When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants

by Steven D. Levitt

  Then there is 100 Bullshit Jobs . . . And How to Get Them by Stanley Bing. This book was also released just this week. Guess who the publisher was? HarperCollins!

  Then there was The Dictionary of Bullshit, published two weeks ago. At least that one wasn’t HarperCollins. Be careful not to confuse The Dictionary of Bullshit with The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit, published in February.

  Then there is Bullshit Artist: The 9/11 Leadership Myth, which came out in paperback in March; Bullets, Badges, and Bullshit, also out in March; and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, from last September.

  Is this enough bullshit? Apparently not.

  On the horizon for release later this month are The Business of Bullshit (not The Dictionary of Business Bullshit, although you could be forgiven for the mistake) and Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit.

  At least there is a few months’ respite before “Hello,” Lied the Agent: And Other Bullshit You Hear as a Hollywood TV Writer, due out next September.

  All I can say is, what the f--- is going on here?

  If Barack Obama Is as Good a Politician as He Is a Writer, He Will Soon Be President

  (SDL)

  This post was published on November 25, 2006, roughly five months before Obama announced he would run for president. It is one of the few correct predictions we have ever made.

  This is not a political blog. I have no interest in politics. But I have been reading a great book that happens to be written by a politician.

  The first time I heard of Barack Obama is when I saw his name springing up on those political signs people put in their front yards in election years. I knew nothing about him except that he was affiliated with the University of Chicago law school and he was running some hopeless campaign for the U.S. Senate. I figured the support he was getting in my hometown at the time was probably the only support he would get in the whole state. The city I lived in, Oak Park, is left-wing to the point of comedy at times. For instance, as you cross into the city, a sign informs you that you are entering a nuclear-free zone. I thought it would take little more than him having a name like “Barack Obama” to win over the folks in Oak Park.

  I was not paying any attention to the Senate race when I happened to get called at random for a poll being conducted by the Chicago Tribune. They asked me who I was going to vote for in the upcoming Senate election. Just out of sympathy and loyalty to the University of Chicago, I said I would vote for Obama. That way, when the results of the poll came out, he would have a few percent of the electorate behind him and he wouldn’t feel so bad. I was flabbergasted when I saw the results of the poll on the front page of the newspaper a few days later: Obama was in the lead for the Democratic primary! (This, of course, was well before he got tapped to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.)

  Because I am not very into politics, I didn’t pay much attention to the Senate race (which eventually was a landslide with Obama crushing—of all people—Alan Keyes). I did see him give two speeches: the Democratic convention one and his acceptance speech the night he won. Both times, I felt like he cast some sort of spell over me. When he spoke, I wanted to believe him. I can’t remember another politician ever having that effect on me. One friend, who knows Barack and who also knew Bobby Kennedy, said he had not seen anyone like Kennedy until he met Barack.

  Anyway, all of this is just a long prelude to the fact that I picked up his book The Audacity of Hope and was blown away at how well written it is. His stories sometimes make me laugh out loud and at other times well up with tears. I find myself underlining the book repeatedly so I can find the best parts quickly again in the future. I am also almost certain he wrote the whole thing himself, based on people I know who know him. If you aren’t giving Freakonomics as a Christmas gift this year, this would make a great gift.

  I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised at what a good writer he is because I read his first book Dreams from My Father two years ago and loved that one as well. But unlike that first book, written fifteen to twenty years ago before he had political ambitions, I thought this new one would just be garbage. Rarely does a book so exceed my expectations. Also, I should stress that I don’t agree with all his political views, but that in no way detracts from the enjoyment of reading the book.

  If he has the same effect on others as he does on me, you are looking at a future president.

  Medicine and Statistics Don’t Mix

  (SDL)

  Some friends of mine recently were trying to get pregnant with the help of a fertility treatment. At great financial expense, not to mention pain and inconvenience, six eggs were removed and fertilized. These six embryos were then subjected to Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), a process that costs $5,000 all by itself.

