Freakonomics Radio - 68. The Power of the President -- and the Thumb

Episode Date: March 28, 2012

How much does the President of the United States really matter? And: where did all the hitchhikers go? A pair of "attribution errors."

Oh, the president matters a great deal. You may recognize that voice. I'm Don Rumsfeld, and I've just written a book, Known and Unknown, a memoir. He's also a former Navy pilot, congressman, U.S. ambassador to NATO, White House chief of staff, and a two-time secretary of defense. Needless to say, our Constitution divides the powers between the legislative and the judicial and the executive branches. So no president of the United States has the overwhelming power that dictators do, for example. However, a president of the United States has the bully pulpit. He can talk and be heard and people listen. And of course,

in our society with a free political system, you lead not by command but by persuasion. And persuasion, my uncle used to tell me, is a two-edged sword, reason and emotion. Plunge it deep. Today, we're going to plunge deep into a couple of questions. The first one, the one I asked Rumsfeld, well, I have a feeling you're not going to like it. Most people, if you ask them this question, their heads explode. They sputter. They swear. They tell you you're a moron for even thinking this question.

But let's ask it anyway. How much does the president of the United States really matter? I mean, we know the rhetoric. The president is the leader of the free world, the most powerful human being on the face of the earth. But how true is that? How much does the president really matter? I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Dwight G. Eisenhower.

Richard Bill House Nixon. I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear. That I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States. And will, to the best of my ability. To the best of my ability. Preserve, protect, and defend. The Constitution. Of the United States.

So help me God. From APM American Public Media and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, how much power does the president really have? And later, we hit the road to see if hitchhiking is as dangerous as it seems. Did we ditch a good thing? Here's your host, Stephen Dovner. Donald Rumsfeld is 79 years old. During his nearly 50 years in and out of Washington,

he got a good look at the powers of the president via seven different men, from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. In between, he spent a lot of time in the private sector. You've been a CEO a couple of times. You've worked in the White House. Now, there's been academic research looking at the actual impact of a CEO on a firm. And perhaps not surprisingly to you, economists have found that CEOs are far less influential than, let's say, their pay packages might connote. But there's this kind of leadership perception, much as there is with the presidency. So talk to me for a moment about the parallel between the CEO and the president. Well, they're really very, very different.

And being good at one doesn't suggest that one would necessarily be good at the other. The political world is a thing of a different order. Because the powers are divided, a president has to spend a great deal of time dealing with the Congress and dealing with the media because you communicate to the Congress and the public through the media. And almost anything that's proposed is going to be debated and discussed openly immediately. In business, conversely, I mean, I could go into a corporation and decide that I want to freeze the dividend, and I could do it as CEO. I could decide I'm going to open a research facility in country X instead of country Y. I could decide I'm going to downsize or sell off a division, and I did it.

And you can be wrong as well as right, to be sure, but at least you are able to do it. You know, in government, if we put something in place in one of the departments or agencies, the Congress wants to have hearings on it. They want to pull the plan up by the roots every five minutes to see if it's still growing and traumatize it. And the press wants to critique it before it's even 15 minutes old. It's enormously different. Now, that's a very, very compelling argument. But I have to say it sounds a little bit at odds with how we began this conversation when I just asked you kind of the baseline question, how much does the president matter? You answered that, well, of course it matters a great, great, great deal.

But you're telling me now that in terms of influence, in terms of ability to get things done, to move things from step one to step 10, the president, man, he's just got a whole heap of trouble. He's just got to keep plowing through. Is that right? Well, I mean, think of what presidents have accomplished in my adult lifetime. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt got things through the Congress and changed the way America functioned during the Great Depression. He carefully moved the country towards World War II and began assisting with Len Lease, the British, and recognizing the threat that Adolf Hitler posed. He did some bad things, like impounding all the Japanese Americans in the Pacific coast and putting them in detention centers. But he could do those things.

Throughout the Depression, you have been patient. You have granted us wide paths. You have encouraged us with a widespread approval of our purposes. And look at what George W. Bush did. I mean, 9-11, there was no road map or guidebook for him, what he should do, And yet he did. And he got a lot done. And this country has been protected for a decade.

So you're implying that the circumstance of the presidency is what confers the shape of the power, I guess. You mentioned FDR and President Bush. And in each case, we're talking about dramatic circumstances, depression and war on the one hand and a massive terrorist attack on the other. No, it's both. It's both. It's both the circumstance and the personality, the individual. We're a nation at war and America and our allies are fighting this war with relentless determination across the world. Give me an example, if you could, of where you were surprised by a given president's inability to get something done.

