Freakonomics Radio - 151. Are We Ready to Legalize Drugs? And Other FREAK-Quently Asked Questions

Episode Date: January 9, 2014

Dubner and Levitt talk about fixing the post office, putting cameras in the classroom, and wearing hats.

Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. One of the most unusual things about Levitt is that he doesn't really care what anybody else thinks about his ideas, for better or worse. One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society is to test them with repugnant ideas. Because economists are pretty much immune to repugnance. It's fun. Your wife will love you more if you go do it. It makes you, you know, feel like a proud American. But never should anyone delude themselves into thinking that the vote they cast will ever decide an election.

Most of them'm just lazy. You know, I could be investing in the kids or I could be, you know, indulging my own, you know, hobbies. Let's just watch TV instead. Exactly. I'm not one of those people who really hates fat people. I know there are people who hate fat people, but I don't really mind fat people.

So what will Levitt say in this week's installment of Frequently Asked Questions? I never know what you're going to put on the radio. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner. Every now and again, Steve Levitt and I ask you to send us some questions and then we try to answer them in this podcast. It's called Frequently Asked Questions. Hey, so Levitt, you ready to go? Absolutely.

All right. For sure. Do you have a cold beverage? I have a warm one. That'll do for me, though. All right. Let's start with this. Levitt, here's a question from someone named Matt Hayashi.

I am curious to know what solutions would emerge if we took a poor performing junior high classroom, perhaps one classified as hopeless and from the inner of some city, and put four cameras shooting from each corner and stream the video over the internet. Would the students get a better education? Would performance improve? Would the students get a better education? Would performance improve? Would the students grow up and contribute positively to society? This could be fundamentally good for the country's future by addressing the problems with public education of children. I'm fascinated by this idea. I can't imagine how many lawyers you'd have to talk to before you could get even one camera in the room. But I'm curious to know.

I mean, it brings up some notions that we've talked about before. But, for instance, just the power of scrutiny. And not only on the kids in the classroom, but the teachers, too. So I'm curious to know what you think about this idea and what might happen. I'll tell you, it's a different idea. I like it because there's so many ideas about what to do about public education. And this is not one that I've heard before. And I think scrutiny can affect people's behavior.

Now, just being devil's advocate, I'd say that if you were to put four streaming cameras into, let's just say you start with one inner city school, but then let's say it works out pretty well. And so now you have it in a thousand or a hundred thousand inner city classrooms. The problem is no one's going to watch. I mean, what could be more boring than watching someone get taught eighth-grade civics or something like that? So I'm not sure that there actually would be any scrutiny. Well, but it might just be like the surveillance camera at the 7-Eleven that you only watch when something drastic happens, right? So let's not assume that it needs a real audience, but like if somebody totally blows up or does something amazing, then there's the possibility that people can see it.

Absolutely. So there's this idea of deterring something or encouraging people. But I just think that the occasional blow-ups which occur are not what is fundamentally getting in the way of the student's learning. What the reader suggests is that somehow it's going to transform the daily activities in the room. And my hunch is that you could start, when you first start,

we know from what people call the Hawthorne effect, that when you start watching people, they behave differently. But I think over time, if you knew that nobody was actually watching you and that the video was rolling but no one ever looked at it. I mean, think about the parallel we have, which is reality TV. So people get on these reality TV shows. And I'm sure for the first hour or two that the camera's on them, they act very stale and serious and stuff. And then you can tell by the, you know, very quickly they act in outrageous ways that you say to yourself,

how could they act that way knowing it's on TV? And I think you just get used to stuff. And so even though these people know what they're doing is being put on national TV, they very quickly just act the way they normally act in front of the camera. And I think that's what would probably happen if you put a camera on one of these inner city classrooms. Yeah, okay. I mean, look, who am I to disagree with you or challenge that? But I also just am curious, one thing that happens in a classroom is the dynamic between the students and the teacher and the students themselves and so on. And I'm just curious to think how that dynamic might be altered just by knowing that it's not just them in the classroom and that theoretically, I don't know, maybe it's the teacher who's much more effective. Maybe it's

