Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [81]
When Wolfers examined the subset of games that involved heavy favorites, he found something astonishing: there were too few games in which the heavy favorite won by a little more than the point spread and an inexplicable surplus of games in which the favorite won by just less. This was again Quételet’s anomaly. Wolfers’s conclusion, like Quételet’s and Poincaré’s, was fraud. His analysis went like this: it is hard for even a top player to ensure that his team will beat a point spread, but if the team is a heavy favorite, a player, without endangering his team’s chance of victory, can slack off enough to ensure that the team does not beat the spread. And so if unscrupulous bettors wanted to fix games without asking players to risk losing, the result would be just the distortions Wolfers found. Does Wolfers’s work prove that in some percentage of college basketball games, players are taking bribes to shave points? No, but as Wolfers says, “You shouldn’t have what’s happening on the court reflecting what’s happening in Las Vegas.” And it is interesting to note that in a recent poll by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, 1.5 percent of players admitted knowing a teammate “who took money for playing poorly.”20
QUÉTELET DID NOT PURSUE the forensic applications of his ideas. He had bigger plans: to employ the normal distribution in order to illuminate the nature of people and society. If you made 1,000 copies of a statue, he wrote, those copies would vary due to errors of measurement and workmanship, and that variation would be governed by the error law. If the variation in people’s physical traits follows the same law, he reasoned, it must be because we, too, are imperfect replicas of a prototype. Quételet called that prototype l’homme moyen, the average man. He felt that a template existed for human behavior too. The manager of a large department store may not know whether the spacey new cashier will pocket that half-ounce bottle of Chanel Allure she was sniffing, but he can count on the prediction that in the retail business, inventory loss runs pretty steadily from year to year at about 1.6 percent and that consistently about 45 percent to 48 percent of it is due to employee theft.21 Crime, Quételet wrote, is “like a budget that is paid with frightening regularity.”22
Quételet recognized that l’homme moyen would be different for different cultures and that it could change with changing social conditions. In fact, it is the study of those changes and their causes that was Quételet’s greatest ambition. “Man is born, grows up, and dies according to certain laws,” he wrote, and those laws “have never been studied.”23 Newton became the father of modern physics by recognizing and formulating a set of universal laws. Modeling himself after Newton, Quételet desired to create a new “social physics” describing the laws of human behavior. In Quételet’s analogy, just as an object, if undisturbed, continues in its state of motion, so the mass behavior of people, if social conditions remain unchanged, remains constant. And just as Newton described how physical forces deflect an object from its straight path, so Quételet sought laws of human behavior describing how social forces transform the characteristics of society. For example, Quételet thought that vast inequalities of wealth and great fluctuations in prices were responsible for crime and social unrest and that a steady level of crime represented a state of equilibrium, which would change with changes in the underlying causes. A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear translated into about