It might have been a legislative something. It might have been a leadership something. It might have been a foreign policy something. Well, Gerald Ford, of course, was a man of the House of Representatives. He had served there for a long time and was highly respected. In fact, his hope in life had been to someday maybe be speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He got in the presidency and the war in Vietnam was coming to an end. And he decided that if they could get the Congress to provide some additional funds,

they could very likely affect how the outcome ended. That is to say, conceivably save lives. There were hundreds of thousands of people killed after the end of the Vietnam War in Indochina. And conceivably strengthen the South Vietnamese government sufficiently that they could survive and not be totally overrun by the North. He worked with the Congress and tried to get the funds from the Congress and couldn't. And if there's anybody – now admittedly, he didn't have control of either house.

They were in the hands of the Democrats. But as a president, he was loved up on Capitol Hill. He was respected. In my view, he had the benefit of being on the right side of the issue, trying to do the right thing, and he was not successful. Were you at the time surprised, frustrated, chagrined? Oh, I don't know. I suppose I was surprised. I don't get frustrated or chagrined.

How do you do that? I don't know. You just get up every morning and look ahead. Unless every able American pitches in, Congress and I cannot do the job. Give me an example, if you would, of where a president took the blame for something that was really entirely out of his control. Well, I think one would have to say not entirely out of his control, but certainly Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War. It was it was, you know, started in the Kennedy administration. He inherited it after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. And he ended up having to announce that he wouldn't run for re-election. I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. Did you ever, did you come down more on the right side of President Johnson or on the wrong side in

your encounters with him? Well, I was a big supporter of civil rights. So, so I mean, that was no problem. I, I did, I had troubles with some of his approaches on Vietnam, but we would not have had a civil rights legislation in the 1960s had Lyndon Johnson not resolved to have it. And it was that masterful combination of the cooperation between the Republicans and Lyndon Johnson and his determination. Now, there's an example of a president using the powers of the presidency brilliantly for the good of the country. But really, it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome. What makes a leader powerful? If it's all about persuasion, like Rumsfeld says,

Lyndon Johnson was one of the best, a master of the trade. This was a man who could get his dog to sing. Come on, sing for me. Oh! Oh, you silly dog. But let's get back to the present for now. Out of many, we are one. That while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubt,

and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes, we can. I've probably never been more wrong about anything than I was about my projections for what the Obama administration would look like. That's Steve Levitt. He's my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. He admits he usually doesn't pay much attention to politics, but in the last election, he did. I think the problem for Obama is that he's the greatest speaker who ever lived. And I've said this from long before I came president.

The very first time I heard Obama speak, I thought he was like the Pied Piper because even though I disagreed with most of what he said, I immediately wanted to do them. I would have done whatever he would have told me to do. And in fact, that's why I voted for Obama. I never vote, but I voted for Obama because I thought there's a good chance that Obama will be the greatest president in the history of mankind. And I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Barack Obama. Leavitt doesn't usually vote for two reasons. One is that, like a lot of economists, he thinks that casting one vote in a sea of millions is basically just a waste of time.

Now, it should be said that most people don't think about voting like economists do. But the other reason he doesn't vote is that he doesn't think the president matters all that much. It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of the nation. Yes, we can. What I think a president can do is I think a president can set a tone for a nation. So whether it was someone like a Ronald Reagan. Tear down this wall. Or Franklin Roosevelt.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That's really what great leaders do is they set it down. And I really thought that Obama would be able, through his unbelievable intellect and eloquence, be able to set an incredible tone for our country. And what's strange and surprising to me is that exactly the opposite happened. As soon as he got into office, the tone of the debate was just rancorous and off-tune, off pitch. Leavitt imagined Obama strolling into the White House and blasting away all the negativity, blazing a path toward a shining future. Obama and his staff probably had the same idea.

Here's one of them, who happens to be a colleague of Levin's. Hi, I'm Austin Goolsbee. I'm a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and I'm the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. Which means that you worked as an economist in the White House bending the president's ear. Something like that. Something like that. So you might think from the way that everybody talks during an election, including the candidates, that there's some kind of magic button in the Oval Office that the president can just kind of press whenever he needs to jack up

the economy to create more jobs or whatnot. But you guys, you got in there, you found there are no such buttons at all, are there? You know, I spent a lot of the first month there wandering all around in the basement trying to figure out the tunnels, whether I could find if there was a bunker under there or whatever it was. I never found that button. I never found the bunker or the tunnels either. But I think the bigger mistake that people make is assuming that they can go turn the crank in the White House or in Congress or somewhere in Washington and just get the economy going because such a big share of the economy has nothing to do with Washington that it doesn't quite work like that.

