Top Quotes: “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance” — Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner

Introduction

“1 of every 140 miles is driven drunk, or 21 billion miles each year.

Why do so many people get behind the wheel after drinking Maybe because — and this could be the most sobering statistic yet — drunk drivers are rarely caught. There is just one arrest for every 27,000 miles driven while drunk. That means you could expect to drive all the way across the country, and then back, and then back and forth three more times, chugging beers all the while, before you got pulled over. As with most bad behaviors, drunk driving could probably be wiped out entirely if a strong-enough incentive were instituted — random roadblocks, for instance, where drunk drivers are executed on the spot — but our society probably doesn’t have the appetite for that.”

“The same proportion of miles that are driven drunk — 307 million miles — are walked drunk each year.

Doing the math, you find that on a per-mile basis, a drunk walker is eight times more likely to get killed than a drunk driver.

There’s one important caveat: a drunk walker isn’t likely to hurt or kill anyone other than her- or himself. That can’t be said of a drunk driver. In fatal accidents involving alcohol, 36 percent of the victims are either passengers, pedestrians, or other drivers.

Still, even after factoring in the deaths of those innocents, walking drunk leads to five times as many deaths per mile as driving drunk.”

Gender in India

“It is especially unlucky to be born female, because many Indian parents express a strong “son preference.”

Only 10 percent of Indian families with two sons want another child, whereas nearly 40 percent of families with two daughters want to try again. Giving birth to a baby boy is like giving birth to a 401(k) retirement fund.

He will grow up to be a wage-earning man who can provide for his parents in their sunset years and, when the time comes, light the funeral pyre. Having a baby girl, meanwhile, means relabeling the retirement fund a dowry fund. Although the dowry system has long been under assault, it is still common for a bride’s parents to give the groom or his family cash, cars, or real estate. The bride’s family is also expected to pay for the wedding.

The U.S. charity Smile Train, which performs cleft-repair surgery on poor children around the world, recently spent some time in Chennai, India. When one local man was asked how many children he had, he answered “one.” The organization later learned that the man did have a son — but he also had five daughters, who apparently didn’t warrant a mention. Smile Train also learned that midwives in Chennai were sometimes paid $2.50 to smother a baby girl born with a cleft deformity — and so, putting the lure of incentives to good use, the charity began offering midwives as much as $10 for each baby girl they took to a hospital for cleft surgery.

Girls are so undervalued in India that there are roughly 35 million fewer females than males in the population. Most of these “missing women,” as the economist Amartya Sen calls them, are presumed dead, either by indirect means (the girl’s parents withheld nutrition or medical care, perhaps to the benefit of a brother), direct harm (the baby girl was killed after birth, whether by a midwife or a parent), or, increasingly, a pre-birth decision. Even in India’s smallest villages, where electricity might be sporadic and clean water hard to find, a pregnant woman can pay a technician to scan her belly with an ultrasound and, if the fetus is female, have an abortion. In recent years, as these sex-selective abortions have become more common, the male-female ratio in India — as well as in other son-worshipping countries like China — has grown even more lopsided.”

“In a national health survey, 51 percent of Indian men said that wife-beating is justified under certain circumstances; more surprisingly, 54 percent of women agreed — if, for instance, a wife burns dinner or leaves the house without permission. More than 100,000 young Indian women die in fires every year, many of them “bride burnings” or other instances of domestic abuse.

Indian women also run an outsize risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, including a high rate of HIV/AIDS, One cause ís that Indian men’s condoms malfunction more than 15 percent of the time. Why such a high fail rate? According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, some 60 percent of Indian men have penises too small for the condoms manufactured to fit World Health Organization specs. That was the conclusion of a two-year study in which more than 1,000 Indian men had their penises measured and photographed by scientists. “The condom,” declared one of the researchers, “is not optimized for India.””

“The women who recently got cable TV were significantly less willing to tolerate wife-beating, less likely to admit to having a son preference, and more likely to exercise personal autonomy.”

“Rural Indian families who got cable TV began to have a lower birthrate than families without TV. (In a country like India, a lower birthrate generally means more autonomy for women and fewer health risks.) Families with TV were also more likely to keep their daughters in school, which suggests that girls were seen as more valuable, or at least deserving of equal treatment. (The enrollment rate for boys, notably, didn’t change.) These hard numbers made the self-reported survey data more believable. It appears that cable TV really did empower the women of rural India, even to the point of no longer tolerating domestic abuse.

Or maybe their husbands were just too busy watching cricket.”

Horses

“At the turn of the twentieth century, some 200,000 horses lived and worked in New York City, or 1 for every 17 people. But oh, the troubles they caused!

