cephyn^.com

Review

Rating: 9

I am not a big fan of conventional wisdom. In fact, I’m more one to question conventional “wisdom” whenever possible. Most of it is based on anecdote and tradition and has absolutely no basis in reality. This is most obvious to me in baseball. I follow closely sabermetric research and honestly believe the game is not being played as efficiently or wisely as it could be - but tradition is strongly entrenched in baseball and it’s taking a long time to change. I really think I could be a better adviser than many teams currently have. That’s because a lot of baseball is based on odds and statistics, something that makes sense to me pretty quickly. I reject the conventional wisdom because I can see it’s wrong.

This is not pso for economics. I’m aware of it, but I don’t know much about it. It’s voodoo to me. I tend to defer to the economists, or econometricians. I don’t claim to know more than them or reject their reasoning (just as I defer to the research of climatologists when it comes to climate change). When I saw that this book was all about Unconventional Wisdom, I was in.

It isn’t a perfect book, I do think I know a little more than the author in a couple cases, but he writes really well. This book is the fastest book on economics you’ll ever read. It’s fun. It definitely challenges you to think about some things too.

Of course, most people want to know about the title - sex sells!! It’s also a perfect example of how problems are framed in most of the book. Why is more sex safer sex? Well, the first thing you need to understand is that it’s not safer for any one individual - but it IS safer for the community at large. And that’s how almost all the problems in the book are tackled - how to change things so that the community at large benefits.

A little taste of how this works - there are two types of people, a promiscuous one and a relatively conservative one. It benefits society at large for the conservative one to become more promiscuous. Why? If mr. conservative goes out, intending to go home with someone, he is raising the odds of potential partners finding a healthy partner. And that reduces the spread of disease. But also, if he goes home with an infected partner, he may catch the disease but he is less likely than mr. promiscuous to spread it far and wide - because he’s more conservative.

That’s super-simplistic, and I realize you may have thoughts on this, but Landsburg does a pretty good job of covering all the angles. And he devotes more pages to this single issue than any other in the book. And there are a LOT of issues in the book, and it really gets you thinking on things.

He argues that the world needs more people to be more prosperous, not fewer. Saving money helps everyone. One of his weaker, but interesting, chapters is that beautiful people make more money because they’re beautiful - not the other way around. Child labor is good - in places. And many, many, MANY more things addressed - shorter and shorter as the book goes on, which sometimes is a shame. There are 2 issues I really was fascinated by, his thoughts on politics, justice and organ donation.

He covers many parts of politics, but one suggestion he had really perked my interest - instead of having representatives represent people of a geographic area, have them represent people by their last name. For example, last names that start with Aa-Afr would be a voting block, instead of district 58 of LA County or whatever. At first it sounds a little dumb…but think about it. The current system is rife with gerrymandering. There is no way to draw a “fair” district - it’s always going to skew one way or another and the current parties keep finding ways to lock in seats. You go by names - it’s a random sample. Also, you’d really cut down on pork - it’s harder to send dollars to people with a block of names than people on a city block. For me, it’s not ideal, since it still would allow 2 party dominance (I still think bigger districts, multiple representatives is the way to go) but this idea is still more fair than the current system. It’s a great thought experiment. The more I think about it, the more ways I could see it working and being an improvement.

The justice system in America is pretty messed up. It’s improved somewhat in the past few years here, but overall - juries are made up of people that simply couldn’t get out of jury duty. Sad but true. And those people are the ones trying to understand often complicated lines of evidence. It’s time to make it better, and Landsburg has some good ideas. The best of all is professional jurors, which I’ve been saying for a while is a really good idea. The current system really tries to select for the most ignorant jurors and then keeps them in the dark on the grounds that they need to be impartial. So let me get this straight - we trust them to make a decision on evidence presented in the courtroom, which is often conflicting, but we don’t trust them to make the same sort of determination on anything they hear outside the courtroom? It’s ridiculous. Let jurors find all the information they can on a case. If some information is good, more information is better.

Organ donation is a strange subject for most people. And I believe that within in the next 50 years, it will be a moot argument. We will be able to grow organs ex vivo and then transplant them into people - using their own DNA and eliminating any worries of rejection. But Landsburg has an idea on how to make the system better, now. And I think he’s wrong on this one. His idea is to put kidneys on the open market. Let people pay for them. Let people sell their organs - regulate it, cut out a black market and let people profit AND save other people’s lives. Sounds great! And it would be - but there are two big flaws in his reasoning.

One, you can’t put any kidney into any person and expect success. You need to match the DNA and genes as best you can. Otherwise, even immuno-suppressants (which transplant patients must take for life) won’t help. You will reject. And that can be worse than the original disease. So some kidneys will be in much higher demand than others, and some people’s kidneys will be rather worthless. You might say - “that’s OK, that’s what a free market is all about!” And yes, that’s true. I can buy that argument - but Landsburg doesn’t consider it. He treats all kidneys the same. And that’s where the second problem comes in.

We don’t know why people get many kidney diseases that require transplant. We don’t know the gene markers, or the environmental causes. We cannot predict with any level of certainty who is going to need a kidney - so if these people sell a kidney early in life, they’ve just given a diseased kidney to someone who needs a healthy one, AND the donor will now be in GRAVE danger when they develop disease later in life. They may not survive long enough to buy back a kidney to replace the one they donated. That’s dangerous, and to put kidneys on the open market before we really know why they fail in the first place would be irresponsible. I think we’ll be able to grow kidneys in a lab before we’ll really understand the causes of disease. So I just can’t back his argument for this one. His goal here is to save lives, but I think it would endanger more lives. Instead of the current system, he wants pay people to play Russian roulette. (apologies to Russians)

That said, this is a well written and provocative book. I really recommend it to anyone who wants to think about the world a little differently. Maybe you’ll see how silly some conventional things are, and learn how to think about changing them.