Even freakier

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, philosophy

Yesterday when I reviewed Freakonomics, I was already halfway through its successor. Why is it that the best books go by so fast? A short while ago I finished Superfreakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The authors will again gain notoriety and fame in equal measure, particularly for the articles behind the subtitle: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. I've added their blog at NY Times to my regular reading list, and to the blog links on this page.

And why should suicide bombers buy life insurance? The company isn't going to pay off, unless one had the foresight to buy it two or more years earlier. It is to make themselves harder to profile. Fortunately, the authors purposely refrained from reporting the strongest profilers' tools.

A couple of decades ago, Lewis Thomas wrote of the three levels of medical care: Palliative (we can't do anything besides perhaps make the patient more comfortable), which is quite costly; Restorative (such as surgery or chemotherapy) that can be hideously expensive; and Preventive (vaccines, for example), which is cheap. Chapter 4 of Superfreakonomics expands this idea into many realms, including polio vaccine, of course (I was one of Dr. Salks thousands of experimental subjects, so this is dear to me), Robert McNamara and seat belts, the failed "remedy" of car seats (seat belts work as well, but you could go to jail for belting up your kid), and a simple hurricane prevention device.

That last item leads to the last chapter, about a company with the initials IV and its solutions to a number of ills, including global warming. I was particularly taken by this analysis:

• Forty years ago we worried about global cooling.
• Soot and smog were blocking enough sunlight to cool the climate.
• As we (the First World) cleaned up the air, the earth warmed.
• This was probably more due to cleaner air than to carbon dioxide.

I can extrapolate as well as the next fool. I expect the advancing economies of China and India to dirty the air again, probably on an even larger scale. The last eight years have seen a cooling amounting to a quarter of the past twenty years' warming. We may wish for a lot of global warming in about ten-twenty more years! Only after Western air-cleaning-and-remediation technologies become widespread in Asia will warming become a potential threat again.

Just by the by, carbon dioxide is not that strong as a greenhouse gas, and its effects are self-limiting. Increasing the CO₂ by a factor of thirty, to a full one percent of the atmosphere, cannot raise global temperature more than 4°C (7°F). The "runaway greenhouse" of the planet Venus is due to an atmospheric pressure of sixty times that on Earth, composed of more than 80% CO₂. That is 180,000 times the amount of the gas that we "enjoy".

The value of these books to me is the way of thinking, based on its premise: People respond to incentives. The incentives can vary from person to person; for example honor, dignity or social status can be a greater motivator for some people. I once read a book in which a scrupulously honest man, one who bent over backward to avoid any taint of corruption, was manipulated by someone who made him think he might be bribed to favor a certain course of action. Naturally, he overdid his zeal to avoid the bribery and was pushed to the opposite tack.

I once exchanged a series of E-mails with a new company president (I work elsewhere now), who had given a speech with the title "A Passion for Profits". I explained how, by exercising my passion for excellence, profits had always followed. His responses made it clear that, not only did he not understand people who are internally motivated, he was deeply suspicious of them, even threatened. Fortunately I was already halfway through my exit strategy to my present employer.

A final thought: where little or no money is involved, our strongest incentive is usually others' good will. This leads to: Avoid people who are adept at making you feel guilty for your virtues.