markets — where there were lots of hospitals competing with one another — price was a signal of quality. Higher priced hospitals had lower mortality. Surprise two was that in competitive markets, the higher prices charged by the most expensive hospitals were also cost–effective...
COOPER: In hospitals that weren’t facing competition, going to these high–priced facilities really jacked up your spending — so, a 52% increase in spending. And just didn’t lead to any difference in outcomes. And, given that half the country is in a market where their hospital doesn’t face competition, it tells you that there’s something going on that we should be very, very worried about."
Homo economicus strikes again
Singapore Retirement Crisis: Pension Savings Dwindle as Costs Surge - Bloomberg - "Singaporeans’ long-term saving plans are being jeopardized by inflation hovering near the highest level in more than a decade, insufficient wage growth, accelerating housing costs and other financial burdens from living in a city recently listed as the world’s most expensive alongside New York. In addition, a reluctance by many to put money in riskier, higher-yielding investments means nest eggs are falling short. The result is nearly 60% of Singaporeans say they are not on track with their retirement plans... The result is nearly 60% of Singaporeans say they are not on track with their retirement plans... Nearly 20% of household assets, or S$540 billion ($398 billion), are stored in Central Provident Fund accounts... But after accounting for inflation over the next decade, the maximum payout from the government is likely to be less than S$2,000 per month, Lee said. That compares with the average monthly nominal wage in Singapore of S$5,847. Still, close to half of Singaporeans plan to count on CPF savings for retirement... Singapore’s sizzling property market poses another threat to disposable income"
Who Decides Where Home Is? After 17 Years, A Long Time Immigrant Reflects on Leaving Singapore - " Over her 17 years here, the system has reminded Masha time and time again that she is a foreigner. Often, when flying back from abroad when travelling, she would get questioned by authorities. “You’re too young to be working here alone, we need to check your documents,” officers would tell her. Similar to Masha, I have heard from many Russian women that they are often questioned about being escorts or prostitutes in airports across the globe. Now again she is reminded of her standing, as she waits for the result of her 10th PR application—the previous nine of which were rejected... why is Masha not a local? She will never know—PR application rejections don’t come with reasoning. Singapore has a relatively high number of foreigners living in the country, but what kind of immigrants are preferred remains unknown. On one hand, there are immigrants like Masha who are essentially locals—their relationships and lifestyle are built side by side with their Singaporean peers. Then there are immigrants who come in with job expertise or financial prowess—your researchers, finance moguls, and shipbrokers, among many others. Naturally, the government may prefer these individuals for the knowledge and experience they bring with them... more than 6 in 10 Singaporeans felt that foreigners were not doing enough to integrate. But as the Bloomberg article highlights, the newly settled rich are currently scrambling for luxury property, sports cars, and golf club memberships—is this where bonds with everyday Singaporeans are fostered?"
It seems she didn't leave in the end though
Why Singapore is a paradise for expats | by Ken Dow ✈️ | Medium - "English (sort of)
Expat community
Career growth
Travel opportunities
Modern society and infrastructure."
