Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [1]
If nothing else, our publishers have resigned themselves to our unyielding bad taste: when we proposed that this new book be called SuperFreakonomics, they didn’t even blink.
If this book is any good, you have yourselves to thank as well. One of the benefits of writing books in an age of such cheap and easy communication is that authors hear directly from their readers, loudly and clearly and in great number. Good feedback is hard to come by, and extremely valuable. Not only did we receive feedback on what we’d already written but also many suggestions for future topics. Some of you who sent e-mails will see your thoughts reflected in this book. Thank you.
The success of Freakonomics had one particularly strange by-product: we were regularly invited, together and separately, to give lectures to all sorts of groups. Often we were presented as the very sort of “experts” that in Freakonomics we warned you to watch out for—people who enjoy an informational advantage and have an incentive to exploit it. (We tried our best to disabuse audiences of the notion that we are actually expert in anything.)
These encounters also produced material for future writings. During a lecture at UCLA, one of us (Dubner) talked about how people wash their hands after using the bathroom far less often than they admit. Afterward, a gentleman approached the podium, offered his hand, and said he was a urologist. Despite this unappetizing introduction, the urologist had a fascinating story to tell about hand-washing failures in a high-stakes setting—the hospital where he worked—and the creative incentives the hospital used to overcome these failures. You’ll find that story in this book, as well as the heroic story of another, long-ago doctor who also fought poor hand hygiene.
At another lecture, to a group of venture capitalists, Levitt discussed some new research he was doing with Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociologist whose adventures with a crack-selling gang were featured in Freakonomics. The new research concerned the hour-by-hour activities of street prostitutes in Chicago. As it happened, one of the venture capitalists (we’ll call him John) had a date later that evening with a $300-an-hour prostitute (who goes by the name of Allie). When John arrived at Allie’s apartment, he saw a copy of Freakonomics on her coffee table.
“Where’d you get that?” John asked.
Allie said a girlfriend of hers who was also “in the business” had sent it to her.
Hoping to impress Allie—the male instinct to impress the female is apparently strong even when the sex is already bought and paid for—John said he’d attended a lecture that very day by one of the book’s authors. As if that weren’t coincidence enough, Levitt mentioned he was doing some research on prostitution.
A few days later, this e-mail landed in Levitt’s in-box:
I heard through a mutual acquaintance that you are working on a paper about the economics of prostitution, correct? Since I am not really sure if this is a serious project or if my source was putting me on, I just thought I would put myself out there and let you know I would love to be of assistance.
Thanks, Allie
One complication remained: Levitt had to explain to his wife and four kids that he wouldn’t be home the following Saturday morning, that instead he’d be having brunch with a prostitute. It was vital, he argued, to meet with her in person to accurately measure the shape of her demand curve. Somehow, they bought it.
And so you will read about Allie in this book as well.
The chain of events that led to her inclusion might be attributed to what economists call cumulative advantage. That is, the prominence of our first book produced a series of advantages in