Ben Goertz

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

Read: 10/1/12

Rating: 5/5

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s blog for a couple years so the theme of the book didn’t surprise me. What’s surprising is that instead of reading a few pages last night before bed, I stayed up until 1am reading the e-book cover to cover! The structure, impeccable logic, and crisp writing make the book an enjoyable journey. I highly recommend it and I’ve already ordered two copies on Amazon to give away!

The book at its core is a collection of anecdotes and case studies researched by the author. Their is a downside of course to building a life philosophy from a couple success stories, which I believe is one of the main critiques Newport makes against the “follow your passion” viewpoint. Instead of directly pointing to the science that would solve this, Newport instead endlessly references popular books from the NY Times bestseller list: Outliers, Drive, Little Bets,… I think a better effort to link his opinions directly to scientific fact would help close the case. I maintain my high recommendation in light of this and see this more as a tasting menu towards further reading.

Buy it. Read it!

My Highlights & Notes:

Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as Thomas experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naïve. Fulfilling his dream to become a full-time Zen practitioner did not magically make his life wonderful. location 90

The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job. location 128

this main thread of my argument moves beyond the mere acquisition of useful skills and into the subtle art of investing the career capital this generates into the right types of traits in your working life. location 131

As one prominent career counselor told me, “do what you love, and the money will follow” has become the de facto motto of the career-advice field. location 182

Glass continues: “I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That’s your tragic mistake.” location 254

Here’s the CliffsNotes summary of the social science research in this area: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them. location 272

less than 4 percent of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96 percent describing hobby-style interests such as sports and art. location 283

Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, has made a career studying how people think about their work. Her breakthrough paper, published in the Journal of Research in Personality while she was still a graduate student, explores the distinction between a job, a career, and a calling. A job, in Wrzesniewski’s formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity. location 288

it seems that the type of work alone does not necessarily predict how much people enjoy it. location 299

the strongest predictor of an assistant seeing her work as a calling was the number of years spent on the job. location 304

If you have many years’ experience, then you’ve had time to get better at what you do and develop a feeling of efficacy. location 308

“nutriments” required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people location 318

In other words, working right trumps finding the right work. location 331

And yet, for all of this increased focus on following our passion and holding out for work we love, we aren’t getting any happier. The 2010 Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction found that only 45 percent of Americans describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61 percent recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey. location 362

passion-centric career planning can be deemed a failure: The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it. location 369

“follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst. location 384

I liked that phrase—the tape doesn’t lie—as it sums up nicely what motivates performers such as Jordan, Mark, and Steve Martin. If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. This clarity was refreshing. location 499

Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. location 509

First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry-level positions, which, by definition, are not going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later. When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle. location 512

Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to clear yes-or-no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused, which probably explains why Bronson admits, not long into his career-seeker epic What Should I Do With My Life? that “the one feeling everyone in this book has experienced is of missing out on life.”7 location 516

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy. location 526

In other words, forget why Jordan adopted this mindset and notice instead how he deploys it. location 549
Note: it would be easier to counter this notion with an example of a job few people admire or imagine being passionate about.

Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. location 578

Glass emphasizes the importance of the hard work required to develop skill. “All of us who do creative work… you get into this thing, and there’s like a ‘gap.’ What you’re making isn’t so good, okay?… It’s trying to be good but… it’s just not that great,” he explained in an interview about his career. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase,” location 599

THE CAREER CAPITAL THEORY OF GREAT WORK The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital. The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love. location 620

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow. The former ended up celebrated in the industry, in control of his own livelihood, and weekending with his family in a forested retreat. The latter ended up on food stamps. location 694
Note: a little extreme. Edit

THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike. location 715

There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good. location 844

it was a really fractured market with huge information asymmetry,” location 871
Note: reminds me of the labor market. Edit

There’s a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way though a tune that’s not ingrained in muscle memory, and I hated that feeling. I learned songs reluctantly, then clung to them fiercely once they had become easy for me. I used to get upset when our rhythm guitar player would suggest we try out something new during band practice. He was happy glancing at a chord chart and then jumping in. I wasn’t. Even at that young age I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world. location 924

lessons focused on picking out the leads from Allman Brothers records. “So he would write out the lead and then you would go memorize them?” I asked. “No, we would just figure them out by ear,” location 929

I played. But he practiced. location 940

German psychologists set out to determine if grand masters had freakish memories. (Interestingly, it turns out they don’t: Though grand masters are fantastically efficient at storing chess positions in their minds, their general recall ability is quite average.) location 961

Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors. location 992

The researchers discovered that the players who became grand masters spent five times more hours dedicated to serious study than those who plateaued at an intermediate level. The grand masters, on average, dedicated around 5,000 hours out of their 10,000 to serious study. The intermediate players, by contrast, dedicated only around 1,000 to this activity. location 993