Well, before Obama was president, Goolsbee was one of his economics go-to guys, an advisor on both his presidential and 2004 Senate campaigns. So you personally, Austin, have been with President Obama for a long time, longer than any political ally that I know of at least. So tell me, here's a question I've always wanted to ask you. When it comes to actually having the power and the influence to get things done, how much does the president of the United States actually matter? For the macro economy, not a ton. I mean I say about 98 percent of the economy has nothing to do with Washington at all, much less the president in a normal time. I think he certainly can set the tone. And then there are a bunch of particulars where, I don't know if it's like flying an airplane or something where they said it's 98% boredom and 2% terror or something. In the White

House, it's got an element like that. Look, the economy is doing what it's doing. But then every once in a while, there are these catastrophic events and the world is about to blow up. And then the president of the United States makes a really big difference, as does the head of the Fed, because, you know, the decisions that they make in a crisis can either make things worse and worse and start to spiral the wrong way, or they can, you know, get some wind back under the sails and start to fix it. I'd say if I had to summarize, I think the world vests too much power, certainly in the president, but probably in Washington in general for its influence on the economy, because most all of the economy has nothing to do with the government. So that's a sobering thought, isn't it? Here's President Obama's former top economist saying that the whole idea of the president affecting the economy is a bit of a charade. Now, can that possibly be true? And how do you even try to answer that question empirically? How do you isolate the

president from all the other forces at work on the economy? Justin Wolfers is an economist who's taught at Penn and Princeton. He tried to answer that question in a study of the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential election. 2004 was a social scientist's dream. So the thing is, if you want to try and study the effects of the presidency on anything, in my case on the economy, then if you're a doctor, what you do is you'd run a big randomized trial. Half the time, you'd randomly make it a Republican president. Half the time, you'd randomly make it a Democrat president. And you'd see how those two treatments did in terms of effects on the economy. The problem is we're not allowed to do that in the social sciences. I can't randomly make someone president.

Yet. Yet you're not allowed. Yet. But if you remember the 2004 race, around about 3 o'clock on election day, the exit polls got leaked. And the exit polls said that John Kerry had won in a landslide. Now, around about seven o'clock at night, they counted enough votes that it had become quite clear that in fact Bush was going to win.

But what you have is this four hours, I'm a Democrat, so I'll say four beautiful hours, in which we basically had a Kerry presidency. And it was random because the only reason people thought John Kerry was president was because of a misinterpretation of the early exit polls. And so what we can do is we can look at how the financial markets performed during those four hours of the Kerry presidency and compare that to either the four hours prior when it was clearly a Bush presidency or the four hours after when we learned it was actually going to be the second George W. Bush presidency. So when we do that, you see in fact that stocks fell a little bit during the second George W. Bush presidency. So when we do that, you see in fact that stocks fell a little bit during the four hours of the Kerry presidency. And then they rose a bit when it became the Bush presidency. So that tells us that the stock market preferred George Bush over John Kerry. Sounds like good news for Republicans. Now let me give the

Democrats response, which is in fact, it didn't move very much. It looks like the difference between having a Bush presidency and a Kerry presidency for the value of U.S. stocks was maybe 1.5% or 2%, which is really a pretty small effect. You might think the stock market effect that Wolfer's measured isn't very meaningful in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, it does seem to show that the people who pay the most attention to the economy and who stand most to profit or lose money agree that the president isn't such a big kahuna. I'll bet you $100 you can't name this piano player. He was from the state of Missouri, town of Independence. He loved the piano, sometimes thought about a career in music. Instead, he opened a haberdashery, and later he became president of the United States.

That's right, Harry S. Truman. Truman had an eventful presidency, deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a tough post-war economy at home, the founding of the United Nations. He didn't always get his way. The Taft-Hartley labor law was passed despite the most powerful objection a president possesses, the veto. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what if we just woke up tomorrow and there wasn't a president? I think we would continue functioning in almost the same way. My fellow citizens, my countrymen, my fellow Americans. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio.

Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Bernadette Myler is a Cornell Law professor who specializes in the Constitution and executive power. I asked her what would happen if, whether by miracle or tragedy, depending on your point of view, we woke up tomorrow with no president. I don't think that actually the day-to-day experience would change all that much. How we wound up without a president would probably dictate certain kinds of responses or change public opinion or change the ways in which people were responding. But I think that just not having a president, I'm not sure, would really change the way things happen every day all that much. So what can the president do? Myler thinks the president has real power in only five areas.

One is as commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy. A second area is not of unilateral power, but is a very significant power, and that's the power to decide whom to appoint, especially with judicial nominations. Then a third power that I think is often under-reflected upon is the power not to enforce laws. So the president has the executive power, which means he can execute the laws, but it also means he can decide not to execute the laws. And then a fourth power, I think, is the power to persuade Congress to take certain kinds of action. And then a final area is really a power in relation to negotiating with foreign countries, a power over foreign affairs. All right, all right. Let's not kid ourselves. Those are real powers, powerful powers.

But it's hardly the unilateral authority that goes with all that leader of the free world rhetoric. But that's how we wanted it. Remember, this is a country that got rid of a king in favor of a democratic republic. Are some people in that republic much, much more powerful than others? Of course they are. And the president is a very powerful individual, but he's an individual. It's easy to overestimate his influence. So when you think of the role of the president in relation to Congress, in relation to the states, in relation to the public and so on, what's the best metaphor for the president? Is he or she a puppet master pulling every string? Or is he or she more like the Wizard of Oz, this very mortal man behind the curtain?

How do you see it? I would say actually the Wizard of Oz is a better analogy, partly because I think so much of what is important about the president is an image. The wonderful Wizard of love. So if the president is, for the most part, just another guy with a really big microphone, why even have a president? I think people think the president is almost like a benevolent despot determining our fortunes. And when in reality, I think the president is really just someone who's sitting in the co-pilot seat in a plane that's already on autopilot. And certainly there are some things that can do. And we always have pilots and planes just like we need a president. That's J.C. Bradbury. He's a professor

at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He's known as the baseball economist. He's studied things like how much the manager of a baseball team really matters. What we found when we look at managers is that while some might be slightly better than the others, it's not a big difference between one manager to the next in terms of the decisions that they make. What I've tried to do is look at players who've played for many different managers and coaches and see how they perform differently under different managers. I have not found much differentiation at all between how well players perform with different managers. That is,

as they move from team to team, they tend to perform about as well as they always have. Now, leading a baseball team is, of course, nothing like leading an entire country. So it would be ludicrous to compare the two jobs. But let's do it anyway. Well, I think the reason you finally have to have a guy in the dugout is because if you've ever played intramural sports in college, you know that when there's no coach, people aren't on the same page. People disagree. So it's just nice to have one person to say, OK, this is where – what we're going to do. This is the plan to move forward.

And so the manager there has to be there even though he may not be doing anything that's much different than any other manager might do. So it's like you kind of need dad in the house. Exactly. You need that final arbiter to say, OK, this is the decision we've made and we're going with it. Sounds a little bit like what the president of the United States does. Absolutely. And the president, if you think about the control that a president might have over the economy, for instance, just one area, the president is just a third of our government

and we have the legislative and executive branches. And if the two houses of Congress agree and the president agree, we can get policy, but it's very complicated for them all to agree, and so it's very hard for the president to even have an impact on the economy directly, and especially when much of what goes on in the economy is determined outside by market forces. So the president sort of serves as a focal point to say, how are we doing? Are we doing good? Are we doing bad? And voters sometimes look to blame the president when things aren't going well, even though there's not much he or she could have done about it. Or they may try and reward him when things are going well, just happen to be riding good times. My friends, we did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. All in all, not bad. It's an attribution problem.

That's Bill James, another baseball scholar. He helped revolutionize the field of baseball statistics. James says the attribution problem is a common one, like with pitchers. In baseball, for many years, people believed that baseball was 75% pitching. And the essential reason that they believe this is that they credit the pitcher with wins and losses. And if you credit the pitcher with winning and losing the game, it becomes a tautology that the pitcher is always responsible for winning and losing the game. And it creates the illusion that the pitcher is responsible for much more than he actually is.

