If so much crack is still being sold and bought, why aren’t we hearing about it? Because crack-associated violence has largely disappeared. And it was the violence that made crack most relevant to the middle class. What made the violence go away? Simple economics. Urban street gangs were the main distributors of crack cocaine. In the beginning, demand for their product was phenomenal, and so were the potential profits. Most crack killings, it turns out, were not a result of some crackhead sticking up a grandmother for drug money but rather one crack dealer shooting another—and perhaps a few bystanders—in order to gain turf.
But the market changed fast. The destructive effects of the drug became apparent; young people saw the damage that crack inflicted on older users and began to stay away from it. (One recent survey showed that crack use is now three times as common among people in their late thirties as it is among those in their late teens and early twenties.) As demand fell, price wars broke out, driving down profits. And as the amount of money at stake grew smaller and smaller, the violence also dissipated. Young gang members are still selling crack on street corners, but when a corner becomes less valuable, there is less incentive to kill, or be killed, for it.
So how can it be that crack consumption is still so high? Part of the answer may have to do with geography. The index shows that consumption is actually up in states far from the coasts, like Arizona, Minnesota, Colorado and Michigan. But the main answer lies in the same price shift that made the crack trade less violent. The price has fallen about 75 percent from its peak, which has led to an interesting consumption pattern: there are far fewer users, but they are each smoking more crack. This, too, makes perfect economic sense. If you are a devoted crackhead and the price is one-fourth what it used to be, you can afford to smoke four times as much.
But as crack has matured into a drug that causes less social harm, the laws punishing its sale have stayed the same. In 1986, in the national frenzy that followed the death of Len Bias, a first-round N.B.A. draft pick and a cocaine user, Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This disparity has often been called racist, since it disproportionately imprisons blacks.
In fact, the law probably made sense at the time, when a gram of crack did have far more devastating social costs than a gram of powder cocaine. But it doesn’t anymore. Len Bias would now be forty years old, and he would have long outlived his usefulness to the Boston Celtics. It may be time to acknowledge that the law inspired by his death has done the same.
DOES THE TRUTH LIE WITHIN?
One professor’s lifetime of self-experimentation
September 11, 2005
Seth Roberts is a fifty-two-year-old psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. If you knew Roberts twenty-five years ago, you might remember him as a man with problems. He had acne, and most days he woke up too early, which left him exhausted. He wasn’t depressed, but he wasn’t always in the best of moods. Most troubling to Roberts, he was overweight: at 5-foot-11, he weighed 200 pounds.
When you encounter Seth Roberts today, he is a clear-skinned, well-rested, entirely affable man who weighs about 160 pounds and looks ten years younger than his age. How did this happen?
It began when Roberts was a graduate student. First he had the clever idea of turning his personal problems into research subjects. Then he decided that he would use his own body as a laboratory. Thus did Roberts embark on one of the longest bouts of scientific self-experimentation known to man—not only poking, prodding and measuring himself more than might be wise but also rigorously recording every data point along the way.
Self-experimentation, though hardly a new idea in the sciences, remains rare. Many modern scientists dismiss it as being not nearly scientific enough: there is no obvious control group, and you can hardly run a double-blind experiment when the researcher and subject are the same person. But might the not-quite-scientific nature of self-experimentation also be a good thing? A great many laboratory-based scientific experiments, especially those in the medical field, are later revealed to have been marred by poor methodology or blatant self-interest. In the case of Roberts, his self-interest is extreme, but at least it is obvious. His methodology is so simple—trying a million solutions until he finds one that works—that it creates the utmost transparency.
In some ways, self-experimentation has more in common with economics than with the hard sciences. Without the ability to run randomized experiments, economists are often left to exploit whatever data they can get hold of. Let’s say you’re an economist trying to measure the effect of imprisonment on crime rates. What you would ideally like to do is have a few randomly chosen states suddenly release 10,000 prisoners, while another few random states lock up an extra 10,000 people. In the absence of such a perfect experiment, you are forced to rely on creative proxies—like lawsuits that charge various states with prison overcrowding, which down the road lead to essentially random releases of large numbers of prisoners. (And yes, crime in those states does rise sharply after the prisoners are released.)
What could be a more opportunistic means of generating data than exploiting your own body? Roberts started small, with his acne, then moved on to his early waking. It took him more than ten years of experimenting, but he found that his morning insomnia could be cured if, on the previous day, he got lots of morning light, skipped breakfast and spent at least eight hours standing.
Stranger yet was the fix he discovered for lifting his mood: at least one hour each morning of TV viewing, specifically life-size talking heads—but never such TV at night. Once he stumbled upon this solution, Roberts, like many scientists, looked back to the Stone Age for explication. Anthropological research suggests that early humans had lots of face-to-face contact every morning but precious little after dark, a pattern that Roberts’s TV viewing now mimicked.