They’re both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback. At the same time, notice how chess-tournament play sounds a lot like my approach to guitar: It’s enjoyable and exciting, but it’s not necessarily making you better. location 1003

In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term “deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” location 1007

“When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents,” Ericsson notes. “However, when scientists began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers… no general superiority was found.” location 1017

years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” location 1026
Note: this is a key point for matching with Skill Honey Edit

if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. location 1026

people are stuck. This generates an exciting implication. Let’s assume you’re a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you’ll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can’t ignore you. location 1030

There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it. Television writing is a winner-take-all market because all that matters is your ability to write good scripts. That is, the only capital type is your script-writing capability. An auction market, by contrast, is less structured: There are many different types of career capital, and each person might generate a unique collection. The cleantech space is an auction market. Mike Jackson’s capital, for example, included expertise in renewable energy markets and entrepreneurship, but there are a variety of other types of relevant skills that also could have led to a job in this field. location 1103

The advantage of open gates is that they get you farther faster, in terms of career capital acquisition, than starting from scratch. It helps to think about skill acquisition like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. In other words, it’s hard to start from scratch in a new field. location 1141

practice] requires good goals.” location 1150

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. location 1158

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. location 1164

This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good.” If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.” location 1169
Note: Apply this to my own life.

What’s interesting is that Martin redefines the word so that it’s less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you. The final step for applying deliberate practice to your working life is to adopt this style of diligence. location 1185

This is why Martin’s diligence is so important: Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. location 1189

You have to get good before you can expect good work. location 1270

Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts. location 1295

Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE company, all that matters is your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check e-mail are all irrelevant. They leave it to the employee to figure out whatever works best for getting the important things done. “No results, no job: It’s that simple,” as ROWE supporters like to say. location 1300

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment. location 1311

it’s dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. location 1323

Control that’s acquired without career capital is not sustainable. location 1350

once you have enough career capital to acquire more control in your working life, you have become valuable enough to your employer that they will fight your efforts to gain more autonomy. location 1391

This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. location 1482

The Second Control Trap The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change. location 1485

The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way. location 1502

nuanced heuristic, location 1514
Note: great word choice

you should only pursue a bid for more control if you have evidence that it’s something that people are willing to pay you for. location 1518

“Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.” location 1556
Note: huge insight!

The Law of Financial Viability When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on. location 1569

To understand this, notice that the definition of “willing to pay” varies. In some cases, it literally means customers paying you money for a product or a service. But it can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or, more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you paychecks. location 1573

her mission provides her a sense of purpose and energy, traits that have helped her avoid becoming a cynical academic and instead embrace her work with enthusiasm. Her mission is the foundation on which she builds love for what she does, and therefore it’s a career strategy we need to better understand. location 1675

The Power of Mission To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question, What should I do with my life? Missions are powerful because they focus your energy toward a useful goal, and this in turn maximizes your impact on your world—a crucial factor in loving what you do. People who feel like their careers truly matter are more satisfied with their working lives, and they’re also more resistant to the strain of hard work. location 1677

The Baffling Popularity of Randomized Linear Network Coding location 1727
Note: catchy title Edit

This example of joint discovery surprised me, but it would not have surprised the science writer Steven Johnson. In his engaging 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson explains that such “multiples” are frequent in the history of science. location 1732

Big ideas, Johnson explained, are almost always discovered in the “adjacent possible,” location 1740

“We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape,” he explained. The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. location 1745
Note: amazing definition Edit

discoveries often happen multiple times, therefore, is that they only become possible once they enter the adjacent possible, at which point anyone surveying this space—that is, those who are the current cutting edge—will notice the same innovations waiting to happen. location 1748

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.” location 1761

A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. location 1771

From her vantage point as a new graduate student, she was much too far from the cutting edge to have any hope of surveying the adjacent possible, and if she can’t see the adjacent possible, she’s not likely to identify a compelling new direction for her work. location 1775

If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. location 1784
Note: boom! Edit

Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of “small” thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a “big” action. location 1834

Kirk’s path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn’t decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission—to popularize archaeology—with a series of small, almost tentative steps. location 1953

“Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins”. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, “allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.” location 1963

These bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results. location 1992

aleatoric location 2051
Note: cool word Edit

“You’re either remarkable or invisible,” says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow. As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: “The world is full of boring stuff—brown cows—which is why so few people pay attention…. A purple cow… now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.” location 2057

if I publish a book that says “follow your passion” is bad advice, (hopefully) this would compel you to spread the word. That is, the book you’re holding was conceived from the very early stages with the hope of being seen as “remarkable.” location 2091
Note: clever Edit

The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking. location 2107

We’re a society trained to watch what’s on and then discuss what caught our attention the next day. location 2134

