Freakonomics Radio - 47. Wildfires, Cops, and Keggers

Episode Date: November 2, 2011

On Election Day, most people focus on the obvious winners and losers -- that is, the candidates. But we went looking for some of the strange side effects that elections produce.

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. It is time once again for a little Freakonomics Radio, that moment of your lives every couple of weeks when we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of what? Of, yes, everything. Dubner, how are you? Hey, Kai. I'm great. Listen, I sent you a little something this week. You want to open it up? Okay. All right. Here we go. It's, oh my God, it's heavy, first of all. Also- It is heavy?

Oh my God, yes. Oh, Jesus, Dubner. Also in a bag. Oh, get out of here. Yeah. It's Heineken. It's a little mini keg of Heineken. It's one of our, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put it in the marketplace refrigerator. Don't thank me too much, Kai. I'm actually just trying to save myself a little money because as you know, election day is next week.

All right. Yeah, fine. But much as I like my beer, what does election day have to do with it? Well, as it turns out, election day and beer inflation sometimes travel together. So here's Jeffrey Kubik, an economist at Syracuse University. All right. Basically, the year after an election, there tends to be beer tax increases. So if you are throwing your kegger during the year after an election, you're probably going to be paying more.

Right. See, Kai, the idea is that incumbent politicians may not want to hike beer taxes before an election since the beer drinking constituency is pretty sizable. So the taxes come later. It's weird, but it kind of makes sense. Oh, it gets weirder, Kai. It always does, man. It always does with you. That's my purpose here.

But, you know, most people, when they look at elections, they focus on the obvious winners and losers. That is the candidates themselves. We, however, this week went looking for some strange side effects of elections. And believe it or not, there's a growing body of academic research on this. So here, in order of appearance are Ben Olkin, Spiros Skouras, and Arka Ghosh. In the period leading up to elections, we find greater evidence of deforestation. In Greece, the area burned in an election year is two and a half times the size burned on a non-election year. Crime is lowest in an election year, and it rises right after an election for elections in India. All right, so that's a lot of stuff. We'll go to the

last one first, because that's the one that stuck. The crime drop in India. Incumbents, I imagine, want to show they're tough on crime, so they do more policing so crime goes down before an election. Exactly right. And not just in India, but around the world here as well. Yep. All right. So deforestation and wildfires, though, help me out. Well, in Indonesia, where that clip is about, illegal logging is big business. The researchers who looked at this theorized that logging companies bribe incumbents during the season to look the other way. The wildfires in Greece, similar story. You can't legally develop forested land there unless it's been burned by a wildfire.

So again, the theory goes that developers burn the land on purpose knowing that the incumbents that they support just won't quite notice. I know what this is. This is unintended consequences, right? That's exactly right. You know, elections produce all kinds of consequences that are in no way an official plank on anyone's platform. And next week, with an off-year election, we might see the special interests who are always jockeying for influence have even more influence than usual. Here's Sarah Anzia from Stanford University. When elections are held at weird times, like a city election held in the odd-numbered years, the people who really care about the election outcome are going to turn out to vote,

meaning that each successfully mobilized voter goes much farther toward tipping the election outcome when turnout is low. Right. So, Kai, Anzia found that teachers' unions, for instance, do incredibly well in places that hold school board elections in off years. In those districts, teachers get paid three to four percent more. You're right. It's the disproportionate impact thing. Fewer people voting, your vote counts more in theory. That's exactly right. Now, we've argued before in Freakonomics that voting generally matters a lot less than people think in a presidential election, let's say. But next week with off-year elections, you can have more influence than usual, and then

you can go out and celebrate your influence with a cheap keg party, Guy. Or with your beer. That's right. All right. Vote early, vote often. Freakonomics.com is the website. Stephen Dubner, we'll see you in a couple of weeks, man. My pleasure.

Thanks, Guy. Hey, we want to hear the stories of the weird election effects that have gone on in your backyard. So give us your feedback. Would you go to Freakonomics.com slash radio and click the talkback box? Thanks a lot.