Horse-drawn wagons clogged the streets terribly, and when a horse broke down, it was often put to death on the spot. This caused further delays. Many stable owners held life-insurance policies that, to guard against fraud, stipulated the animal be euthanized by a third party. This meant waiting for the police, veterinarian, or the ASPCA to arrive. Even death. didn’t end the gridlock. “Dead horses were extremely unwieldy,” writes the transportation scholar Eric Morris. “As a result, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so they could more easily be sawed into pieces and carted off.”

The noise from iron wagon wheels and horseshoes was so disturbing — it purportedly caused widespread nervous disorders — that some cities banned horse traffic on the streets around hospitals and other sensitive areas.

And it was frighteningly easy to be struck down by a horse or wagon, neither of which is as easy to control as they appear in the movies, especially on slick, crowded city streets. In 1900, horse accidents claimed the lives of 200 New Yorkers, or 1 of every 17,000 residents. In 2007, meanwhile, 274 New Yorkers died in auto accidents, or 1 of every 30,000 residents. This means that a New Yorker was nearly twice as likely to die from a horse accident in 1900 than from a car accident today. (There are unfortunately no statistics available on drunk horse-drivers, but we can assume the number would be menacingly high.)

Worst of all was the dung. The average horse produced about 24 pounds of manure a day. With 200,000 horses, that’s nearly 5 million pounds of horse manure. A day. Where did it go?

Decades earlier, when horses were less plentiful in cities, there was a smooth-functioning market for manure, with farmers buying it to truck off (via horse, of course) to their fields. But as the urban equine population exploded, there was a massive glut. In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summertime, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people’s basements.

Today, when you admire old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-story parlor, keep in mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a homeowner to rise above the sea of horse manure.

All of this dung was terrifically unhealthy. It was a breeding ground for billions of flies that spread a host of deadly diseases. Rats and other vermin swarmed the mountains of manure to pick out undigested oats and other horse feed — crops that were becoming more costly for human consumption thanks to higher horse demand. No one at the time was worried about global warming, but if they had been; the horse would have been Public Enemy №1, for its manure emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

In 1898, New York hosted the first international urban planning conference. The agenda was dominated by horse manure, because cities around the world were experiencing the same crisis. But no solution could be found. “Stumped by the crisis,” writes Eric Morris, “the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.”

The world had seemingly reached the point where its largest cities could not survive without the horse but couldn’t survive with it, either.”

Gender and Wages

“Title IX also brought some bad news for women. When the law was passed, more than 90 percent of college women’s sports teams had female head coaches. Title IX boosted the appeal of such jobs: salaries rose and there was more exposure and excitement. Like the lowly peasant food that is “discovered” by the culinary elite and promptly migrates from roadside shacks into high-end restaurants, these jobs were soon snapped up by a new set of customers: men. These days, barely 40 percent of college women’s sports teams are coached by women. Among the most visible coaching jobs in women’s sports are those in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), founded thirteen years ago as a corollary to the men’s NBA. As of this writing, the WNBA has 13 teams and just 6 of them — again, fewer than 50 percent — are coached by women. This is actually an improvement from the league’s tenth anniversary season, when only 3 of the 14 coaches were women.”

“It turns out that the typical street prostitute in Chicago works 13 hours a week, performing 10 sex acts during that period, and earns an hourly wage of approximately $27. So her weekly take-home pay is roughly $350. This includes an average of $20 that a prostitute steals from her customers and acknowledges that some prostitutes accept drugs in lieu of cash — usually crack cocaine or heroin, and usually at a discount. Of all the women in Venkatesh’s study, 83 percent were drug addicts.

Like LaSheena, many of these women took on other, non-prostitution work, which Venkatesh also tracked. Prostitution paid about four times more than those jobs. But as high as that wage premium may be, it looks pretty meager when you consider the job’s downsides. In a given year, a typical prostitute in Venkatesh’s study experienced a dozen incidents of violence. At least 3 of the 160 prostitutes who participated died during the course of the study.

“Most of the violence by johns is when, for some reason, they can’t consummate or can’t get erect,” says Venkatesh. “Then he’s shamed — “I’m too manly for you” or ‘You’re too ugly for me!” Then the john wants his money back, and you definitely don’t want to negotiate with a man who just lost his masculinity.”

Moreover, the women’s wage premium pales in comparison to the one enjoyed by even the low-rent prostitutes from a hundred years ago. Compared with them, women like LaSheena are working for next to nothing.

Why has the prostitute’s wage fallen so far?

Because demand has fallen dramatically. Not the demand for sex. That is still robust. But prostitution, like any industry, is vulnerable to competition.