Once you identify a general mission, however, you’re still left with the task of launching specific projects that make it succeed. An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback—little bets—and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed. location 2143

Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller’s obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that’s more mentally demanding? location 2251

According to popular legend, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist, scored only a slightly above-average IQ of 125 when he was tested in high school. In his memoirs, however, we find hints of how he rose from modest intelligence to genius, when he talks about his compulsion to tear down important papers and mathematical concepts until he could understand the concepts from the bottom up. It’s possible, in other words, that his amazing intellect was less about a gift from God and more about a dedication to deliberate practice. location 2269

I actually ended up finding a pair of mistakes in the paper. When I told the authors, it turned out I was only the second person to notice them, and they hadn’t yet published a correction. location 2298

If I had to describe my previous way of thinking, I would probably use the phrase “productivity-centric.” Getting things done was my priority. When you adopt a productivity mindset, however, deliberate practice-inducing tasks are often sidestepped, as the ambiguous path toward their completion, when combined with the discomfort of the mental strain they require, makes them an unpopular choice in scheduling decisions. It’s much easier to redesign your graduate-student Web page than it is to grapple with a mind-melting proof. The result for me was that my career capital stores, initially built up during the forced strain of my early years as a graduate student, were dwindling as time went on. location 2326
Note: huge!

Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. location 2331

a little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn’t exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback. location 2442

In other words, the system as a whole is a closed feedback loop—constantly evolving toward a clearer and better supported vision for my work. location 2455

He didn’t need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him. location 2480

Related articles

• Q & A with Cal Newport, author of SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU
• Don’t Follow Your Passion
• Gen Y needs no slogan but true, authentic information (about work)!
• Do Like Steve Jobs Did: Don’t Follow Your Passion

On Writing by Steven King

Read: 6/18/12

Rating: 4/5

My Highlights & Notes:

In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.Read more at location 119

The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories by Frank Rose

Read: 4/21/12

Rating: 5/5

My Highlights & Notes:

“Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet, which is other people.” ~ Jordan Weisman – p.17

“If ever the Story of any private Man’s Adventures in the World were worth making Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish’d, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so… The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it…; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.” introduction to Robinson Crusoe in the first edition. p.32

“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art in comparison is near, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a few months later in response. Life is true; art is a construct. But Defoe was writing long before this particular type of construct became accepted as art. So never mind that every story is by definition a fiction of some sort – what Defoe was saying in his preface was, This is not a novel. - p.33

They weren’t building a game; they were building an experience that was capable of, as he [Elan Lee] put it, “transforming your life into an entertainment venue.” p.34

Interesting points about new mediums trying to mask their new powers by acting like old mediums. p.36-37

[William] Gibson calls cyberspace: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, recording.” p.38

…one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web… Passion. Obsession. A yearning to immerse oneself in stories that transpire in a fictional universe. The desire to experience that universe through as many different media as possible. A need to extend and embrace that universe by telling new stories within it. ~ quoting from an essay by William Gibson p.40

Talks about James Cameron creating a full world for Avatar, including hiring Paul Frommer – a linguist from USC – to build a language for Pandora. p.48

“I think the role of this type of film should be to create a kind of fractal-like complexity,” he [James Cameron] went on. “The casual viewer can enjoy it without having to drill down to the secondary and tertiary levels of detail. But for a real fan, you go in an order of magnitude and, boom! There’s a whole set of new patterns. You can step in in powers of 10 as many times as you want, and it still holds up. But you don’t need to know all that stuff to enjoy it – it’s just there if you want it. To me, that’s the best science fiction.” p.49

Entertainment gets defined as “escapism” by Jon Landau – I disagree. I don’t think people are always trying to escape from their boring lives. p.54

“The best stories in video games are the stories the player tells himself,” said Yannis Mallet. “In French we say ‘son propre film’ – the movie in his head.” p.57

“I like the way they think,” [James Cameron] said, still talking about the Marines. “The way they think is, they’re not doing it because it’s easy. They’re doing it because it’s hard. They’re doing it because you can’t.” p.64

… the audience for Star Wars, as for other deep media sagas, takes the form of an inverted pyramid. At the top are the hundreds of millions of people who’ve seen a couple of the movies and know Star Wars as a cultural icon. Just below them are the millions who respond to the story in different media – gamers who play the games, readers who love the books, collectors who obsess over the toys. And at the point of the pyramid are the otaku – the hundreds of thousands of superfans who are most deeply connected to the saga, who contribute to the online forums and belong to the official Hyperspace fan club and help construct the Wookieepedia, the fan-built knowledge base for true Star Wars otaku. p.74

- If the costs of production have fallen massively since the original Star Wars and creators can sell directly to fans or superfans, why are we waiting on studios? You could build an entire digital world through crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding – to a niche market and still make money.

Who controls a story – its creator or its fans? p.75

- We need to invite creatives to build these universes around a common framework. Set up the premise and then see where the creative process takes us.

