From a reader named Kevin O’Toole comes a bleg that needs input from people with experience in the realms of running, races, and maybe Olympic competition. (We tussled with Olympic medal counts here; and Justin Wolfers harnessed your collective wisdom when he ran the Stockholm Marathon.) Here’s Kevin’s story:

For the past few years, I’ve had some ongoing bets with friends at work (a supply-chain management company in Atlanta) around weight loss and fitness — just to stay in shape and keep it interesting. We’ve refined things based on the concept we liked at StickK.com (haven’t been there in a while, but I heard about it on Freakonomics).

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A business exec told me that he thinks of consulting firms a bit like Charlie Sheen thinks about prostitutes. When I asked him to explain, he said that when Sheen was being sentenced for using a prostitute, the judge asked him why a man like him would have to pay for sex. And Sheen reportedly replied: “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.” The exec went on to explain that he prefers hiring business consulting firms that also do their jobs and then leave.

I’m repelled, but fascinated, by Sheen’s reasoning.

This story got me thinking about the demand for non-relational contracting. Ian MacNeil, my former colleague at Northwestern, was famous for claiming that most contracting is “relational” — or extends the duty to perform contracts through time and repeated transactions. But Sheen’s (possibly apocryphal) quotation has me thinking that there may be contexts in which people would pay a premium to avoid a relationship. Read more…

New York magazine, riffing on Drew Barrymore’s starring role in the film adaptation of He’s Just Not That Into You, suggests 10 other self-help books that should be Barrymore vehicles, including Freakonomics:

Drew Barrymore stars as a free-spirited Northwestern economics grad student who ventures into the Cabrini Green projects on the south side of Chicago to research the lives of drug dealers. Along the way, she finds herself drawn to a dashing young man (Tristan Wilds, The Wire) who yearns to escape the lifestyle and move with her to the suburbs of Evanston. The two quickly begin falling for each other, but one thing stands in the way of their blossoming romance: the fact that he still lives with his hilariously outspoken mother (Martin Lawrence).

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Over the past few months, the press has deluged Americans with weepy stories about people who are in danger of losing their houses because their sub-prime mortgages now exceed the value of their houses, which the recession and the popping of housing bubbles have caused to drop.

I am sympathetic; and I, and other taxpayers, am being asked to provide relief in one form or another. People who bought houses whose basic value far exceeded what they might reasonably have expected are now expecting other taxpayers to bail them out; and the expectations will probably be satisfied.

But what if one poses the issue in reverse: Would taxpayers be willing to put tax dollars into a program that would buy single-family houses that are larger and more valuable than would be consistent with usual standards of prudence in mortgage lending? I strongly doubt it.

Implicitly, proponents of homeowners’ bail-outs are relying on what one might call a “second-hand endowment effect.” We are supposed to offer money in sympathy with others’ losses (not of life, merely of property), whereas we wouldn’t offer money out of sympathy to provide them gains. Similar second-hand endowment effects exist, I believe, toward a variety of existing and proposed government programs to “help” citizens.

(Hat tip: DJH)

Photo: respres

We at U.C.L.A. hear from reporters a lot, and they are often looking for a few quotes to help write a familiar script. In it, Los Angeles is cast in the role of the nation’s transportation dystopia: a sprawling, smog-choked, auto-obsessed spaghetti bowl of freeways which meander from one bland suburban destination to the next. The heroes of the picture are cities like San Francisco, or especially New York, which are said to have created vastly more livable urban forms based on density and mass transit.

But this stereotype is as trite and clichéd as any that has spewed from the printer of the most dim-witted Hollywood hack. And it is just as fictitious. The secret is that Los Angeles doesn’t fit the role it’s been typecast in.

I have not yet been granted authorization to distribute the coveted Freakonomics schwag, but challenge yourself with the following quiz anyway. Read more…

Photo: JGNY

A reader named Joel Margolese of Andover, Mass., while on holiday vacation in Boca Raton, Fla., wrote the following:

Doing the annual pilgrimage to South Florida this holiday season, we’ve all been struck by how everywhere seems to be more crowded than usual. Parks, beaches, even stores are jammed. We could barely find a parking space at our favorite park, which is usually empty.

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Three weeks ago, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Dozens responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a couple per week.

Mark C asks:

I’d love to see a definitive attribution to this old favorite, which I’ve seen attributed to Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa, and others:

Talking/writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

The earliest occurrence of this found by The Yale Book of Quotations was the following by Elvis Costello, quoted in Musician, October 1983:

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

TRad writes:

“Any 20-year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40-year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.” I’ve seen it attributed to several persons, most often to Bismarck or Churchill.

I wrote about this in my column in the Yale Alumni Magazine: Read more…

The gloves are definitely coming off. This piece by Chicago economist John Cochrane and another by Chicago’s Eugene Fama get under the skin of Brad DeLong and lead Paul Krugman to denounce Cochrane and Fama as barbarians.

Despite NBC banning sexually explicit ad content from the Super Bowl broadcast, Comcast customers in parts of Tuscon were exposed to about 30 seconds of a pornographic film which interrupted Comcast’s Super Bowl coverage on Sunday.

