Twilight Timing

May 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

Jacob and Isabella were the most popular baby names last year.  Some observers, even some sociologists, see this as the influence of “Twilight.”  (See here for example.) 
But Jacob, Isabella, and even Bella were on the rise well before Stephanie Meyer sent her similarly-named characters out to capture the hearts ,minds and naming preferences of romantic adolescents. 

(Click on the graph for a larger view)

The forecasters predict a bumper crop soon in Rue, Cato, and perhaps other names that are from Hunger.  Still, since the YA audience for these books and movies are more Y than A, I’m hoping for lag time of at least a few years before they start naming babies.  As I blogged earlier (here) “Splash,” the film with Darryl Hannah as Madison the mermaid, came out in 1984, but it was not until nine years later that Madison surfaced in the top 100 names. And if there’s a Hogwarts effect, we’re still waiting to see it.  The trend in Harry and Harold is downward on both sides of the Atlantic, and Hermione has yet to break into the top 1000.

Don’t look for any Katnisses to be showing up on your class lists for quite a while.

Game Theory – It Takes Balls

April 30, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

I don’t know much about game theory.  I’ve always found it hard to squeeze real-life situations into the shape of a prisoner’s-dilemma matrix and to think of life as a game.  A game show, on the other hand, is a game.  And the final round of the British show “Golden Balls” is totally Prisoner’s Dilemma.  (Shouldn’t that apostrophe be moved to make it be Prisoners’ Dilemma? After all, it’s not solitaire.)

You can get the idea of the set-up in the first two minutes of this clip.*  But don’t stop there.  Watch the full six minutes, and appreciate the ingenuity of the strategy played by Nick (he’s the guy in the brown shirt on the right of the screen).

SPOILER SPACE, which I’ll fill with the “Golden Balls” matrix.

In many prisoner’s dilemma scenarios, the prisoners are separated and can’t discuss their options.  In “Golden Balls,” they can talk things over, the only catch being that each player is well aware that the other might be lying.  Earlier rounds of the game are designed to encourage lying. 

Nick is ingenious in two ways.  First, he brings in an option that “Golden Balls” does not include but cannot exclude: the offer to split the loot 50-50 after the show even if the show gives the entire amount to him.

Second (and here is where my lame game-theory knowledge is showing), by convincingly maintaining that he is going to Steal, he destroys the Nash equilibrium that “Golden Balls” tries to create.  He forces Ibraham to choose Split, for Ibraham’s position n ow becomes this:

• If Nick is fully telling the truth about sharing: Split, I get £6500. Steal, I  get 0
• If Nick is lying about sharing: Split, I get 0.  Steal, I get 0.
• So my only hope of getting anything is Split.  

Which is what he does. 

Nick’s ploy also creates an interesting dramatic switcheroo for the viewers as well.  As we watch the clip, it looks as though all the pressure is on Ibraham.  We can see him debating with himself and with Nick.  But after the two men show their balls, we realize that in reality, it’s Nick who had to be sweating, not about which choice he will make – he has already decided that – but about whether he is actually fooling  Ibraham.  He was betting £13,000 on his own acting ability.  That takes balls.

One other observation: I used to watch “Survivor,” and when players would lie and succeed, I might have admired them for being the clever strategist, but I didn’t like them.  In fact, I often actively disliked them.  But here, when I found that Nick had lied successfully, I was hoping that Ibraham or “Golden Balls” would give him a few extra pounds as a bonus.

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* The clip is from February.  I found it thanks to  Planet Money, which posted it last week without comment.

Weed Arrests Are Not About Weed*

April 29, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Arrest data for some crimes rise or fall with the amount of that crime.  If you see arrests for homicide increasing, you can be fairly sure that homicide itself is on the increase.  By contrast, an increase in arrests for prostitution is almost certainly the sign of a “crackdown.”  A higher level official – the precinct commander, the police brass, maybe even the mayor – has told the cops on the street to arrest more hookers. 

Neither of these explanations accounts for the trend in marijuana arrests in New York, particularly in the Bronx.  On Sept. 19, 2011, Ray Kelly, the NYPD commissioner, issued an order that police should not arrest people for possession of small amounts of marijuana, the personal-use weed that cops found in stop-and-frisks. 

The Guardian has published some graphs (here) showing the numbers of marijuana arrests in 2011 and in the previous three years.  These usually decline in the fall – cooler weather, back-to-school – and the Kelly edict should have steepened the slope.  But that’s not what happened.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community notes that marijuana arrests are often “substitute arrests.”  Just as a substitute drug is what you use when you can’t get the drug you want, a substitute arrest is one cops make when they can’t arrest the person for the crime they’d like to bust him for.   The cops might be doing whatever they can to punish someone witnesses might not want to testify against – a high-level drug dealer, a frequent wife-beater, or even a robber. Or the cops might be using stop-and-frisk marijuana arrests to get troublemakers off the street, at least temporarily, in order to maintain order.  Or they may be using the arrest to assert their authority (or from the arrestees’ perspective, throwing their weight around by hassling kids). 

“Substitution arrest” may be good explanation for why police bother to make these one-joint arrests.  But it does not account for the increase in such arrests following an order from the top to stop doing it.

I’m puzzled.


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*The title of this post is derived from one of Robin Hanson’s favorite constructions   I’ve used it before (here), and I’ll probably use it again.

We Want to Have Our Appendix Out Too

April 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

How compatible are medical care and the free market?

The SocioBlog’s most viewed post (it got Boinged) showed widely varying prices among countries for the same medical products (hospital stay, Lipitor, OB delivery, office visit).  The US prices were four to ten times higher. 

Within the US, even within the same county, prices also vary widely.  Sarah Kiff at WaPo’s Wonkblog reports (here) on a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine (gated, here) that compared prices for an appendectomy.  The range: $1,500 to $187,000.  It’s as though the price of haircut ranged from $15 to $1870.   Even in the county with the least variation, the difference between the least and most expensive was $46,000.

It’s essentially the same service, though one haircut or appendectomy might be much better than another.  But not that much better.  These prices suggest that the usual market processes are not in play.  And they are not.  When I get a haircut, I pay the barber, and I check the price list before I go into the shop.  If my haircut insurance company were paying, I’d just walk in.

Also, unlike an appendectomy, my haircut is not an urgent production.  My untrimmed hair is not causing me to double over in intense pain, desperate for relief.  Even if I don’t act quickly, I won’t die.  I can take my time to shop around.  I can ask friends for suggestions, I can look for online reviews, and afterwards, I can form a reasonable opinion of the barber’s competence.  I’ve never had appendicitis, and unlike Miss Clavel's charges, I’m not eager for it.  But if my appendix were to start acting up, I’m sure I would not be a Consumer Reports type of consumer. 
 
The market is supposed to bring us more and better goods and services at a lower price.  With healthcare in the US, both the process and the outcomes suggest that this is not the ideal example of a market.