… there’s nothing inherent in humans that makes them want to be passive consumers of entertainment, or of the advertising that pays for it. The couch potato era, seemingly so significant at the time, turns out to be less an era than a blip – and a blip based on faulty assumptions at that. p.87

People don’t passively ingest a marketing message, or any type of message. They greet it with an emotional response, usually unconscious, that can vary wildly depending on their own experiences and predispositions. They don’t just imbibe a story; they imbue it with meaning. Which means that perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created,” in the words of Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School, by marketers and consumers together. p.88

“For me, the deeper aspect is model building,” Will Wright continued. “We’re always building models of the world around us to help us predict what’s going to happen, and play is one of the primary ways in which we build these models. I think storytelling lives alongside play as another mechanism for building models.” p.141

Mystery, [J.J. Abrams] went on to say, is the catalyst for imagination. p.151

“Foraging,” because that’s what looking for information is like. And “sensemaking,” because the need to make sense of the show is why you need to go foraging in the first place. p.153

Great quote from William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. p.163

Interesting company named Bunchball mentioned. p.176

“Each of us is part of the giant network that we call society,” writes Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network theorist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Our world is small because society is a very dense web.” p.204

Stripped of all the apparatus of advanced civilization and pecuniary gain – stripped of Hollywood and television and publishing – storytelling is a simple act of sharing. We share information. We share experience. Sometimes we overshare. But why do we share at all?… Because life is a constantly functioning information exchange. p.204

Interesting research by Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland – mentions his book On the Origin of Stories. p.204

The most obvious thing we get is status: telling a story, (almost) any story, gives us an opportunity to claim the attention of people around us. So we compete to tell stories, to fill in the details of other people’s stories, to offer out own comment. And we get a payoff in the form of an ego boost. p.205

It’s interesting this “ego boost” idea seems to be true, it’s strange that the impact on the audience and what they gain seems to hardly ever be talked about.

Talking again about how the brain fires off in similar ways when we watch someone do something – almost as if we’re doing it ourselves. p.208-209

Poignant anecdote about John Moe on twitter. p.216

As Brian Boyd writes:
Signals that evolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms races develop between insistent senders and resistant receivers. Messages become louder, longer, more repetitive, massively redundant, like the roars of red deer stags or Superbowl advertisers. Signals user for cooperative purposes, by contrast – “conspiratorial whispers” – will be energetically cheap and informationally rich.
It’s not enough to just break through the clutter, in other words. And rarely is it worth the effort required to smash through the filter. You need to disarm the filter – and the best way to do that, the most economical and efficient way, is to signal that your signal is nonthreatening. p.236

It’s like Alex Bogusky said: this generation knows you’re trying to sell them something, and you know they know, so let’s drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible. p.240

Cool story about Nick Haley. He did a homemade iPod ad to the song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by Cansei de Ser Sexy – “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” p.240

By subtly directing brand perceptions while encouraging the consumer to help create those perceptions, Howard maintained, the marketer can help the brand and the consumer to, in effect, become one. “You can’t rely on ads,” she said. “A brand becomes relevant by infusing itself directly into the culture“… “Advertising used to interrupt life’s programming. Now advertising is the programming. And if you’re actually being marketed to successfully, you have no idea.” p.242

Jeff Gomez is big on myth. “We see ourselves as stewards,” he said. In too many cases – Star Wars being an obvious exception – the producers of a movie or a television show or a video game haven’t plumbed their story deeply enough even to identify its message, much less whatever underlying myth it may embody. “So the message changes and the audience becomes frustrated,” he went on. “It’s our job to figure it out. And to do that [you have to find] the core of the story. “That means immersing ourselves in it and figuring out what makes it timeless and relevant. There’s an aha! moment that’s very specific to each property. It’s the moment when I’ve found the true emotional connection.” p.245-246

Wow! Gomez’s group – Starlight Runner – produces a huge 150 page book to develop the “story worlds”… from a platform-neutral perspective… so robust as to furnish hundreds of hours of content. p.246

“Do people like storytelling?” asked Nick Law, R/GA’s chief creative officer for North America, when I saw him at the agency’s New York headquarters. “Of course people like storytelling. But given the choice, they’re probably going to go to HBO.” p.249-250

[TV ads now]… it’s a ballooning of entertainment at the expense of information. It’s a poor man’s Hollywood.” But what civilians actually want, he argued, is information. p.251

Cool chart about system thinkers. p.253

…dopamine has less to do with pleasure itself than with the drive to seek pleasure. p.262

“Addictive drugs hijack the natural reward system,” he continues, “and what we showed was that video games hijack it as well.” At the same time, the experiment also connected gaming to another behavior – one seemingly quite different, yet equally connected with the role of dopamine in the brain’s reward circuitry: learning.
“Learning and addiction are very tightly bound together.” p.264

