Freakonomics Radio - 109. How to Live Longer

Episode Date: January 9, 2013

Why do Hall of Fame inductees, Oscar winners, and Nobel laureates outlive their peers?

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything. Dubner, how are you? Kai, I'm great. Thank you. Happy New Year and all that. Thank you to you as well. Today, big news, the Baseball Hall of Fame voting was announced. I don't know if you caught that. Of course I did. And a grand total of zero people were elected to the Hall of Fame. Now, were you surprised? I was a little bit surprised. It's the first time since 1996. In fact, you know, all the talk was

about the fact that because the steroid age is happening now and guys like Clemens and Bonds, who deserve to be in, but won't be elected. Oh, wait a minute. Are we going to have to have that conversation? You think they deserve to be in? All right. That's all. No, I'm not having that conversation. That's another conversation. But the argument was that because those guys are not going to get elected, that it would free up a little bit more space, potentially. But as it turns out, nobody got in. And I got to tell you, this is what I'm here to talk about today. This is bad news. If you get nominated to a Hall of Fame and don't get in, not only do you not get in, but, and I hate to tell you this, Kyle, you actually might die a little bit sooner. Because why? What? Why? Well, there's a growing body of research that looks at the relationship between what we call status generally and life expectancy. Okay. So the economist David Becker, he looked at Hall of Fame data, Baseball Hall of Fame, and he found that while a player who gets elected to the Hall

of Fame doesn't necessarily outlive the average baseball player. He does live a couple of years longer than a player who gets nominated for the Hall of Fame, but year after year gets rejected. Here's David Becker. So this seems to suggest to us that it's really the story that getting close but not winning is what's really bad for health, which we think is potentially a really profound point about the nature of status competition more broadly in our society. So actually, it's not an honor just to be nominated, right? That's exactly right, which is appropriate to talk about since tomorrow is the nominations for the Academy Awards will be announced. And there's also an Oscar effect.

Donald Redelmeyer, who's a medical professor at the University of Toronto, he has done research and now argues that Oscar winners outlive their peers. And here's his best guess as to why that is. Once you really got an uncontestable measure of your own peer approval, all of the subsequent, you know, nasty reviews or setbacks or rejections just do not seem nearly as aggravating. They sort of roll off your back. And in turn, that makes you much more resilient. Absolutely. Now, Kai, let me say this. This longevity research is pretty complex.

Some researchers are unpersuaded. But the more fields you look at, the more plausible it seems that a status boost is good for your health. And perhaps more convincingly, that getting close to the mountaintop but never quite reaching it, that's a real setback. The economist Andrew Oswald looked at this phenomenon among 50 years worth of Nobel Prize winners. All right. We do find that if you're lucky enough to win the Nobel Prize, you can expect about 18 months more of life. Okay, but hold on. I mean, that's great, 18 more months. But when you win the Nobel Prize, you get like a million dollars. How do you know it's not just being rich makes you live longer?

Yeah, that's a good question. So that's one of the first problems that a researcher has in this kind of research, which is to isolate a particular effect, in this case status, and isolate that from other factors like money. So they use a mathematical model that will control for other differences. In this case, Oswald found that the money was not a factor in the Nobel winner's longevity. It was, he says, the winning itself. A nominee for the Nobel Prize looks virtually identical to someone who actually wins the Nobel Prize. The real difference is simply one of them gets the telephone call from Stockholm and the other doesn't.

Well, I will speak only for myself here, Dubner. I am not going to win a Nobel Prize or get into the Hall of Fame or win an Oscar, right? Hold out hope. Never say never, Kai. Yeah, you're right. You know, most of us will. That's not going to happen. We did, therefore, go looking for something that might help anybody if they want to live a little bit longer. And you know what, Kai?

We actually found something. All right, hit me, brother. What do you got? Annuities. Really? So these are the things that people buy. Yeah, it's this financial instrument you buy, and it pays off a set amount each year, but only as long as you stay alive. So it's like a longevity

lotto, right? And research shows that people who buy annuities tend to live longer. And not just because they're the kind of people that have the money to buy annuities to start with. It's apparently that little extra incentive of the annuity payout that keeps people going. So, you know, maybe those Hall of Fame losers want to stock up on the annuities this week. Any little bit helps, I guess. Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Thanks very much, Guy. Hey, podcast listeners, coming up on our next episode, let's say that you want to write a book about Winston Churchill. First step, get your checkbook. I used 3,872 words of Winston Churchill's in the book, and that cost me £950, which is roughly 40 cents a word. Who owns the words that come out of your mouth?

That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio