Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition Page 22

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly one billion votes, only seven elections were decided by a single vote, with two others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past one hundred years—a 1910 race in Buffalo—was decided by a single vote.

  But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters’ hands—most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.

  Still, people do continue to vote, in the millions. Why? Here are three possibilities:

  Perhaps we are just not very bright and therefore wrongly believe that our votes will affect the outcome.

  Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it’s fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you’d spend the winnings—much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

  Perhaps we have been socialized into the voting-as-civic-duty idea, believing that it’s a good thing for society if people vote, even if it’s not particularly good for the individual. And thus we feel guilty for not voting.

  But wait a minute, you say. If everyone thought about voting the way economists do, we might have no elections at all. No voter goes to the polls actually believing that her single vote will affect the outcome, does she? And isn’t it cruel to even suggest that her vote is not worth casting?

  This is indeed a slippery slope—the seemingly meaningless behavior of an individual, which, in aggregate, becomes quite meaningful. Here’s a similar example in reverse. Imagine that you and your eight-year-old daughter are taking a walk through a botanical garden when she suddenly pulls a bright blossom off a tree.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” you find yourself saying.

  “Why not?” she asks.

  “Well,” you reason, “because if everyone picked one, there wouldn’t be any flowers left at all.”

  “Yeah, but everybody isn’t picking them,” she says with a look. “Only me.”

  In the old days, there were more pragmatic incentives to vote. Political parties regularly paid voters $5 or $10 to cast the proper ballot; sometimes payment came in the form of a keg of whiskey, a barrel of flour or, in the case of an 1890 New Hampshire Congressional race, a live pig.

  Now as then, many people worry about low voter turnout—only slightly more than half of eligible voters participated in the last presidential election—but it might be more worthwhile to stand this problem on its head and instead ask a different question: considering that an individual’s vote almost never matters, why do so many people bother to vote at all?

  The answer may lie in Switzerland. That’s where Patricia Funk discovered a wonderful natural experiment that allowed her to take an acute measure of voter behavior.

  The Swiss love to vote—on parliamentary elections, on plebiscites, on whatever may arise. But voter participation had begun to slip over the years (maybe they stopped handing out live pigs there too), so a new option was introduced: the mail-in ballot. Whereas each voter in the U.S. must register, that isn’t the case in Switzerland. Every eligible Swiss citizen began to automatically receive a ballot in the mail, which could then be completed and returned by mail.

  From a social scientist’s perspective, there was beauty in the setup of this postal voting scheme: because it was introduced in different cantons (the twenty-six statelike districts that make up Switzerland) in different years, it allowed for a sophisticated measurement of its effects over time.

  Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a rainstorm; the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly. An economic model would therefore predict voter turnout to increase substantially. Is that what happened?

  Not at all. In fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the smaller communities within cantons. This finding may have serious implications for advocates of Internet voting—which, it has long been argued, would make voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates that the exact opposite might hold true.

  Why is this the case? Why on earth would fewer people vote when the cost of doing so is lowered?

  It goes back to the incentives behind voting. If a given citizen doesn’t stand a chance of having her vote affect the outcome, why does she bother? In Switzerland, as in the U.S., “there exists a fairly strong social norm that a good citizen should go to the polls,” Funk writes. “As long as poll-voting was the only option, there was an incentive (or pressure) to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation could be hope for social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just the avoidance of informal sanctions. Since in small communities, people know each other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn’t, the benefits of norm adherence were particularly high in this type of community.”

  In other words, we do vote out of self-interest—a conclusion that will satisfy economists—but not necessarily the same self-interest as indicated by our actual ballot choice. For all the talk of how people “vote their pocketbooks,” the Swiss study suggests that we may be driven to vote less by a financial incentive than a social one. It may be that the most valuable payoff of voting is simply being seen at the polling place by your friends or co-workers.

  Unless, of course, you happen to be an economist.

  THE ECONOMY OF DESIRE

  Can fear of AIDS change sexual preference?

  December 11, 2005

  What is a price?

  Unless you’re an economist, you probably think of a price as simply the amount you pay for a given thing—the number of dollars you surrender for, let’s say, Sunday brunch at your favorite neighborhood restaurant. But to an economist, price is a much broader concept. The 20 minutes you spend waiting for a table is part of the price. So, too, is any nutritional downside of the meal itself: a cheeseburger, as the economist Kevin Murphy has calculated, costs $2.50 more than a salad in long-term health implications. There are moral and social costs to tally as well—for instance, the look of scorn delivered by your vegan dining partner as you order the burger. While the restaurant’s menu may list the price of the cheeseburger at $7.95, that is clearly just the beginning.

  The most fundamental rule of economics is that a rise in price leads to less quantity demanded. This holds true for a restaurant meal, a real-estate deal, a college education or just about anything else you can think of. When the price of an item rises, you buy less of it (which is not to say, of course, that you want less of it).

  But what about sex? Sex, that most irrational of human pursuits, couldn’t possibly respond to rational price theory, could it?

  Outside of a few obvious situations, we generally don’t think about sex in terms of prices. Prostitution is one such situation; courtship is another: certain men seem to consider an expensive dinner a prudent investment in pursuit of a sexual dividend.

 
But how might price changes affect sexual behavior? And might those changes have something to tell us about the nature of sex itself?

  Here is a stark example: A man who is sent to prison finds that the price of sex with a woman has spiked—talk about a supply shortage—and he becomes much more likely to start having sex with men. The reported prevalence of oral sex among affluent American teenagers would also seem to illustrate price theory: because of the possibility of disease or pregnancy, intercourse is expensive—and it has come to be seen by some teenagers as an unwanted and costly pledge of commitment. In this light, oral sex may be viewed as a cheaper alternative.

  In recent decades, we have witnessed the most exorbitant new price associated with sex: the H.I.V. virus. Because AIDS is potentially deadly and because it can be spread relatively easily by sex between two men, the onset of AIDS in the early 1980s caused a significant increase in the price of gay sex. Andrew Francis, a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago, has tried to affix a dollar figure to this change. Setting the value of an American life at $2 million, Francis calculated that in terms of AIDS-related mortality, it cost $1,923.75 in 1992 (the peak of the AIDS crisis) for a man to have unprotected sex once with a random gay American man versus less than $1 with a random woman. While the use of a condom greatly reduces the risk of contracting AIDS, a condom is, of course, yet another cost associated with sex. In a study of Mexican prostitution, the Berkeley economist Paul Gertler and two co-authors showed that when a client requested sex without a condom, a prostitute was typically paid a 24 percent premium over her standard fee.

  Francis, in a draft paper titled “The Economics of Sexuality,” tries to go well beyond dollar figures. He puts forth an empirical argument that may fundamentally challenge how people think about sex.

  As with any number of behaviors that social scientists try to measure, sex is a tricky subject. But Francis discovered a data set that offered some intriguing possibilities. The National Health and Social Life Survey, sponsored by the U.S. government and a handful of foundations, asked almost 3,500 people a rather astonishing variety of questions about sex: the different sexual acts received and performed and with whom and when; questions about sexual preference and identity; whether they knew anyone with AIDS. As with any self-reported data, there was the chance that the survey wasn’t reliable, but it had been designed to ensure anonymity and generate honest replies.

  The survey was conducted in 1992, when the disease was much less treatable than it is today. Francis first looked to see if there was a positive correlation between having a friend with AIDS and expressing a preference for homosexual sex. As he expected, there was. “After all, people pick their friends,” he says, “and homosexuals are more likely to have other homosexuals as friends.”

  But you don’t get to pick your family. So Francis next looked for a correlation between having a relative with AIDS and expressing a homosexual preference. This time, for men, the correlation was negative. This didn’t seem to make sense. Many scientists believe that a person’s sexual orientation is determined before birth, a function of genetic fate. If anything, people in the same family should be more likely to share the same orientation. “Then I realized, Oh, my God, they were scared of AIDS,” Francis says.

  Francis zeroed in on this subset of about 150 survey respondents who had a relative with AIDS. Because the survey compiled these respondents’ sexual histories as well as their current answers about sex, it allowed Francis to measure, albeit crudely, how their lives may have changed as a result of having seen up close the costly horrors of AIDS.

  Here’s what he found: Not a single man in the survey who had a relative with AIDS said he had had sex with a man in the previous five years; not a single man in that group declared himself to be attracted to men or to consider himself homosexual. Women in that group also shunned sex with men. For them, rates of recent sex with women and of declaring homosexual identity and attraction were more than twice as high as those who did not have a relative with AIDS.

  Because the sample size was so small—simple chance suggests that no more than a handful of men in a group that size would be attracted to men—it is hard to reach definitive conclusions from the survey data. (Obviously, not every single man changes his sexual behavior or identity when a relative contracts AIDS.) But taken as a whole, the numbers in Francis’s study suggest that there may be a causal effect here—that having a relative with AIDS may change not just sexual behavior but also self-reported identity and desire.

  In other words, sexual preference, while perhaps largely predetermined, may also be subject to the forces more typically associated with economics than biology. If this turns out to be true, it would change the way that everyone—scientists, politicians, theologians—thinks about sexuality. But it probably won’t much change the way economists think. To them, it has always been clear: whether we like it or not, everything has its price.

  HOODWINKED?

  Does it matter if an activist who exposes the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan isn’t open about how he got those secrets?

  January 8, 2006

  Our book Freakonomics includes a chapter titled “How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?” This chapter was our effort to bring to life the economic concept known as information asymmetry, a state wherein one party to a transaction has better information than another party. It is probably obvious that real-estate agents typically have better information than their clients. The Klan story was perhaps less obvious. We argued that the Klan’s secrecy—its rituals, made-up language, passwords and so on—formed an information asymmetry that furthered its aim of terrorizing blacks and others.

  But the Klan was not the hero of our story. The hero was a man named Stetson Kennedy, a white Floridian from an old-line family who from an early age sought to assail racial and social injustices. Out of all of his crusades—for unionism, voting rights and numberless other causes—Kennedy is best known for taking on the Klan in the 1940s. In his book The Klan Unmasked (originally published in 1954 as I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan), Kennedy describes how he adopted a false identity to infiltrate the Klan’s main chapter in Atlanta, was chosen to serve as a “klavalier” (a Klan strong-arm man) and repeatedly found himself at the center of astonishing events, all the while courting great personal risk.

  What did Kennedy do with all the secret Klan information he gathered? He disseminated it like mad: to state prosecutors, to human rights groups and even to broadcasters like Drew Pearson and the producers of the Superman radio show, who publicly aired the Klan’s heretofore hidden workings. Kennedy took an information asymmetry and dumped it on its head. And in doing so, we wrote, he played a significant role in quashing the renaissance of the Klan in postwar America.

  Kennedy has been duly celebrated for his activism: his friend Woody Guthrie once wrote a song about him, and a Stetson Kennedy Day was recently declared in St. John’s County, Florida, where Kennedy, eighty-nine, still lives. That is where we interviewed him nearly two years ago; our account of his amazing true story was based on those interviews, The Klan Unmasked and a small mountain of history books and newspaper articles.

  But is Kennedy’s story as true as it is amazing?

  That was the disturbing question that began to haunt another Florida author, Ben Green, who in 1992 began writing a book about Harry T. Moore, a black civil rights advocate who was murdered in1951. For a time, Stetson Kennedy was a collaborator on the book. Although Green was only tangentially interested in Kennedy’s Klan infiltration—it wasn’t central to the Moore story—he eventually checked out Kennedy’s voluminous archives, held in libraries in New York and Atlanta.

  These papers charted the extraordinarily colorful life of a man who had been, among other things, a poet, a folklorist, a muckraking journalist and a union activist. But Green was dismayed to find that the story told in Kennedy’s own papers seemed to be quite different from what Kennedy wrote in The Klan Unmasked.

  In
The Klan Unmasked, Kennedy posed as an encyclopedia salesman named John S. Perkins who, in one of his first undercover maneuvers, visits the former governor of Georgia—a reputed Klan sympathizer—and ingratiates himself by offering to distribute some hate literature. A document in Kennedy’s archives, however, suggests that Kennedy had indeed met the ex-governor, but not in any undercover capacity. Rather, he had interviewed him for a book he was writing—nor did this document mention any hate literature.

  A close examination of Kennedy’s archives seems to reveal a recurrent theme: legitimate interviews that he conducted with Klan leaders and sympathizers would reappear in The Klan Unmasked in different contexts and with different facts. In a similar vein, the archives offer evidence that Kennedy covered public Klan events as a reporter but then recast them in his book as undercover exploits. Kennedy had also amassed a great deal of literature about the Klan and other hate groups that he joined, but his own archives suggest that he joined most of these groups by mail.

  So did Kennedy personally infiltrate the Klan in Atlanta, as portrayed in The Klan Unmasked?

  In his archives are a series of memos that were submitted to the Anti-Defamation League, one of several civil rights groups to which Kennedy reported. Some of the memos were written by him; others were written by a man identified as John Brown, a union worker and former Klan official who had changed his ways and offered to infiltrate the Klan. “This worker is joining the Klan for me,” Kennedy wrote in one memo in early 1946. “I am certain that he can be relied on.”

  In Kennedy’s subsequent memos—indeed, in hundreds of pages of Kennedy’s various correspondence from the era—he matter-offactly attributed some of his most powerful Klan information to John Brown: one of the memos he declared “a report from my informant inside the Klan on the meeting of Atlanta Klan No. 1 on August 12 and Atlanta Klan No. 297 on August 15.” As John Brown fed inside information to Kennedy, Kennedy would then relay it to groups like the A.D.L., as well as to prosecutors and journalists. It wasn’t until he wrote The Klan Unmasked, several years later, that Kennedy placed himself, Zelig-like, at the center of all the action.