Fascinating brain science. p.266

“If you measure dopamine while an animal is searching, it’s very high,” LeDoux said later, over lunch at a lower Manhattan cafe. “But when they find something and consume it, dopamine doesn’t register. It’s more in the seeking than in the attainment of the goal.” If anticipation is so often sweeter than success, dopamine would seem to be the reason why. p.268-269

Scientist at Concordia University hypothesized that dopamine servers to heighten the brain’s focus in response to uncertainty, possibly in an attempt to learn how to predict the reward. p.271

This emotional system… makes animals intensely interested in exploring their world and leads them to become excited when they are about to get what they desire. It eventually allows animals to find and eagerly anticipate the things they need for survival, including, of course, food, water, warmth, and their ultimate evolutionary survival need, sex. In other words, when fully aroused, it helps fill the mind with interest and motivates organisms to move… in search of the things they need, crave, and desire. p.272 block quote from Jaak Panksepp

Related articles

• The Internet and the ‘Art of Immersion’ (cnet.com)
• Multichannel customer experience – Q&A: Frank Rose on digital storytelling and media immersion (serve4impact.com)
• Storytelling experiments – Frank Rose: digital technology allows multi-way conversations (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Macroeconomic storytelling (cafehayek.com)
• James Cameron And Getting Trapped Inside Your Most Successful Creation (wnyc.org)
• Received: Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion (datamining.typepad.com)
• Will James Cameron Become the Next George Lucas? (screencrave.com)

“Freakanomics” Rev Ed: (and Other Riddles of Modern Life) (P.S.) by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Freakonomics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Read: 3/23/12

Rating: 5/5

The best books inspire great questions that leave me day dreaming about solutions to problems. Dubner and Levitt are like mythbusters for economics, politics, science, or any other field they wish to go after. Their core concept here is questioning everything – especially if it’s considered “common knowledge.” Levitt’s geniues as an economist has been credited to his ability to measure data typically considered outside the realm of economics. This non-traditional, lateral thinking is what I love most about the book. As a reader I start to feel like each new riddle seems more and more beatable – like these unrelated fields can all be approached with a similar toolkit and economics just happens to be the best tool for many of the sticky questions.

My Highlights & Notes:

he approached economics in a notably unorthodox way. He seemed to look at the world not so much as an academic but as a very smart and curious explorer—a documentary filmmaker, perhaps, or a forensic investigator or a bookie whose markets ranged from sports to crime to pop culture.Read more at location 46

“I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.”Read more at location 50

Note: This is the stuff! I feel this way just taking basic econ classes.

As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions.Read more at location 55

he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want.Read more at location 61
Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (although he is afraid of calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable.Read more at location 62

Levitt’s underlying belief: that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.Read more at location 70

Note: I don’t know that this is true but it’s an interesting premise.

“We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,” Clinton said, “or our country is going to be living with chaos.Read more at location 123

Note: Interesting how their predictions were so wrong. Who tracks this stuff?

These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives.Read more at location 136

If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along.Read more at location 137

Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal.Read more at location 154

You depend on her for this information. That, in fact, is why you hired an expert. As the world has grown more specialized, countless such experts have made themselves similarly indispensable.Read more at location 172

In a medical study, it turned out that obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas—suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures.Read more at location 180

Someone who didn’t know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generallyRead more at location 220

It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.Read more at location 256

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.Read more at location 258

in the face of the Internet, their informational advantage is shrinking every day—as evidenced by, among other things, the falling price of coffins and life-insurance premiums.Read more at location 273

Note: What? Edit

Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. If you learn to look at data in the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Because there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.Read more at location 275

“Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in the position of a third person, an impartial observer,” Heilbroner wrote, “and in this way to form a notion of the objective…merits of a case.”Read more at location 296

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.Read more at location 314

The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.Read more at location 315

But most incentives don’t come about organically. Someone—an economist or a politician or a parent—has to invent them.Read more at location 327

a solution to this one: automatic tax withholding from employees’ paychecks.Read more at location 331

Note: Was this really one of Friedman’s contributions? Edit

when people are given a small stipend for donating blood rather than simply being praised for their altruism, they tend to donate less blood. The stipend turned a noble act of charity into a painful way to make a few dollars, and it wasn’t worth it.Read more at location 368

Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary.Read more at location 373

as W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.Read more at location 375

Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.Read more at location 389

teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished.Read more at location 415

If economics is a science primarily concerned with incentives, it is also—fortunately—a science with statistical tools to measure how people respond to those incentives. All you need are some data.Read more at location 436