It was also the Stone Age that informed his system of weight control. Over the years, he had tried a sushi diet, a tubular-pasta diet, a five-liters-of-water-a-day diet and various others. They all proved ineffective or too hard or too boring to sustain. He had by now come to embrace the theory that our bodies are regulated by a “set point,” a sort of Stone Age thermostat that sets an optimal weight for each person. This thermostat, however, works the opposite of the one in your home. When your home gets cold, the thermostat turns on the furnace. But according to Roberts’s interpretation of the set-point theory, when food is scarcer, you become less hungry; and you get hungrier when there’s a lot of food around.
This may sound backward, like telling your home’s furnace to run only in the summer. But there is a key difference between home heat and calories: while there is no good way to store the warm air in your home for the next winter, there is a way to store today’s calories for future use. It’s called fat. In this regard, fat is like money: you can earn it today, put it in the bank and withdraw it later when needed.
During an era of scarcity—an era when the next meal depended on a successful hunt, not a successful phone call to Hunan Garden—this set-point system was vital. It allowed you to spend down your fat savings when food was scarce and make deposits when food was plentiful. Roberts was convinced that this system was accompanied by a powerful signaling mechanism: whenever you ate a food that was flavorful (which correlated with a time of abundance) and familiar (which indicated that you had eaten this food before and benefited from it), your body demanded that you bank as many of those calories as possible.
Roberts understood that these signals were learned associations—as dependable as Pavlov’s bell—that once upon a time served humankind well. Today, however, at least in places with constant opportunities to eat, these signals can lead to a big, fat problem: rampant overeating.
So Roberts tried to game this Stone Age system. What if he could keep his thermostat low by sending fewer flavor signals? One obvious solution was a bland diet, but
that didn’t interest Roberts. (He is, in fact, a serious foodie.) After a great deal of experimenting, he discovered two agents capable of tricking the set-point system. A few tablespoons of unflavored oil (he used canola or extra light olive oil), swallowed a few times a day between mealtimes, gave his body some calories but didn’t trip the signal to stock up on more. Several ounces of sugar water (he used granulated fructose, which has a lower glycemic index than table sugar) produced the same effect. (Sweetness does not seem to act as a “flavor” in the body’s caloric-signaling system.)
The results were astounding. Roberts lost forty pounds and never gained it back. He could eat pretty much whenever and whatever he wanted, but he was far less hungry than he had ever been. Friends and colleagues tried his diet, usually with similar results. His regimen seems to satisfy a set of requirements that many commercial diets do not: it was easy, built on a scientific theory and, most important, it did not leave Roberts hungry.
In the academic community, Roberts’s self-experimentation has found critics but also serious admirers. Among the latter are the esteemed psychologist Robert Rosenthal, who has praised Roberts for “approaching data in an exploratory spirit more than, or at least in addition to, a confirmatory spirit” and for seeing data analysis “as the opportunity to confront a surprise.” Rosenthal went so far as to envision “a time in the future when ‘self-experimenter’ became a new part-time (or full-time) profession.”
But will Seth Roberts’s strange weight-control solution—he calls it the Shangri-La Diet—really work for the millions of people who need it? We may soon find out. With the Atkins diet company filing for bankruptcy, America is eager for its next diet craze. And a few spoonfuls of sugar may be just the kind of sacrifice that Americans can handle.
CURBING YOUR DOG
Can technology keep New York City scooped?
October 2, 2005
Twenty-five hundred tons. That’s how much manure was produced every day by the 200,000 horses that moved people and goods around New York City in the late nineteenth century. Much of the manure went uncollected, which posed a terrible problem. (This is to say nothing of the horse urine, the deafening clatter of hooves or the carcasses left to rot in the street.) The manure was so widespread and smelly and unsanitary that brownstones were built with their entrances on the second floor so that homeowners might rise above it.
Like so many seemingly overwhelming problems, this one was resolved, quite painlessly, by technology. The electric streetcar and then the automobile led to the disappearance of the horses, and with them went their dung.
Most of the animal dung produced in today’s New York comes from our dogs. (Estimates of the dog population vary widely, but one million is a good guess.) All their poop doesn’t just lie there, of course. In 1978, New York enacted its famous (and widely imitated) “pooper scooper” law, and the city is plainly cleaner, poop-wise, than it was. But with a fine of just $50 for the first offense, the law doesn’t provide much financial incentive to pick up after your dog. Nor does it seem to be vigorously enforced. Let’s pretend that 99 percent of all dog owners do obey the law. That still leaves 10,000 dogs whose poop is left in public spaces each day. Over the last year, the city ticketed only 471 dog-waste violations, which suggests that the typical offender stands a roughly 1-in-8,000 chance of getting a ticket. So here’s a puzzle: why do so many people pick up after their dogs? This would seem to be a case in which social incentives—the hard glare of a passer-by and the offender’s feelings of guilt—are at least as powerful as financial and legal incentives.