a teacher who knows that that video can be accessed by his or her superiors at any point down the road or peers. So, look, at the very least, it would be a fun experiment to try, wouldn't it, with a camera in a classroom just to see what the feeling is? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm all in favor of any kind of experiment like that. It could be good. In some sense, it has been done. It just hasn't been done in this setting. A lot of daycare and nursery schools have streaming video of the classrooms, I think, because parents at that age are more nervous about how their kids might be treated or how their kids might react. And so you could actually, before running this experiment, it might be interesting

to look and see whether anything changed in terms of teacher behavior in that other setting. I mean, because we didn't talk about it before, but maybe the one group that would possibly watch would be parents. I mean, I would watch my 13-year-olds and see what they're doing in class and read them the riot act if they weren't paying attention or complain if they're teachers. So maybe that's actually the one audience that could be useful. I certainly believe that the more you get parents involved in schools, the better, that there's tons of evidence that we've talked about that having good parents is at least as important as having good schools. And so I like the idea. I like the idea.

Okay, Levitt, here's the next one. Joseph Fogan writes, As a resident of the Buffalo, New York area, I recently saw and read an article about a local drug trafficker. As a result, I was wondering what the hidden costs of the war on drugs may be. I was wondering if Team Freakonomics has ever done a study report on this or if they'd be interested. I think it poses a lot of interesting legal and moral questions. So, Levitt, we've talked and even, I guess, written about in the past. Drugs is a big topic. Why don't you start? When you think of drug legalization, how do you start to frame that argument in your head?

So I have thought a lot about the war on drugs. And it's a great question to philosophize on, I think, because most people approach it from a more moral or philosophical point of view of should drugs be legal? It's a libertarian perspective says maybe drugs should just be legal. People should be able to do whatever they want. That's what Milton Friedman thought. Other people think it's immoral. There's something wrong with drugs. But, you know, that's not the Freakonomics way. The Freakonomics way is to actually look at the data. And I do have a paper with Roland Fryer and a former student of mine, Paul Heaton and Kevin Murphy. And we set out to look at the

crack epidemic and the costs of the crack epidemic from a purely practical perspective. How bad was it? Did the places that had a lot of crack, did really bad things happen there and why? And it was really interesting. It was really one of the most surprising results because almost all of the big costs that we saw had to do not with the consumption of crack itself. Consumption of crack had some negative effects, but they weren't great. The really big social costs had to do with the prohibition of the legality of crack. And so it was the case that the greatest costs we saw were the violence related to the fighting for property rights and the imprisonment of people. And it was interesting because it doesn't say that legalization is necessarily a good thing.

That's a big jump to have. But it says that in a regime where drugs are highly illegal, hard drugs like cocaine, in the U.S., the real costs that we feel then are the costs of the prohibition, not the costs of the use, because the prohibition is reasonably effective at lowering the U.S., the real costs that we feel then are the costs of the prohibition, not the costs of the use, because the prohibition is reasonably effective at lowering the use. Now, what would happen if we got rid of the prohibition and let anybody and everybody use crack cocaine? I think that wouldn't be a great outcome either. And you say that because the nature of crack is destructive, more so than, let's say, marijuana or no?

Absolutely. So crack cocaine is a really devilish drug because it gives you such an intense high for such a short period of time that your desire is just to get high over and over and over. It's highly addictive and it's really hard to function when you're a crack addict. But what it makes me think is that this experimentation we're doing now with policy towards the drugs like marijuana and potentially it would be expanded over time is a good idea. Because I think when it comes to marijuana, the social costs of the prohibition of marijuana are just really low. Very few people in that state are being killed over marijuana. The gangs are not making their money off marijuana. Marijuana in some very real sense is

too cheap. It's too easy to grow yourself. And so it isn't the source of all of the ills that come with prohibition. And so the gains of legalizing marijuana for society are much smaller than the, oh, well, that's because prosecuting and pursuing marijuana is a big part of police work. And if it were decriminalized, then the police would get unfunded. Is that a ridiculous thought to have? No, I like that. Now we always think about incentives. And certainly if one of the incentives that a police department has is to be busy. I mean, we know there are a lot more police officers in places where there's a lot more crime. So if there was no crime to deal with, there wouldn't be many police officers. I mean, you think about firefighters, think about putting yourself out of a job. I mean, there aren't any fires anymore. I don't know what firefighters do all day. I mean, they think about firefighters, think about putting yourself out