A dramatic one-year spike in test scores might initially be attributed to a good teacher; but with a dramatic fall to follow, there’s a strong likelihood that the spike was brought about by artificial means.Read more at location 452

this is a less charitable but just as likely answer—she doesn’t know the right answers herself. (With standardized tests, the teacher is typically not given an answer key.) If this is the case, then we have a pretty good clue as to why her students are in need of inflated grades in the first place: they have a bad teacher.Read more at location 520

They weren’t the ones who artificially jacked up their scores; they probably expected to do great in the seventh grade—and then they failed miserably. This may be the cruelest twist yet in high-stakes testing. A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.Read more at location 537

a good teacher’s students carried over all their gains into the next grade.Read more at location 552

The evidence was only strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned. The final outcome of the Chicago study is further testament to the power of incentives: the following year, cheating by teachers fell more than 30 percent.Read more at location 579

Note: Why can they only warn them! That’s ridiculous! Cheating teachers should be charged with fraud. Edit

As Malloy saw it, all his troubles stemmed from the one fight in which he took a dive. Otherwise, he could have had class; he could have been a contender.Read more at location 617

theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected.Read more at location 722

Note: Why do we consider street crime so egregious compared to white collar crime? Surely more people have been damaged from losses related to Enron and Wall St than muggings or thefts. How many people would you have to steal from to reach the level of Wall St. fraud? What’s the average loss from theft? Edit

But white-collar crime presents no obvious victim. From whom, exactly, did the masters of Enron steal? And how can you measure something if you don’t know to whom it happened, or with what frequency, or in what magnitude?Read more at location 724

economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 “Beer on the Beach” study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.Read more at location 731

the same people who routinely steal more than 10 percent of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box—a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft.Read more at location 742

a smaller community tends to exert greater social incentives against crime, the main one being shame.Read more at location 757

(Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)Read more at location 768

“The Ring of Gyges,”Read more at location 777

In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant spelled out for the House of Representatives the true aims of the Ku Klux Klan: “By force and terror, to prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free ballot, to suppress the schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce the colored people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery.”Read more at location 794

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to full-scale racial segregation.Read more at location 803

D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (originally titled The ClansmanRead more at location 804

Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between the new Klan and the new threat in Europe: “Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini,” he wrote. “Looks to me like it’s the Ku Klux that he is copying.”Read more at location 811

Kennedy would go on to become a self-described “dissident at large,”Read more at location 826

the few anti-hate groups that existed at the time had little leverage or even information about the Klan. “Almost all of the things written on the subject were editorials, not exposés,” Kennedy would later explain. “The writers were against the Klan, all right, but they had precious few inside facts about it.”Read more at location 834

It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)Read more at location 847

Note: This is what children do. Edit

he would ask for a “Mr. Ayak”—“Ayak” being code for “Are You a Klansman?” He would hope to hear this response: “Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai”—code for “A Klansman Am I.”Read more at location 849

Note: Poor choice of code words. Edit

The second is the absence of a correlation between lynchings and Klan membership: there were actually more lynchings of blacks between 1900 and 1909, when the Klan was dormant, than during the 1920s, when the Klan had millions of members—which suggests that the Ku Klux Klan carried out far fewer lynchings than is generally thought.Read more at location 859

The most compelling explanation is that all those early lynchings worked. White racists—whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—had through their actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive scheme that was terribly clear and terribly frightening.Read more at location 868

there are few incentives more powerful than the fear of random violence—which, in essence, is why terrorism is so effective.Read more at location 874

Then there were rackets like the Klan’s Death Benefit Association, which sold insurance policies to Klan members and accepted only cash or personal checks made outRead more at location 882

to the Grand Dragon himself.Read more at location 883

overheated passages from the Klan’s bible, which was called the Kloran.Read more at location 900

the Klan hierarchy as it proceeded from the local to the national level: an Exalted Cyclops and his twelve Terrors; a Great Titan and his twelve Furies; a Grand Dragon and his nine Hydras; and the Imperial Wizard and his fifteen Genii.Read more at location 904
he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.Read more at location 923

Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.Read more at location 951

It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a verity of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a consumer). But information asymmetries everywhere have in fact been gravely wounded by the Internet.Read more at location 959

Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not.Read more at location 962

Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch and Jack Grubman of Salomon Smith Barney wrote glowing research reports of companies they knew to be junk.Read more at location 978

Though extraordinarily diverse, these crimes all have a common trait: they were sins of information. Most of them involved an expert, or a gang of experts, promoting false information or hiding true information;Read more at location 982

For an information crime to reach the surface, something drastic must happen. When it does, the results tend to be pretty revealing.Read more at location 988

If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you’d be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.Read more at location 998

experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear.Read more at location 1007

the agent’s main weapon: the conversion of information into fear.Read more at location 1027

The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that haven’t been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers.Read more at location 1233

“We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.” Economic and social behaviors, Galbraith continued, “are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere,Read more at location 1238

as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.”Read more at location 1241