According to The Huffington Post, Comcast suspects the work of hackers.

The company is paying each of its affected customers a $10 refund.

Blog reader Philip Ravenscroft e-mailed us with this question: “How did they decide $10 was the correct amount?”

Furthermore, if $10 is Comcast’s estimation of the damage 30 seconds of porn incurred on the average viewer, should it have paid more to families watching the game with small children, or — since the porn clip interrupted the game right after Larry Fitzgerald’s last touchdown in the game — Cardinals fans?

And most important, what about the people who enjoy porn? Should they send back the refund — perhaps with an extra dollar or two?

Simon Rogers

Simon Rogers moved to New York from London when he was 28 to begin his modeling career. About two years ago, he created UglyNY, a talent and modeling agency affiliated with Ugly in London, which is run by a friend. You’ll see photos of his clients throughout the rest of this post.

As Rogers once told The New York Times, UglyNY serves the market for “great-looking people, people who’ve really been hit with the ugly stick, and everything in between.” UglyNY’s recent clients include Clairol, Walmart, and Vanity Fair. Demand for “real people,” Rogers says, is growing — in part because of the influences of reality TV, MySpace, etc. Plus they are often cheaper.

Terence Exodus

“Real-people” models are paid “anywhere from a third to half what a professional model would,” reports The Times. Read more…

In Freakonomics we poke fun at “experts” — folks who go around speaking with great authority about topics they don’t actually know that much about.

I can be criticized for a lot of things since Freakonomics came out, but one thing that I have been pretty good at is not masquerading as an expert on topics I know little about. For instance, although I have views on the financial crisis, I’ve more or less kept them to myself, instead using the Freakonomics blog as a vehicle for publicizing the views of people who know more than I do about the issues, even if I don’t necessarily agree with everything they are saying.

Every once in a while, though, I let someone get me going on topics I have no business talking about.

A recent interview with Steve Paulson on NPR is a good example. Somehow he got me talking about the housing bubble and the stimulus package. I wouldn’t actually encourage you to listen to it, but if you want to be a witness to my descent into expertdom, it is available online. My segment starts about 30 minutes into the show. Other guests on the show include Paul Krugman, who has a very different view of stimulus than I have.

An article in The Economist reports that “the lipstick index,” the theory that women buy more lipstick in tough economic times, is probably not valid.

A better index might instead be hairstyles. As The Independent reports, Japanese researchers found that women tend to have longer hairstyles when the economy is doing well, and shorter styles during harder times.

Later on in the article, Susanna Sallstrom-Matthews, a cultural economist at the University of Cambridge, offers this explanation for the apparent short-hair/recession correlation:

People enjoy fewer material pleasures in periods of recession, so want more visual pleasures, and there’s more variation among short haircuts than long.

But since trendy, short haircuts cost around $60 each and require more frequent upkeep than long hair, do they make sense when you’re trying to save money?

They may now, as some salons are offering discounts if you show up with your hair already washed, or let you pay as you wish for your cut.

I passed up the salon altogether and opted for this deal at a neighborhood bar:

Photo: Annika Mengisen

The result was a mediocre haircut, but a pleasant bourbon buzz.

NPR reported last month that, for the first time in five years, the U.S. Army had more than met its recruiting goals.

This happens every time unemployment rises, and it should be absolutely no surprise. People choose military service after high school partly out of a desire to serve the country; but there is strong evidence that incentives matter.

Higher pay increases the supply of enlistees, and so does a reduced opportunity cost — the value of potential enlistees’ time in other activities. Higher unemployment is especially heavily concentrated among young workers; the alternatives for high-school graduates in a recession are reduced, and the military becomes a more attractive option.

So I would be happy to bet that the Army will have even less trouble meeting enlistment goals in 2009, provided its demand for enlistees does not increase too much.

Other supply behavior is countercyclical too — and typically includes enrollment in economics courses. So the recession should increase the demand for teachers of intro economics, like me. An ill wind blows a bit of good!

My colleague Luigi Zingales has some words of wisdom for the incoming Treasury secretary.

Tom Daschle (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/The New York Times), Nancy Killefer (Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times).

So today is a two-fer: both Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer will not be joining the Obama administration, as planned, as Health and Human Services secretary and chief performance officer, respectively.

They were both undone by failure to pay taxes.

Tim Geithner, meanwhile, the new Treasury secretary, was recently confirmed by the Senate despite his own tax failures.

Good God: what does it say about the U.S. tax code that people like Geithner, Daschle, and Killefer haven’t properly paid their taxes?

(By “people like” them, I mean people who are smart and accomplished, have been through many application and vetting processes in their careers, and above all have reason to comply with tax-paying.)

Here, we’ll make it a quiz:

A. If all three of them were intentionally cheating (and getting away with it until high-level scrutiny), then it’s much too easy to cheat on taxes.

B. If all of them made honest mistakes, then the tax code simply isn’t working.

C. If there’s some combination of cheating and mistakes, then it’s too easy to cheat and the tax code isn’t working.

I’d vote for C. We wrote a column about tax cheating a while back. It included this passage: Read more…