of a job. I mean, there aren't any fires anymore. I don't know what firefighters do all day. I mean, they've been pretty good, I think, at figuring out how to do things other than go put out fires. But you could imagine that if all the crime went away, the police would end up looking a lot more like firefighters than they would like police officers, and we just wouldn't need that many of them around. So I think that's sensible. But I also think that it's deeper than that and that there is a mindset among the police, which is that the law says that marijuana is illegal and it's my job to uphold the law and therefore marijuana in particular. So Gallup polls, which are pretty consistent over time, show that about 40 years ago, 12% of Americans favored marijuana legalization. And that number is up to 58 now. So almost five times as many. So what do you think that represents? Anything dramatic? Or are we just seeing one of those gradual lines shifting that happens in society? Nothing more than that.

I think it's a reaction to the fact that marijuana just hasn't proven to be that damaging, that a lot of people smoke marijuana and it doesn't ruin their lives, and they go on to be regular folks who no longer smoke marijuana. It's just a lot of it comes down to how much weight you put on the utility of the user, right? If you really think that the people who are smoking a lot of dope are having a lot of fun with it, then probably you tip the calculus towards let them smoke it. Otherwise, if you think that's the wrong kind of fun, you shouldn't count that, then you think it shouldn't be legal.

But in a lot of ways, I think it comes down to that simple issue. And, Levitt, just for the record, when's the last time you smoked dope? Oh, man, it's been a long time. I think it's been at least probably close to 20 years. If marijuana were totally, entirely decriminalized in Illinois and you could go to a nice little deli right outside the UFC there and buy some. Would you do it tomorrow or the next week? I would occasionally smoke, but it wouldn't be a way of life, I don't think. Yeah. Would you like to, say, try to play golf, Wallstone? Would that be a thrill for you? No, not at all. listeners have ideas to help out the United States Postal Service and what to do when a company is dying. Death is a part of human existence and maybe death is part of a company's existence the same way and we should celebrate it and hasten it rather than spend all our time prolonging the last few years of life. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio.

Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Welcome back to Frequently Asked Questions, where Steve Levitt and I do our best to sort out what's on your mind. Let's get back to it. Okay, question from Rene Verbeek. He writes, The money I spend on this service is as high as sending the same letter from New York to Boston. You'd expect that the post office would ask more money for services to and from rural areas and less for services to and from urban areas. Or I would add, you know, just for further away than closer away. You pay 46 cents these days for a first class stamp anywhere. And he asked, why is it that postal services have these flat rates and not a price proportional to the cost of the actual provided service? I think that's a great question, Levitt. Any obvious answer to that other than evolution and randomness? Well, I think it's complicated, right?

The problem is that when you're sending something that on average only costs $0.46 to try to customize whether it should be $0.41 or $0 61 cents is really costly because how are you going to figure out how to do it? And I think even just historically, the idea of the stamp and the value of the stamp makes it more complicated. But when you say it'd be complicated, I mean, look, there are transit services that do that, right? So New York doesn't. New York, if I buy a subway, one pass on a subway train, it's the same amount amount whether it's a short ride or a long ride. A lot of cities, however, you pay different for different zones. So let's say it's not one price for New York to Boston for a stamp, another price from New York to Charlotte and on and on and on. But let's say there are zones, three zones, five zones.

Would that really be so complicated? And I guess what I'm really asking is, would the USPS not be in such bad shape if they'd actually been properly pricing their service all along? I mean, that's a good question. You're talking, you're really talking like an economist today, Dubner. What's going on? I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd show up. Really coming of age. I mean, I think it's not clear. I mean, the real problem the Postal Service has is the point of a letter has gotten a lot less important over time because there are much better substitutes than ever existed before. And, you know, between you start with faxes and then you go to electronic mail and then you go to texting. And, you know, it wouldn't be at all surprising if you just took a bunch of business students and did a case study and said, if your business was to deliver letters,

what would happen if a lot better stuff came around? I think for sure, you know, the telephone wasn't great, the telegraph, none of this stuff was good for the Postal Service. So I don't know if I want to pin the financial difficulties of the Postal Service on that. It's just a bulky way of trying to do business. But that aside, when I think about business and how they do things, I think experimentation is always a good idea. I mean, this is a great case where you might say, try an experiment. Try an experiment where for one city of the United States, the postal service does divide the costs into these five different divisions, like you said, or make it per mile, or whether it's urban or rural. And I think you could begin to understand how people react to it.

Well, let me run this past you. Another listener named Nathan Conroy writes to say that every day when I open my mailbox, he writes, I'm continually puzzled at the concept of the failing U.S. post office at a time when we receive a hideous amount of junk mail every single day. How can the company behind the delivery of this madness be on the brink of fiscal collapse again and again and again? So he goes on to say that, you know, as we've discussed, email and other technological advances have been slowly killing off the post office. He writes, my question is this, when faced with such a vicious predator, meaning mostly email, why didn't the USPS jump on the electronic highway? And he proposes a digital world in which you might receive a, quote, USPS certified email from your bank, employer, or children's school. This certified email would let you know that the

sender is legitimate, that no viruses will be attached, and that you are not being phished. How do you know this? It's simple. Prior to sending the email, the sender would have to, one, verify identity, two, provide credentials, and most importantly, three, pay 10 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents. So that's an interesting idea. I'm curious what you think of that as an idea that the USPS might should have embraced. But more broadly, you know, you wrote a blog post a few years back about good to great, the companies that were featured in that book, Good to Great by Jim Collins, and how the companies that went from good to great often ended up going to crap years after the book came out. And I just wanted to ask you generally about how hard it is for a company, whether it's the USPS or General Electric or General Motors, to survive and thrive over time and whether companies, especially big companies, are inherently maybe bad at changing with the times.

Yeah, I think for sure big companies are bad at making massive changes, I think for two reasons. One is that I think companies that are successful end up falling under the illusion of thinking that they're good at everything. And that because they're good at everything, you know, why should they have to change? And, you know, so I think that really hurts companies that have success. Even if they're good, I think most companies that make a ton of money often make it because they're a little bit lucky. They have one good idea. They're really good at one particular thing. Like Walmart is fantastic at logistics, and no one's ever been able to catch up to them, and that's a huge advantage.

I mean, that doesn't mean that Walmart's great at figuring out what products to put in the stores. Maybe they're great at that too. But I mean, the post office of all possible companies to try to make radical changes, a radical change that completely reinvents what they do, it's just, I think, impossible because, I mean, you and I have talked a lot with businesses over the last 10 years and more or less, I think most people in the business, if they truly tell you what they want, is they want to do the same thing today that they did yesterday. And they don't want to have to rethink everything. And they don't want to bet the entire future of the company on some crazy newfangled email thing that nobody has back in 1997 when they would have had to have started thinking about this. I mean, I think our reader's point is a really interesting one. It's a really innovative and

creative idea. And I think it's the kind of thing that could really work. Now, will that ever be the post office's big business? Probably not. Should the post office be thinking about creative ways to use their brand name to try to be expanding into other things? I think for sure. I mean, certainly after Federal Express came in, you saw the post office change what they were willing to do to try and do crazy things to get your package there in one day, just the way Federal Express will do that. And that was not something they offered before, and they reacted to it. But that's easier to react to, I think, than the email things. But I've talked to a couple of entrepreneurs who's out there trying to do what our reader suggests, which is to create different classes

of email, which perhaps some of which cost and which carry different levels of importance and significance. And I think that's great. It's exactly what you want to do when there's a service out there that's completely free and which is absolutely and totally abused because of it is to create a close substitute that actually costs money and to potentially then get what we economists call a separating equilibrium where the people who are willing to pay five cents to reach out and touch you with an email can signal to you that they really are willing to pay to talk to you. Whereas, you know, the Nigerian scammers are not willing to pay five cents per person. And so they would be separated. But it's kind of, I don't know, painful a little bit to watch big, older companies that used to be phenomenally successful, try to change. But

from the outside, it's obvious that they're going to fail. I guess I'm thinking right now, the line of big old department stores, Sears and JCPenney. And I don't know, one or two of them may kind of lumber into the next, you know, economic cycle. But it seems like they're all more like dinosaurs that are lumbering off to the graveyard. And it's just going to take a long time for them to finally lay down their heads and die. So, I mean, that's the way capitalism works. And we love a lot of things about it and the dynamism and the creative destruction and all that. But is there some better model to think about if you are that big company or one of the thousands of employees

of that big company who kind of sees that its obsolescence is around the corner but can't run from it? I think that's the magic of a business leader, right? So when you're one of these companies, you're faced with a challenge to either die the slow death you're talking about or to radically reinvent yourself and turn yourself into something great. And people try. I mean, JCPenney did some radical experiments with pricing that didn't work very well. But Apple, look, Apple was terrible for a while, right? People thought Apple was going to die. It reinvented itself. IBM is an amazing success story for reinvention. Going from making old, big,

you know, computers that nobody wants anymore to running a services business, being a consulting firm. Yeah. So I think they are examples of great successes, but it's hard and it takes someone with vision and it takes people in the organization willing to change. And I think a lot of times it's just easier to start from scratch because you fight so much inertia. I do just a little bit of business consulting now and the inertia in these big firms is just amazing how hard it is to turn those big old boats. And then every once in a while we work with a smaller, newer firm and everything just happens quickly. And it may just be, I mean, death is a part of human existence and maybe death is part of a company's existence the same way. And we should celebrate it and hasten it rather than spend all our time prolonging

the last few years of life, just like we do with humans. It should be a reallocation of resources towards generation rather than maintenance. Hey, Levitt, let me ask you this. A reader, listener named Ryan Harris writes, why don't people wear hats anymore? Movies and TV tell us that leaving the house without a hat in the previous centuries would be like leaving without a cell phone today. What happened, Ryan Harris? Levitt, you have any thoughts? I would say that we should flip the question on its head and we should ask why the hell did people ever wear hats? Well, I think we do know a little bit about that.

Head covering has gone hand in hand with religious observance for millennia, right? But then there was a whole thing about class and in all throughout Europe, you know, the hats had a signal of a different class and how you doffed your hat when someone more

senior came in contact. So, you know, the hat was all kinds of religious and class signaling. So there were a lot of reasons. Is it maybe just that as we've become, I mean, our culture has become much less religious. Do you think that's contributed to less hat wearing? Oh, you know, these are hard. These are questions way above my pay grade. But I mean.

Above or below? Above. I mean, to figure out big social phenomena are hard. I mean, fashion's changed immeasurably. And I think of hats as just mostly about fashion. But that's a good question. We got a lot of good questions from the readers today. Levitt, what would it take...

How much would I have to pay you to, to let's say wear a fedora for a solid week a lot i mean i don't even wear i'm the one of the only golfers who does not wear i've never seen i've never seen you wear any kind of hat yeah i i only wear i wear hats in winter to stay warm but yeah i just don't wear hats all right good right. Good job, Levitt. You did great. Okay. Yeah, it's kind of, I thought I would be better. I thought I had my game, but I didn't really deliver. No, you delivered. You did great. That was good.

Okay. Thanks a bunch. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye. That's it for this edition of Frequently Asked Questions. If you keep sending in your questions to radio at Freakonomics.com, we will keep answering them. On next week's show, we revisit a favorite episode which looks at how your behavior changes when you put on a mask. A middle-aged lady came and apologized to me afterwards and said, I'm so sorry. I put the mask on and I found myself being very rude. I was getting too close to the performers. I even touched one at one point. I'm so sorry, I put the mask on and I found myself being very rude. I was getting too close to the performers. I even touched one at one point. I'm so sorry. We go behind the scenes of Sleep No

More, a fantastically interesting piece of immersive theater. I got a little rude with people. I was like, get the hell out of the way, man. I would not have usually blindly gone into dark corridors because I'm usually scared of everything. We also hear from the man who created the infamous Stanford prison experiment. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Greta Cohn, Beret Lam, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon,

with engineering help from Jim Briggs. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.