Hmm. Interesting, no? Let's listen back to what James just said, but swap out the word pitcher. And if you credit the president with winning and losing the game, it becomes a tautology that the president is always responsible for winning and losing the game. And it creates the illusion that the president is responsible for much more than he actually is. No matter how illusory his powers may be, the president plainly matters. Just not in the black and white binary way most people think. And that's the genius of our system was this divided power. That's Don Rumsfeld again.

And it has worked amazingly well. I mean, the American political experiment is probably the most amazing and probably the most brilliant creation that mankind has fashioned. And it's been an example for countries all across the globe. So let's leave the question of presidential power behind, but linger for one more minute on what Bill James was saying about attribution errors. As he sees it, such errors are hardly confined to politics and baseball. The same syndrome works in almost every area of life. This also includes, for example, safety from violent crime. In the 1950s, the 1960s, people routinely hitchhiked, routinely picked up hitchhikers. We stopped doing

that because of stories that hitchhikers were violent criminals. Well, hitchhikers had no more tendency to be violent criminals than anyone else. There was always a chance that they were, but stopping the practice of hitchhiking really did nothing whatsoever to reduce the incidence of violence crime and had no social value whatsoever. We had attributed to hitchhiking the violence of a few hitchhikers and had closed down the wrong thing. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we ask our second question. When's the last time anybody saw a hitchhiker on the road? I haven't seen a hitchhiker on the road in 20 years. But it makes you wonder, why did hitchhiking disappear? Thank you. WNYC.org. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio.

Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. How is the killer? Jason, what are we watching here? This is the beginning of Texas Chainsaw Massacre where these kids are going to visit a graveyard and they pick up a, you know, pretty scraggly looking hitchhiker. They make hitchies. Jason Zinnemann is a theater critic for the New York Times and he's the author of a book called Shock Value, which is about the horror films of the 1970s.

So in this movie, a van full of teenagers decide, after some debate, to pick up a hitchhiker. He just got off his shift at the slaughterhouse, so his face is streaked with blood and he's talking about bludgeoning cows to death. It's pretty clear by now that we're wishing that he hadn't been picked up. Pretty much, yes. There's not really any good scenario we can imagine coming out of this.

No, no, it's true. It only gets worse. It only gets worse. Now here's where he cross- who cuts them this is why okay i'm gonna that's enough that that that's what that's the final straw you can is that they uh you cut the guy and he and he gets kicked out and franklin's arm is just bleeding like um franklin it's just a little cut. You know, it's... So if you're asking the question, why did hitchhiking pretty much disappear, movies like this one give a compelling answer.

Because it's so dangerous. If you hitchhike, you will die. That's the lesson we learned, at least. Here's Steve Levitt again. If even anybody thought there were homicidal maniacs who were killing hitchhikers or hitchhikers killing people to pick them up, then certainly that would have the kind of chilling effect on a market that very few things could have.

That's right. Levitt, the economist, thinks of hitchhiking as a market, much like any other. Hitchhiking is a classic example of what economists call a matching market, where there's a person who wants a ride and there's a person who's willing to give a ride. And there's actually usually typically no money change hand, so somehow there are people getting benefit on both sides of the transaction. The 50s, the 60s, maybe even the 70s, there were some sort of equilibrium in which there were a set of people who wanted to hitchhike and there were a set of people who were willing to pick them up.

And somehow that equilibrium got destroyed. So the question is, what happened to the equilibrium? The assumption is that hitchhiking was so dangerous that people just wised up and stopped doing it. But how dangerous was it? We went looking for data on hitchhiking itself and on the violence associated with it. And we found pretty much nothing, at least no worthwhile data. So how common was hitchhiking violence? Did we maybe overreact? Do you remember a few years back when the media talked about the summer of the shark, all those scary stories about horrible, disfiguring

shark attacks? Now, guess how many fatal shark attacks there were that year, the whole year around the world? Go ahead, guess. All right. The actual number was four. There were probably more people killed by TV news vans going to cover all the shark attacks, right? But when something is really frightening, we get a little bit number blind. With something like hitchhiking, it might take just one story. I woke up in the morning. It was just a gorgeous day. The wildflowers were out. The trees, you know, sprouted all their leaves. The grass is green because it's spring and it hasn't dried up or anything yet. It was just so gorgeous.

That's Colleen Stan. It was May 19th, 1977. I had just turned 20 in December and I was very young and had a very carefree spirit about me and I was quite impulsive. Stan was living in Eugene, Oregon, and she was planning to visit a friend in Westwood, California, about 360 miles to the south. But her car wouldn't start, so she decided to hitchhike. She got a ride with some truckers who were hauling grape juice. They let her off in Red Bluff, California, about an hour and a half from her friend's house. The truckers even gave her a gallon of juice when they dropped her off. She put out her thumb again. A car stops and there's like five guys in it. And I said,

thanks, but no thanks, you know. So they went on their way. Her next ride was a blue Dodge Colt. It was a young couple inside with a baby. Looked safe enough. So Stan got in the car. It was a very warm day because it was May and Red Bluffs in the valley and it's very warm there. It can get, in the summer times, it can get like 115 there, you know, so it's a very warm place. And so it was a warm day and I was thirsty from traveling and I had taken juice, and I had tipped it up to take a drink. And about the same time I tipped it up, the driver presses on the accelerator and jets out back onto the highway to take off. Well, this caused the juice to pour all down me.

So I was a little irritated with him at this point. And I remember I looked up to the front, to the rearview mirror, and he's looking in the rearview mirror. And it gave me like a chill down my spine. The man, whose name was Cameron Hooker, and his wife, Janice, wound up kidnapping Colleen Stan. They held her captive for more than seven years. They did a variety of horrible things to her. Finally, in 1984, she escaped. Hooker was sentenced to 104 years in prison. His wife got immunity for testifying against him.

It became a big media story. The message was clear. This is why people shouldn't hitchhike. Because when you get into a car with someone, you are literally handing your life over to them. It's just, it's not worth it. It's too dangerous. Because you can look at someone, you can look at the situation and evaluate it just like I did and say, well this looks like a safe ride. But you don't know what

the intent is in someone's heart because they don't show that on the outside and you don't know. And it's just not worth it because life's too valuable to just give it away like that. You can hardly blame Colleen's stand for feeling this way. But how common are these really bad hitchhiking outcomes? Again, we really don't know, but life is all about trade-offs. Every time you do anything, you consider the trade-off. Should four fatal shark attacks each year keep everyone out of the ocean? Apparently not. But what number would? 40? 400? 4,000? What happens when you start letting relatively small numbers balloon into such a large sphere?

My father was the kind of person who would stop and help anybody. That's Bill James again, the baseball statistician. He was born in 1949 in Kansas. One time with two small kids in the car late at night coming back from a movie, we saw two black guys, two black adult males standing beside the road. And my father was not Spencer Tracy. I mean, he was not a violent racist, but he was a man of his generation, and he had the racist attitudes that were very common in his generation. Nonetheless, we stopped, we asked them if they needed a ride, and we took them where they needed to go. And the reason why is you just did.

It was in the time and place where I grew up, if you saw somebody in need of a ride, you gave them a ride. As James got older, that changed. He remembers hearing PSAs on the radio warning drivers not to pick up hitchhikers. Here's good advice for the cross-country motorist. Although it may seem a kind act, it is not a wise act to pick up hitchhikers indiscriminately. In retrospect, he says, hitchhiking took the blame for crime in general. That's another topic he likes writing about.

His latest book is called Popular Crime. If you have a certain number of violent people running around hitchhiking, the fewer other people you have running around hitchhiking, the more dangerous it becomes to pick up a hitchhiker. It drove itself out of existence. Basically, nobody hitchhikes anymore, and the practice has all but disappeared. My point about it was what's really the social value in this? I mean, the hitchhiking is economically efficient because it puts more

people in a car. The real danger was not hitchhiking. It was the fact that you have a certain number of random crazy people who will hurt you. As long as you have the same number of random crazy people, you have the same number of violent crimes. And eliminating hitchhiking doesn't, in my opinion, do anything to change that. So it was a social change that protects the individual. I mean, I wouldn't pick up hitchhikers either. I'm not nuts. I do that to protect myself. But protecting myself has no value to society.

So the demand for hitchhiking fell because of fear, a breakdown in trust, selfishness, whatever. But maybe those aren't the only reasons that demand fell. Did you ever hitchhike, Levitt? I did not hitchhike. I was just a little bit too young. By the time I was 15, I think hitchhikers had pretty much disappeared. Well, not quite. I was hitchhiking then. When I was about 14 or 15, I started thumbing a ride most mornings before school, in the dark, to get to my job in town stocking shelves. I hitched all during college, all over the South, a couple times from North Carolina to upstate New York and back.

It was a pretty simple calculation. I wanted to get somewhere, and I couldn't afford a car. I mean, why else would anyone hitchhike? Just to Redland. Redland? Do you want to go halfway, or do you want to wait for a lift towards us? I'd go halfway. All right. Are there good hitching spots there? Do you want to go halfway or do you want to wait for a lift towards us again? I'd go halfway. All right. Are there good hitching spots there? Do you know? Here are a few hitchhikers we found out in Oregon.

There were three of them. Teriani, a guy named Stove, and their friend George Jamat. So I'm George Jamat, and I have an engineering degree that I only sometimes use, but my real passion and addiction is travel and fixing things. George has hitchhiked a good bit in about 10 foreign countries and all over the U.S. So you do hitchhiking because you want to, not because you have to, really, right? Almost always, yeah. Almost always. So you're a 25-year-old American with an engineering degree and parental support and all that kind of stuff who helped you buy a car, gave you a hand-me-down car, offered

to buy you a train pass to get home, and you say, no, I just want to go down to the road and put my thumb out. What does that say about you and folks like you in the hitchhiking community now who do it not out of necessity but out of desire for experience? I think you just hit the nail on the head there is desire for experience. I definitely could not normally and sustainably extend my vacations and travels as much as I have without hitchhiking. The other big motivation for a lot of us hitchhikers, the ones that I've talked to get a sort of feeling for how someone else lives quickly if you're riding in a car with them for hours. So a guy like George Gemat hitchhikes not really because he needs to, but to get a sort of feeling for how someone else lives.

But what about all the people who might need to hitchhike out of necessity, but don't, out of fear? On the other hand, maybe there's not as much need as we think. Clearly, people getting richer. That's Steve Levitt again. Did you hear what he said? Clearly, people getting richer and cars getting better made has to be a big part of it, because it's an extremely ineffective way to travel, hitchhiking. It's slow, it's unpleasant,

it's uncertain. And so if you can do something better, whether it's take a bus or take a plane or drive your own car, it's hard to believe there are many people who wouldn't prefer a different mode of transportation. So maybe hitchhiking started to disappear because fewer people needed a free lift. Most reporters ask me, how do I get to work? And I tell them I walk about 30 feet from my bedroom to my office. This is Alan Pisarsky. He's what you might call a scholar of transportation behavior.

He used to work for the U.S. Department of Transportation, and he wrote a series of books called Commuting in America. So we are in agreement that there used to be quite a bit of hitchhiking, although we don't know how much. We are in agreement that there's much less now, correct? Yes. Okay. So we want to know where did all those hitchhikers go? Why did so many people stop hitchhiking? I guess my reflex, statistical reflex, is the greater availability of automobiles.

Well, the first part of it is simply driver's licenses. In the 70s is when women began to gain greater access to driver's licenses. If you look at the distributions today, men and women in terms of driver's licensing is almost identical and almost ubiquitous. It's in the 92, 93 percentile for both men and for women. Okay, so a lot more people driving. But also, says Pazarski, there were a lot more cars. In 1969, only 3 in 10 households had more than one car. By 2009, six in 10. All of the really significant change occurred in the two and three car households. That's where you saw an explosion and all of the growth. Okay. So you're telling me more driver's licenses, more cars. Talk to me about

the cars themselves and longevity. I think that's an important component. One of the things that people, I think, don't recognize, one of the great technological changes that we've seen in America in the last 30 years is simply the longevity of the vehicle fleet. Back in the 60s, cars did not last all that long. Today, the average age of a vehicle in America is north of nine years. What that means is that it's entirely possible to buy a 10- or 12-year-old small car, perfectly serviceable, still functioning quite adequately, at a very reasonable cost. So the automobile in that sense has become much more accessible to many parts of the population. I came down to this studio in a 14-year-old car. That makes sense. Cheap and easy car ownership helped drive down demand for hitchhiking,

along with big changes in how we get around generally. The one is the advent of the interstate, which took people off of Main Street and onto roads where walkers are not permitted. And then, of course, deregulation of aviation in roughly 1980. That had an extraordinary effect on the price of air travel. And so, you know, that made it a whole lot cheaper than standing on a street corner with your thumb out. But here's something else worth thinking about. If you care even a little bit about transportation, about the cost, the growing congestion and the risk of accident, about the carbon emissions from all those cars on the road, then consider this very