  The results that came back from the PGD were disastrous. Four of the embryos were determined to be completely non-viable. The other two embryos were missing critical genes/DNA sequences, which suggested that implantation would lead either to spontaneous abortion or to a baby with terrible birth defects.

  The only silver lining on this terrible result is that the latter test had a false positive rate of 10 percent, meaning that there was a 1-in-10 chance that one of those two embryos might be viable.

  So the lab ran the test again. Once again the results came back that the critical DNA sequences were missing. The lab told my friends that failing the test twice left only a 1-in-100 chance that each of the two embryos was viable.

  My friends—either because they are optimists, fools, or perhaps know a lot more about statistics than the people running the tests—decided to go ahead and spend a whole lot more money to have these almost certainly worthless embryos implanted nonetheless.

  Nine months later, I am happy to report that they have a beautiful, perfectly healthy set of twins.

  The odds against this happening, according to the lab, were 10,000 to 1.

  So what happened? Was it a miracle? I suspect not. Without knowing anything about the test, my guess is that the test results are positively correlated, certainly when doing the test twice on the same embryo, but probably across embryos from the same batch as well.

  But the doctors interpreted the test outcomes as if they were uncorrelated, which led them to be far too pessimistic. The right odds might be as high as 1 in 10, or maybe something like 1 in 30. (Or maybe the whole test is just nonsense and the odds were 90 percent!)

  Anyway, this is just the latest example of why I never trust statistics I get from people in the field of medicine, ever.

  My favorite story concerns my son Nicholas:

  Relatively early on in the pregnancy we had an ultrasound. The technician said that although it was very early, he thought he could predict whether it would be a boy or a girl, if we wanted to know. We said, “Yes, absolutely we want to know.” He told us he thought it would be a boy, although he couldn’t be certain.

  “How sure are you?” I asked

  “I’m about fifty-fifty,” he replied.

  If You Like Hoaxes . . .

  (SJD)

  . . . then you have to admit that this is a pretty good one: sending a piece of bogus research material to a biographer whom you happen to hate. In this case, the biographer is A.N. Wilson, who was writing a book about the poet John Betjeman. Wilson made use of the bogus letter, only to discover too late that the letter was fake—and that if you took the first letter of each sentence in the letter and added them one to the next, they would spell out this lovely message: “A.N. Wilson is a shit.”

  This reminds me of my first job in journalism, as an editorial assistant at New York magazine. Once or twice a week, it was my job to stay late to look over the closing page proofs to make sure there were no errors that the story editors, copy editors, or production editors had missed. The most important thing was to make sure that the “drop caps” (i.e., the jumbo capital letters that begin each new section of a magazine article) didn’t inadvertently spell out something offensive. One n
ight, while proofing an article about breast cancer, I found that the first four drop caps were T, I, T, and S. Yes, we changed them.

  From Good to Great . . . to Below Average

  (SDL)

  I almost never read business books anymore. I got my fill of them years ago when I was a management consultant before I went back and got a Ph.D.

  Last week, however, I picked up Good to Great, by Jim Collins. This book is an absolute phenomenon in the publishing world. Since it came out in 2001, it has sold millions of copies. It still sells over three hundred thousand copies a year. It has been so successful that seven years later the book is still in hardcover. I’ve been hearing about it for years and never looked at it. People are always asking me about it. I figured it was about time I took a look.

  The book focuses on eleven companies that were just okay, and then transformed themselves into greatness—where greatness is defined as a sustained period over which the stock dramatically outperformed the market and its competitors. Not only did these companies make the transition from good to great, but they also had the sort of characteristics which made them “built to last” (which is the title of an earlier book by Collins).

  Ironically, I began reading the book on the very same day that one of the eleven “good to great” companies, Fannie Mae, made headlines in the business pages. It looks like Fannie Mae is going to need to be bailed out by the federal government. If you had bought Fannie Mae stock around the time Good to Great was published, you would have lost over 80 percent of your initial investment.

