Freakonomics Radio - 99. How to Maximize Your Halloween Candy Haul

Episode Date: October 31, 2012

Is it as simple as going to the richest neighborhood you can find? Of course not ...

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 Freakonomics Radio. It's that moment every couple of weeks 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. And Dubner, you are in New York. And I'm going to guess that since you're on the radio today, you're warm and safe and dry, yes, from the storm? I and mine are fine.

We got very lucky. A lot of people obviously hurting in a lot of ways here and all kinds of chaos in New York. Not surprisingly, the famous Village Halloween Parade tonight has been canceled. It'll probably be a pretty muted Halloween everywhere on the East Coast. But we're still hearing from other parts of the country looking for answers. A listener in St. Louis named Vishal Dosanjh wrote to us with a Halloween dilemma. He has got an eight-year-old daughter named Sophia. She, of course, wants to go out trick-or-treating. But the neighborhood where they live is not so great. So here, I'll let

dad explain. I'd say it's on the higher end of a crime rate. There's not many people that are keeping their lights on on Halloween night. You know, there's not many people that have Halloween decorations. Now, little Sophia had made some observations based on Halloween's past. Yeah, some neighborhoods give out more candy. I think it might be because maybe they have more money to buy candy or something like that. Yeah, something like that. That's a pretty savvy eight-year-old, man. I don't think my kids could figure that out.

Exactly. And Vishal, her dad, wanted to know, so is little Sophia right? Do richer neighborhoods actually give out better candy on Halloween? So we turned to John List. He's a University of Chicago economist who's done a lot of research on a related topic of door-to-door charitable giving. And he's looked at both wealthy neighborhoods and less wealthy neighborhoods.

Here's what he had to say. One of the best ways to go is to look for a community that is public-spirited and look for the wealthier parts of that community and then to approach that community for your candy gifts. All right. First of all, that takes all the charm out of it, right?

I mean, if you've got to get a spreadsheet out to go trick-or-treating, man, you're doing something wrong. But straight-up wealth is not what he's talking about, right? Don't go immediately to the richest places in the richest places. That's right. There are other factors to consider. We also talked to the folks at Zillow, the online real estate database, which created a trick-or-treat index, actually, trying to identify the best

trick-or-treating neighborhoods in the top 20 trick-or-treating American cities. Here is Zillow's chief economist, Stan Humphries. From an economic perspective, we thought about children as kind of goal-maximizing automatons. What factors would you look at if you were trying to maximize your haul of candy on Halloween evening? Goal maximizing automatons. I'm pretty sure I'm appalled, actually. What does Zillow have to say about how it constructs this index? I mean, what do they use besides home value, which is what they're known for?

Okay. So in addition to home value, they look at neighborhood density. It looks at a walkability score and crime data. Now, unfortunately, St. Louis, home of Vishal Dosanjh and his daughter, Sophia, did not make Zillow's list of top 20 cities. But Zillow was good enough to run the numbers for us in St. Louis. And the neighborhood they came up with is St. Louis Hills, which is not too far from where the Dosanjhs live. It's got nice houses close together, a good safety score. Here's Rick Bonish, who lives in St. Louis Hills. He says he and his wife spend about $300 on Halloween candy. Wow, that's a lot of money. I mean, we have 20 houses on each side of the block. And so every house is going to have somebody on their front porch giving out candy. But what if

you're, okay, this is going to sound terrible. What if you're like me and you just turn off your lights and pretend you're not home on Halloween? On that block, you will stick out like a sore thumb. But that's actually the point. John List points out that, you know, while giving away candy on Halloween is such small stakes, it looks a lot like the other giving that he studies. And what he's found is that while we give in some part to be truly generous, altruistic, we give in larger part because we want to be seen as being generous.

And what we find is that for every dollar given, roughly 70 cents of that dollar is due to social pressure and 30 cents is due to altruism. That's tough, man. 70, 30. We've talked about this before, though. It's pure pressure, right? It's just really cynical. That's exactly right. Kai, I do have a feeling that tonight, however, especially in the parts of the country where Sandy has hit hard, like here in New York,

that 70-30 split might be about reversed because, you know, hardship really does bring out the best in us. So I have a feeling that tonight, the generosity and, therefore, the Halloween candy will be flowing. Hope so. At least my kids are getting ready to go.

There you go. If you live in New Jersey, by the way, Governor Christie has postponed Halloween. It's now going to be November the 5th, in case you're keeping track. So there you go. Stephen Dubner, he's back in a couple of weeks. Freakonomics.com is the website. See you, man. Happy Halloween, Kai.

Yeah, bah humbug. Hey, podcast listeners, this is Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio. Guess how many episodes we have now made? 99! That's right, which means that next week is number... 100! That's right. So next week, listen in. We have a special episode for you that gives you the very best moments of our previous 100 episodes. No, it would be 99 episodes because you already, they just used to be the 99 episodes.

Yeah, Sean, that's right. Thank you. So listen in next week for the very best of our previous 99 episodes on episode number 100! That was good. Thank you. All right, checks are in the mail.