If social forces get us most of the way there, how do we deal with the occasional miscreant who fails to scoop? After all, a walk through just about any New York neighborhood confirms that compliance with the law is hardly complete. The Parks Department, meanwhile, which conducts regular cleanliness checks of parks and playgrounds, says that dog poop accounts for 20 percent of its “cleanliness failures.” Dog poop is plainly far less of a nuisance than horse manure ever was. But if you are, say, a parent who walks two kids to school every day and tries to keep all three of you from experiencing that telltale soft smush of a misstep, it is a nuisance nonetheless.
With horses, the solution was simply to eliminate them. Might there be a way to get rid of dog poop without getting rid of the dogs? It might help for a moment to think of a dog as if it were a gun. Using laws to eliminate guns has proved extremely difficult. A given gun lasts a very long time, and as with dogs, guns are widely loved. But getting rid of guns should never have been the point of gun control; the point, rather, ought to be getting rid of the misuse of guns—that is, the use of guns in crimes. Consequently, the most successful policies are those that directly punish misuse, like mandatory prison sentences for any crime involving a gun. In California and elsewhere, such measures have substantially reduced gun crime.
Similarly, the problem in New York is not so much with dogs per se. So perhaps attending to the real problem—their poop—will prompt a solution.
Here’s an idea: DNA sampling. During the licensing procedure, every dog will have to provide a sample of saliva or blood to establish a DNA file. Then, whenever a pile of poop is found on the sidewalk, a sample can be taken to establish the offender’s DNA. (Because stomachs and intestinal walls shed so many cells, poop is in fact a robust DNA source; during a murder trial in Indiana in 2002, the defendant was convicted in large part because the dog poop in his sneaker tread linked him to the scene of the crime.) Once the fecal DNA is matched to a given dog’s DNA file, the dog’s owner will be mailed a ticket. It might cost about $30 million to establish a DNA sample for all the dogs of New York. If people stop violating the law, then New York has spent $30 million for cleaner streets; if not, the $30 million is seed money for a new revenue stream.
Unfortunately, there’s a big drawback to this plan. In order to match a pile of poop with its source, you will need to have every dog’s DNA on file—and in 2003, the most recent year on record, only 102,004 dogs in New York were licensed. Even though a license is legally required, costs a mere $8.50 a year and can be easily obtained by mail, most dog owners ignore the law, and with good reason: last year, only 68 summonses were issued in New York City for unlicensed dogs. So even if the DNA plan were enacted today, most offenders would still go unpunished.
In fact, it stands to reason that the typical licensed dog is less likely to offend than the typical unlicensed dog, since the sort of owner who is responsible enough to license his dog is also most likely responsible enough to clean up after it. How, then, to get all of New York’s dogs licensed? Instead of charging even a nominal fee, the city may want to pay people to license their dogs. And then, instead of treating the licensing law as optional, enforce it for real. Setting up random street checks for dog licenses may offend some New Yorkers, but it certainly dovetails nicely with the Giuliani-era “broken windows” approach to low-level crime.
Before you dismiss the entire dog-DNA idea as idiotic—which, frankly, we were about to do the moment it popped into our heads—consider this: it turns out that civic leaders in Vienna and Dresden have recently floated the same idea. (Indeed, one Vienna politician cited Mayor Giuliani as his inspiration.) Closer to home, an eighth-grade girl in Hoboken, New Jersey, has also proposed the DNA solution.
During a meeting last year of the Hoboken City Council, Lauren Mecka, the daughter of a police captain, argued her dog-poop case. “While adults like yourselves are appalled and disgusted by the sight of the uncollected dog poop that adorns our parks and sidewalks,” she said, “it is children like myself and younger who run the greater risk of contact and exposure. We’re the ones who ride our bikes, throw our balls and roll our blades on the city’s sidewalks. And we’re the ones who have our picnics, stage our adventures and carry out our dragon-slaying fantasies on our parks’ grassy lawns.”
The council, Mecka says today, didn’t seem to take her proposal seriously. Why? “They dismissed it, basically, because I was a twelve-y
ear-old kid.”
WHY VOTE?
There’s no good economic rationale for going to the polls. So what is it that drives the democratic instinct?
November 6, 2005
Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into each other at the voting booth.
“What are you doing here?” one asks.
“My wife made me come,” the other says.
The first economist gives a confirming nod. “The same.”
After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: “If you promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll never tell anyone I saw you.” They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.
Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost—in time, effort, lost productivity—with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, “A rational individual should abstain from voting.”
Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition Page 21