Welcoming freaky answers

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, philosophy

So can you buy your way into office, or can't you? Ross Perot couldn't, nor Steve Forbes. Most recently, Hilary Clinton came close, but was outvoted by the candidate she outspent (Barack Obama) in the primary. Why? If you ask Steven Levitt, he'll tell you that Obama is simply more likable. Just as Bill Clinton was more likable than Ross Perot in 1992 and as Bob Dole was more likable than Steve Forbes in 1996.

Where does Levitt get the gall to say that? From the numbers. Specifically, from asking the numbers the right kind of question: not "Does money dominate elections?" but "Does money mean more than personality?". Teasing such an answer from the statistics for many elections was done by applying a normalizing technique. Many unsuccessful candidates have run more than one campaign, and in many cases, the same two candidates have faced one another repeatedly.

If Pol B loses to Pol A the first time they campaign against one another, it is very, very unlikely that Pol B will ever win, no matter how much money is spent by either candidate. Once the populace likes Pol A enough to elect him or her, they don't change their mind unless someone even more likable comes along, or they find out that Pol A is really not so nice as was thought. The insight sheds a little more light on the "incumbency effect".

The insight that made Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner famous and infamous in equal measure, in their 2005 book Freakonomics, was the discovery that the Roe vs Wade decision in 1973 was the principal cause of the drop in crime rates that began about twenty years later. In brief, for nearly all women, the instinct to care for a baby is so powerful that she needs a strong incentive to choose abortion. Being too young, too poor, and uneducated together often provide that incentive. As it happens, criminals are mostly those who were born to such a woman. It is just such young women who were unable to get abortions prior to 1973, primarily because of poverty. Once legalized, abortion became relatively inexpensive, and abortions subsequently prevented the birth of large numbers of unwanted children. The proportion of young people who tend to become criminals fell, and with it, crime rates fell. I am decidedly not pro-abortion, quite the contrary, but the logic is inescapable.

What I found fascinating about the book—the whole title is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything—is the notion of asking a question in a particular way to get results that otherwise remain buried in the noise. For example, they examined just those Sumo matches between a wrestler who is assured of an increased ranking and one who needs just one more win to avoid a reduced ranking. The resulting anomaly proved there is some amount of quid-pro-quo occurring.

I stumbled across just such a question more than twenty years ago, when my wife and I had begun to despair of having children. One doctor was proposing a series of painful and costly tests. A move to another state (a well-timed job offer) required getting a new doctor, and this one, within minutes of meeting my wife, noticed she had a lump on her thyroid. Getting the thyroid hormone problem fixed resulted in a pregnancy. I told this to a friend in yet another state, who is also a doctor, and he told me that one-third of "infertility" can be traced to thyroid hormone problems. It is the single biggest cause. When I asked why that isn't checked first, he told me, "It is too cheap."

I'm going to pass this along to these authors, for it is but one aspect of our health care dilemma. They have no doubt put a few other questions to the same dilemma. There has been a lot of talk in the years since most of us were pushed into HMO plans, that medical decisions need to be made by medical professionals, not by insurance company hacks. However, what we really need is that medical decisions be made for primarily medical reasons, at least from the doctors' side. If the patient must make an economic decision, that is up to the patient. To me, the goal of modifying the health care climate in this country ought to be making that economic decision less painful. I'll have to read Levitt and Dubner's next book to see if they tackle this one!