sobering statistic. The average car commuting to and from work in the U.S. today rides around with about 80 percent of its passenger capacity empty. If our auto fleet were a bus or train fleet, it'd be considered a massive failure. One of America's greatest transportation resources are all those empty seats and automobiles traveling around America. I mean it's a colossal resource that we do waste. Given that there is this massive inefficiency with all this empty capacity in cars, do you wish that hitchhiking could come back? Yeah, I think I do. And I think that maybe

we will see some opportunity for it with the new technologies and people being more willing to spend time with each other and maybe having some kind of a vetting system that says, this guy's okay. That puts people a little bit more at ease. And then that will, I hope, help people to be more comfortable with that kind of an arrangement. Dell City Atomic. Dell City Atomic. Such technologies and vetting systems

already exist in various forms. The ride-sharing board on Craigslist, or Avego, a technology company that provides real-time ride-sharing information via apps and the web. And then there's the practice known as slugging. Slugging, for those who don't know, is basically a kind of an organized hitchhiking world. People just line up on the streets. Sometimes there's a sign, sometimes there's not. We sent Alan Pisarski out on the streets of Arlington, Virginia, where there's a healthy slugging scene. Everybody going to a certain area clusters together. Cars will come along looking for people going their way so they can qualify

to be on the HOV three lanes, which gives them a much faster ride down to the southern suburbs. We're looking now at about seven or eight cars lined up to pick up people. When we ask folks questions, we have to be pretty quick, a little bit nimble, almost like talking to people at a checkout line in the supermarket because they're more interested in getting in the car and heading home. I pull up every day. It says three for Roslyn, three for Pentagon, three for Crystal City. I might have to wait maybe five, ten minutes for a rider, and then I get on the road.

It saves me about $20 a day in commuting costs. There's a website that actually has etiquette rules on it. Don't talk to the driver unless they talk to you. Don't touch anything in the car unless you ask the driver. You have to ride in some pretty nice cars too. Don't eat or drink in the car unless you ask. It's a pretty nice little arrangement. So when some people will talk to you the whole way down, some people will just keep their mouth shut. I usually get home at the same time every day. Slugging is a lot more organized than hitchhiking, and a lot of these people are government employees, so they're wearing suits and ID tags, so they don't exactly conjure the image of the slaughterhouse

hitchhiker from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the creepy couple who kidnapped Colleen Stan. Of course, the normal risks of auto travel still apply. I was a rider rider and the driver was falling asleep behind the wheel. So, you know, you have to try to, you know, wake up, you know, say, hey, either, you know, if you're going to fall asleep, let me out. I'll find a way home or, you know, try to keep your eyes open. What are you scared of and why? Are your fears rational?

Or do you let the small likelihood of a terrible outcome stop you from doing things that you really want to do? You know what I think we fear most in this country? Strangers. We've done a great job through our media, our movies, even our politics, of convincing ourselves that strangers are dangerous. But if you look at the data, you might be surprised. Three of every four murder victims in this country knew their killer. And of course, each of us knows a lot fewer people than there are strangers. More than 60% of rape victims knew their attacker. If you look at the data on missing children, you'll see that an incredibly small percentage

of those incidents, way, way less than even one-tenth of one percent, are what we think of as the stereotypical kidnapping by a stranger. Now, how dangerous was hitchhiking? We may never really know, but almost certainly far, far, far less dangerous than we came to think of it. Are we worse off for abandoning it? That's what I asked Bill James. So there was an equilibrium that existed, and then it was destroyed in large part because of fear, and the equilibrium went away, and it's probably impossible to recreate. Do you think it'd be a good thing if that fear could be suspended, the equilibrium could be recreated, and hitchhiking could be reinvigorated? Yes, I do. And the reason I do is that we have a better society when we can trust one another. And wherever and whenever there's an evaporation of systems based on trust, I than promoting fear and working to reduce the places where terrible things happen, if we could promote trust and work on building societies in which

people are more trustworthy. I think we're all better off in a million different ways, if and when we can do that. So let's see. Our economy is still sputtering, which means money is tight for transportation and everything else. When we drive to work, 80 percent of our passenger capacity is wasted. And as Bill James puts it, a president of the United States, despite the conventional wisdom, is nearly powerless to do anything about it. So, if you're feeling a little bit patriotic today, a little bit optimistic, a little bit adventuresome, go ahead, stick your thumb out, won't you? NYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Catherine Wells, Diana Nguyen, and Andrew Gartrell. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Beret Lam, and Chris Bannon. Our engineer is David Herman. Colin Campbell is our executive producer.

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