But Listerine changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. TwitchellRead more at location 1262

Note: Interesting books listed on amazon. Edit

As it happened, J. T. was a college graduate himself, a business major.Read more at location 1348

if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.Read more at location 1384

except for the top cats, they don’t make much money. They had no choice but to live with their mothers. For every big earner, there were hundreds more just scraping along.Read more at location 1434

The top 120 men in the Black Disciples gang represented just 2.2 percent of the full-fledged gang membership but took home well more than half the money.Read more at location 1435

A 1-in-4 chance of being killed! Compare these odds with those for a timber cutter, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United States. Over four years’ time, a timber cutter would stand only a 1-in-200 chance of being killed. Or compare the crack dealer’s odds to those of a death-row inmate in Texas, which executes more prisoners than any other state. In 2003, Texas put to death twenty-four inmates—or just 5 percent of the nearly 500 inmates on its death row during that time. Which means that you stand a greater chance of dying while dealing crack in a Chicago housing project than you do while sitting on death row in Texas.Read more at location 1453

Had they grown up under different circumstances, they might have thought about becoming economists or writers. But in the neighborhood where J. T.’s gang operated, the path to a decent legitimate job was practically invisible.Read more at location 1464

Note: How do we start to solve this? Edit

So if the prize is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance. On the south side of Chicago, people wanting to sell crack vastly outnumbered the available street corners.Read more at location 1472

when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.Read more at location 1474

After six years running his local gang, J. T. was promoted to the board of directors. He was now thirty-four years old. He had won the tournament.Read more at location 1520

This claim would spark a belief that still seethes to this day, especially among urban blacks, that the CIA itself was the chief sponsor of the American crack trade.Read more at location 1547

Note: Interesting. Has this been followed? Edit

“Apparently, it takes a Ph.D. in criminology to doubt that keeping dangerous criminals incarcerated cuts crime.”Read more at location 1697

This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.Read more at location 1759

Soon after the city’s crime turnaround landed Bratton—and not Giuliani—on the cover of Time, Bratton was pushed to resign. He had been police commissioner for just twenty-seven months.Read more at location 1777

a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it.Read more at location 1914

Note: This sounds 99% selfish Edit

the number of babies put up for adoption (which has led to the boom in the adoption of foreign babies).Read more at location 1936

G. K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads.Read more at location 1974

Consider the effort to save the northern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs—that is, the income surrendered by the logging industry and others—would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million per owl.Read more at location 1986

“Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,”Read more at location 2059
The most radical shift of late in the conventional wisdom on parenting has been provoked by one simple question: how much do parents really matter?Read more at location 2110

genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child’s personality and abilities.Read more at location 2116
Judith Rich Harris. The Nurture AssumptionRead more at location 2123

Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author, who in his own book Blank Slate called Harris’s views “mind-boggling” (in a good way).Read more at location 2133

Let’s say that we want to ask the ECLS data a fundamental question about parenting and education: does having a lot of books in your home lead your child to do well in school? Regression analysis can’t quite answer that question, but it can answer a subtly different one: does a child with a lot of books in his home tend to do better than a child with no books? The difference between the first and second questions is the difference between causality (question 1) and correlation (question 2). A regression analysis can demonstrate correlation, but it doesn’t prove cause.Read more at location 2253

Note: Great overview of correlation. Edit

Even fifty years after Brown v. Board, many American schools are virtually segregated. The ECLS project surveyed roughly one thousand schools, taking samples of twenty children from each. In 35 percent of those schools, not a single black child was included in the sample.Read more at location 2285

The typical white child in the ECLS study attends a school that is only 6 percent black; the typical black child, meanwhile, attends a school that is about 60 percent black.Read more at location 2287

Perhaps educators and researchers are wrong to be so hung up on the black-white test score gap; the bad-school/good-school gap may be the more salient issue.Read more at location 2295

poor testing in early childhood isn’t necessarily a great harbinger of future earnings, creativity, or happiness.Read more at location 2310

whether a child’s family is intact doesn’t seem to matter. Just as the earlier-cited studies show that family structure has little impact on a child’s personality, it does not seem to affect his academic abilities either, at least in the early years.Read more at location 2347

(In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world’s best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read on their own by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.)Read more at location 2406

Here’s a likely theory: most parents who buy a lot of children’s books tend to be smart and well educated to begin with.Read more at location 2433

A book is in fact less a cause of intelligence than an indicatorRead more at location 2437

To overgeneralize a bit, the first list describes things that parents are; the second list describes things that parents do. Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn’t seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start or frequently read to or plopped in front of the television.Read more at location 2455