  Another one of the “good to great” companies is Circuit City. You would have lost your shirt investing in Circuit City as well, which is also down 80 percent or more.

  Nine of the eleven companies remain more or less intact. Of these, Nucor is the only one that has dramatically outperformed the stock market since the book came out. Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay. Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

  I seem to remember that someone did an analysis of the companies highlighted in the classic Peters and Waterman book In Search of Excellence and found the same thing.

  What does this all mean? In one sense, not much.

  These business books are mostly backward-looking: What have companies done that made them successful? The future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success.

  To the extent that this doesn’t actually turn out to be true, it calls into question the basic premise of these books, doesn’t it?

  This post was published in 2008. As of this writing, Fannie Mae is trading at just over $2 per share, down from nearly $80 in 2001, and Circuit City went bankrupt. The rest of the “Good to Great” companies are a mixed bag since 2008. Some have risen steeply (Kroger and Kimberly-Clark), others have fallen badly (Pitney Bowes and Nucor), while two of the eleven companies—Gillette and Walgreens—joined corporate forces (with, respectively, Procter & Gamble and Boots) and have had considerable success.

  Cut God Some Slack

  (SDL)

  A while back, I blogged about how every third book had the word bullshit in its title. Happily, that trend faded. I could only find two books on Amazon released in the last year with bullshit in the title.

  Now it seems that going after God is the hip thing to do. Daniel Dennett started the stampede with Breaking the Spell. Richard Dawkins followed with the bestseller The God Delusion. Then came God, the Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stenger and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.

  Next up? Irreligion by John Allen Paulos (author of Innumeracy). I love the fact that the book’s release date is December 26. What could be more fitting?

  Here is what puzzles me: Who buys these books?

  I’m not religious. I don’t think much about God, except when I am in a pinch and need some special favors. I have no particular reason to think he’ll deliver, but I sometimes take a shot anyway. Other than that, I’m just not that interested in God.

  I’m definitely not interested enough to go out and buy books explaining to me why I shouldn’t believe in God, even when they are written by people like Dennett and Dawkins, whom I greatly admire. If I were religious, I think it would be even more likely that I would go out of my way to avoid books telling me that my faith was misplaced.

  So who is making these anti-God books bestsellers? Do the people who despise the notion of God have an insatiable demand for books that remind them of why? Are there that many people out there who haven’t made up their mind on the subject and are open to persuasion?

  Let me put the argument another way: I understand why books attacking liberals sell. It is because many conservatives hate liberals. Books attacking conservatives sell for the same reason. But no one writes books saying that bird-watching is a waste of time, because people who aren’t bird watchers probably agree, but don’t want to spend twenty dollars in order to read about it. Since very few people (at least in my crowd) actively dislike God, I’m surprised that anti-God books are not received with the same yawn that anti-bird-watcher books would be.

  Why I Like Writing About Economists

  (SJD)

  Over the years I have had the opportunity to write about a great many interesting people. My mother had an extraordinary (and long-buried) story to tell about her religious faith. I’ve interviewed Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; the rookie class of the NFL; a remarkable cat burglar who stole only sterling silver.

  But lately I have been writing about economists—and, most fruitfully, with the economist Steve Levitt. This is a whole new bag, and here’s why.

  A non-fiction writer like me, trained equally in journalism and literature, is constrained by what his subjects tell him. Yes, I am afforded great latitude in surrounding a subject—if Ted Kaczynski won’t discuss his trial, for instance, there are plenty of others who will—but I am gravely limited by what people will tell me and how they tell it.

  The obvious fact is that when most people are being written about, they present themselves as well as they can. They tell the stories that make them look good, or noble, or selfless; some of the cleverer ones use self-deprecation to convey their excellence. Which leaves the writer in an unpleasant situation—dependent on anecdotes that may or may not be true, or complete, and which are told in order to paint a biased picture.

