Stephen Dubner
About
Journalist and co-author of Freakonomics
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Claims by Stephen Dubner (20 of 23)
Capital punishment is not a crime deterrent
Although people would like to believe capital punishment strongly deters future criminals, the way it has historically been carried out in the United States means it does not act as a deterrent at all, and the data supporting this are fairly clear.
The bagel honor-box system shows people are honorable
Paul Feldman's office bagel delivery using an unmonitored honor box, tracked over years, found that roughly 90% of people paid, demonstrating that an honor-payment system can work and that most people behave honorably even without enforcement—contrary to economists who insist such a system cannot function.
NCAA football is a monopoly paying athletes zero
College football and the NFL are observationally similar markets—leagues, fans, TV rights, competitions—yet the average NFL player earns millions while the average NCAA player has earned zero, a stark inequality produced by the NCAA's amateurism monopoly that recent lawsuits (Alston, House) are now beginning to dismantle.
Vet practices ripe for PE because successors can't afford them
Veterinary practices are especially susceptible to private equity takeover because founding vets near retirement want to sell a valuable business, but the next generation of vets (early 30s to late 40s) cannot afford to buy it due to rising living costs and heavy veterinary-school debt, leaving a private equity investor as the best eligible buyer.
Two paths to Harvard dramatize unequal starting conditions
Ted Kaczynski, gifted and intensely nurtured in a mid-century Midwestern family valuing accomplishment, and Roland Fryer, raised amid family instability, incarceration, and drug dealing, both reached Harvard—the former as a student who went disastrously wrong, the latter as a professor—dramatizing how complex and unpredictable life outcomes are despite vastly different starting conditions.
Private equity outcomes good for shareholders, mixed for others
Research evidence (associated with Josh Lerner) on private equity buyouts shows outcomes tend to be good for shareholders but mixed for customers and employees, with more anecdotal and reported evidence being considerably worse for customers and employees.
Wealth creation is siloed from ordinary participants
The problem in the US economy is not just the level of inequality but the way wealth is being created—heightened and siloed off from how the rest of the economy's participants are faring—and the rise of private equity rolling up formerly small-scale businesses is one major avenue of that dynamic.
Economics papers uniquely consider alternative explanations
Economics papers, especially in better journals, follow a template that distinctively requires the author to propose and rule out alternative explanations for their thesis before defending it, which other social sciences do far less consistently, making economics resemble the hard sciences.
Good journalism requires reporting, thinking, and writing
To be a good journalist one must be at least pretty good at three distinct skills—research/reporting, critical thinking (assessing magnitude, anomaly, time series), and writing—and very few people are strong in all three, which is why much well-intentioned journalism fails at one of them.
Homo economicus doesn't resemble real humans
Economic models long described a cardboard figure of Homo economicus that did not resemble the actual humans people know; behavioral economics, building on Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler, helped the discipline level up by reintroducing realistic human psychology over the last 30 years.
Good storytelling needs data, time, and magnitude
The difference between good and bad journalism is that bad journalism is storytelling without data, which makes the anomaly seem normal; good storytelling must include time (over what period a change occurred), magnitude, how representative or anomalous it is, and what incentives may have changed the behavior.
KKR's Stavros gives employees ownership stakes
Pete Stavros at KKR has made it his mission to reward employees of acquired firms by giving them a piece of the equity, so that when KKR sells the operation the employees cash out, partially converting these into employee-owned firms—a model for integrating human scale into hyper-leveraged capitalism.
Executives paid less in the bagel honor system
In one office where bagels were left on both an executive floor and a lower floor, the executive payment rate was lower, which could be read as executives being more dishonest, but an alternative explanation is that executives are accustomed to things being put out for them and simply do not register the honor-box obligation—making the finding deeply inconclusive.
Field data beats decontextualized experimental data
Real field data, even small and hand-curated like the bagel man's, has value because it carries context, whereas decontextualized experimental data (e.g., a Dictator Game subject refusing money because the experimenter wore torn jeans) can be deeply misleading if the reason behind the recorded behavior is unknown.
Few homeowners sell without a realtor
A relatively tiny share of American homeowners sell their homes without a realtor, which Roberts interprets as evidence that realtors provide valuable services beyond pricing, while Dubner argues it may instead reflect the persistence of monopoly power.
Realtors retained near-monopoly commission despite information
Real estate agents have remarkably retained their traditional 5-7% commission and near-monopoly power even after the National Association of Realtors lost a major class-action lawsuit and despite the internet, which many expected would destroy information asymmetry but, in Dubner's view, has not.
Complex interactions are shaped by individual actions
Dubner concedes that markets and norms emerge from complex interactions but maintains that those complex sets of interactions are formed, if not knowingly created, by the actions of individuals and small groups—as when credentialed scientists responded to financial and reputational incentives to make smoking, sugar, or alcohol appear benign.
NFL scarcity strategy drives outsized revenue
The NFL makes far more money than baseball, basketball, or hockey despite playing only 17 regular-season games versus their 82-162, showing that engineered scarcity of games does not hurt and arguably drives its revenue as a phenomenally successful cartel.
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