But it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are. In this regard, an overbearing parent is a lot like a political candidate who believes that money wins elections—whereas in truth, all the money in the world can’t get a candidate elected if the voters don’t like him to start with.Read more at location 2464

adopted children test relatively poorly in school; any influence the adoptive parents might exert is seemingly outweighed by the force of genetics. But, Sacerdote found, the parents were not powerless forever. By the time the adopted children became adults, they had veered sharply from the destiny that IQ alone might have predicted. Compared to similar children who were not put up for adoption, the adoptees were far more likely to attend college, to have a well-paid job, and to wait until they were out of their teens before getting married. It was the influence of the adoptive parents, Sacerdote concluded, that made the difference.Read more at location 2471

in his life, he found he liked them. After graduate workRead more at location 2521

Note: What was the focus of his graduate work? Edit

I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong, and I want to devote my life to this.”Read more at location 2525

Note: This goes along with Bret Victors life structure. Edit

Fryer came to wonder: is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it?Read more at location 2531

most significantly, her own date of birth. This last fact made it possible to identify the hundreds of thousands of California mothers who had themselves been born in California and then to link them to their own birth records. Now a new and extremely potent story emerged from the data: it was possible to track the life outcome of any individual woman. This is the sort of data chain that researchers dream about,Read more at location 2631

His name is an indicator—not a cause—of his outcome. Just as a child with no books in his home isn’t likely to test well in school, a boy named

DeShawn isn’t likely to do as well in life.Read more at location 2644

Most Common High-End White Boy Names 1. BenjaminRead more at location 2700

Note: From Freakanomics Edit

Most Common White Boy Names Among High-Education Parents 1. BenjaminRead more at location 2718

A caution to prospective parents who are shopping for a “smart” name: remember that such a name won’t make your child smart; it will, however, give her the same name as other smart kids—at least for a while.Read more at location 2771

Eleanora (15.80)Read more at location 2786

MacGregor (16.10)Read more at location 2798

There is a clear pattern at play: once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Amber and Heather started out as high-end names, as did Stephanie and Brittany. For every high-end baby named Stephanie or Brittany, another five lower-income girls received those names within ten years.Read more at location 2868

Parents are reluctant to poach a name from someone too near—family members or close friends—but many parents, whether they realize it or not, like the sound of names that sound “successful.”Read more at location 2881

AnsleyRead more at location 2897

AveryRead more at location 2898

EleanoraRead more at location 2899

FlanneryRead more at location 2901

there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world.Read more at location 2928

if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.Read more at location 2937

The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions.Read more at location 2938
“I gave up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn’t know,” he says. “I mean, I just—I just don’t know very much about the field of economics. I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.”Read more at location 2976
He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else had found.Read more at location 2988

“Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science,” says Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. “He represents something that everyone thinks they will be when they go to grad school in econ, but usually they have the creative spark bored out of them by endless math—namely, a kind of intellectual detective trying to figure stuff out.”Read more at location 2995

Behavioral economists have called into doubt the very notion of “homo economicus,” the supposedly rational decision-maker in each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into bordering disciplines—psychology, criminology, sociology, even neurology—with the intent of rescuing their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical models.Read more at location 3003

“Steve isn’t really a behavioral economist, but they’d be happy to have him,” says Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. “He’s not really an old price-theory guy, but these Chicago guys are happy to claim him. He’s not really a Cambridge guy”—although Levitt went to Harvard and then M.I.T.—“but they’d love him to come back.”Read more at location 3009
A syllogism, after all, can be a magic trick: All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.Read more at location 3041

“The first step in analyzing suspicious strings is to estimate the probability each child would give a particular answer on each question,” he wrote. “This estimation is done using a multinomial logit framework with past test scores, demographics and socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables.”Read more at location 3071

Other grad students stayed up all night working on problem sets, trying to make good grades. He stayed up researching and writing. “My view was that the way you succeed in this profession is you write great papers,” he says. “So I just started.”Read more at location 3094

Sometimes he would begin with a question. Sometimes it was a set of data that caught his eye.Read more at location 3096

He completed his Ph.D. in three years, but because of his priorities, he says, he was “invisible” to the faculty, “a real zero.” Then he stumbled upon what he now calls the turning point in his career.Read more at location 3110

Nozick turned to the other fellows: “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine.”Read more at location 3127
To Levitt, Becker is the most influential economist of the past fifty years.Read more at location 3133
Be honest about your weaknesses. Has there ever been a prizewinning scholar as honest about his weaknesses as Steven Levitt? He doesn’t understand economics, he claims, or math.Read more at location 3177

Further Learning

• Steven Levitt’s University of Chicago page - http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Freakonomics.html
• Steven Levitt’s TED Talk on Crack Economics – http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html
• Steven Levitt’s TED Talk on child carseats - http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.html

Related articles

• Freakonomics: Did It Go Right or Wrong? (3quarksdaily.com)
• A kaleidoscope of responses to Dubner’s criticisms of our criticisms of Freaknomics (andrewgelman.com)