  Here is where economists are different. Instead of using anecdotes to augment reality, they use data to assert the truth. That, at least, is the goal. Some of these truths can be uncomfortable. After I wrote about the economist Roland Fryer, he was assailed by fellow black scholars for having underplayed the degree to which racism afflicts black Americans. Steve Levitt’s work with John Donohue on the link between Roe v. Wade and the drop in violent crime has made people of all political beliefs equally queasy.

  But for me, the writer, this kind of thinking is a godsend—a way of looking at the world that’s more long-sighted and unbiased than journalism typically affords.

  Levitt likes to say that morality represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents the way it actually does work. I don’t have the mental horsepower to be the kind of economist that Levitt and Fryer are; but I feel lucky to have found a way to hitch my curiosities to their brains. In the parlance of economists, my skills and Levitt’s are complementarities. Like most of the language of economics, the word itself is an ugly one; but, like a lot of economics itself, the concept is grand.

  When a Daughter Dies

  (MICHAEL LEVITT)

  Steve Levitt wrote:

  My sister Linda passed away this summer. Nobody could love a daughter more than my father Michael loved Linda. My father, who is a doctor, was realistic from the start about what modern medicine might be able to do to save his precious daughter fr
om cancer. Even with those low expectations, he was shocked at how impotent—and actually counterproductive—her interactions with the medical system turned out to be. Here, in his own words, is my father’s poignant account of my sister’s experience with medical care.

  “Daddy, I am going to tell you something you are not going to want to hear. The MRI showed that I have two brain tumors.” This verbal catastrophe is the telephone message that I (an elderly, practicing gastroenterologist) received from my previously healthy fifty-year-old daughter, who had just undergone a brain MRI for unsteady gait of one week’s duration. A worrier and a pessimist, I feared the MRI might show multiple sclerosis. Metastatic brain tumors were outside even my fertile imagination. The date is August 9, 2012.

  For unknown reasons, my daughter is transferred via ambulance to a local metropolitan hospital. In a one-hour period, the MRI result has converted my daughter into an ambulance case and me into a very nervous, distressed father. A total-body CT exam shows additional tumors in the neck, lungs, and adrenal glands with possible involvement of the liver. A relationship is formed with a local oncologist, the neck mass is biopsied, and my daughter is discharged to await biopsy results. Four days later, the biopsy is read as non-small-cell carcinoma of the lung. We are told that in young women who have never smoked, this tumor occasionally may have a favorable genotype that renders it susceptible to chemotherapy. An Internet check indicates that the favorable genotype is rare and “susceptible”—one of those relative terms employed in oncology.

  A Greek aphorism warns, “Call no man happy until he is dead.” A calamity that I hoped/presumed never would occur now seems likely—I am going to outlive one of my children. I am very unhappy, and my wife asks if we will ever be happy again.

  My daughter needs local treatment of the brain tumors and systemic chemotherapy. She and her husband opt for care at a distant referral center. She promptly is seen by a neuro-oncologist at the referral center, and a PET scan confirms the widespread nature of the tumor. The following day gamma knife therapy is performed on the two major brain tumors, in the cerebellum and the frontal lobe. Nine days after the brain lesions were first observed, she leaves the referral center ostensibly in her usual good state of health (dexamethasone relieved the unsteady gait). Temporarily, I begin to eat and sleep once again. My daughter awaits a return visit to the referral center to discuss chemotherapy with a pulmonary oncologist. While I text or talk with her daily, I am completely unprepared for what I see when we meet five days later. She now looks ill. She is hoarse and short of breath with minimal exertion, and the neck mass seemingly has doubled in size. At this moment, the referral center notifies us that re-staining of the tumor indicates that it is of thyroid rather than lung origin. The appointment with the pulmonary oncologist is replaced by a visit with an endocrine-oncologist who recommends an adrenal biopsy to determine the differentiation of the metastatic tumor. Independent of the tissue of origin, it is apparent that a genetically altered monster is running rampant in my daughter’s body.