Who poses the greatest competition to a prostitute? Simple: any woman who is willing to have sex with a man for free.

It is no secret that sexual mores have evolved substantially in recent decades. The phrase “casual sex” didn’t exist a century ago (to say nothing of “friends with benefits”). Sex outside of marriage was much harder to come by and carried significantly higher penalties than it does today.

Imagine a young man, just out of college but not ready to settle down, who wants to have some sex. In decades past, prostitution was a likely option. Although illegal, it was never hard to find, and the risk of arrest was minuscule. While relatively expensive in the short term, it provided good long-term value because it didn’t carry the potential costs of an unwanted pregnancy or a marriage commitment. At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute.

Now imagine that same young man twenty years later. The shift in sexual mores has given him a much greater supply of unpaid sex. In his generation, only 5 percent of men lose their virginity to a prostitute. And it’s not that he and his friends are saving themselves for marriage. More than 70 percent of the men in his generation have sex before they marry, compared with just 33 percent in the earlier generation.”

“The data show that a man who solicits a street prostitute is likely to be arrested about once for every 1,200 visits.”

“Prostitutes do not charge all customers the same price. Black customers, for instance, pay on average about $9 less per trick than white customers, while Hispanic customers are in the middle.”

“The small discount for condom use is surprising. Even more surprising is how seldom condoms are used: less than 25 percent of the time even when counting only vaginal and anal sex. (New customers were more likely to use condoms than repeat customers; black customers were less likely than others.) A typical Chicago street prostitute could expect to have about 300 instances of unprotected sex a year. The good news, according to earlier research, is that men who use street prostitutes have a surprisingly low rate of HIV infection, less than 3 percent. (The same is not true for male customers who hire male prostitutes; their rate is above 35 percent.)

So a lot of factors influence a prostitute’s pricing: the act itself, certain customer characteristics, even the location.

But amazingly, prices at a given location are virtually the same from one prostitute to the next.”

“Customers pay about $16 more if they go through a pimp. But the customers who use pimps also tend to buy more expensive services — no manual stimulation for these gents — which further bumps up the women’s wages. So even after the pimps take their typical 25 percent commission, the prostitutes earn more money while turning fewer tricks.

The secret to the pimps’ success is that they go after a different clientele than the street prostitutes can get on their own. As Venkatesh learned, the pimps in West Pullman spent a lot of their time recruiting customers, mostly white ones, in downtown strip clubs and the riverboat casinos in nearby Indiana.

But as the data show, the pimpact goes well beyond producing higher wages. A prostitute who works with a pimp is less likely to be beaten up by a customer or forced into giving freebies to gang members.”

“Three economists recently analyzed home-sales data in Madison, Wisconsin, which has a thriving for-sale-by-owner market (or FSBO, pronounced “FIZZ-bo”). This revolves around the website FSBOMadison.com, which charges homeowners $150 to list a house, with no commission when the home is sold. By comparing FSBO sales in Madison with Realtor-sold homes in Madison along several dimensions — price, house and neighborhood characteristics, time on market, and so on — the economists were able to gauge the Realtor’s impact.

What did they find?

The homes sold on FSBOMadison.com typically fetched about the same price as the homes sold by Realtors. That doesn’t make the Realtors look very good. Using a Realtor to sell a $400,000 house means paying a commission of about $20,000–versus just $150 to FSBOMadison.com. (Another recent study, meanwhile, found that flat-fee real-estate agents, who typically charge about $500 to list a house, also get about the same price as full-fee Realtors.)

But there are some important caveats. In exchange for the 5 percent commission, someone else does all the work for you. For some home sellers, that’s well worth the price. It’s also hard to say if the Madison results would hold true in other cities. Furthermore, the study took place during a strong housing market, which probably makes it easier to sell a home yourself: Also, the kind of people who choose to sell their houses without a Realtor may have a better business head to start with. Finally, even though the FSBO homes sold for the same average price as those sold by Realtors, they took twenty days longer to sell.”

“In the old days, prostitution rings in even the poorest Chicago neighborhoods were usually run by women. But men, attracted by the high wages, eventually took over — yet another example in the long history of men stepping in to outearn women.”

“You don’t necessarily need a pimp to stay out of jail. The average prostitute in Chicago will turn 450 tricks before she is arrested, and only 1 in 10 arrests leads to a prison sentence.”

“A Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.”

“Every summer around the Fourth of July holiday, Washington Park is thronged with families and other large groups who get together for cookouts and parties. For some of these visitors, catching up with Aunt Ida over lemonade isn’t quite stimulating enough. It turns out that the demand for prostitutes in Washington Park skyrockets every year during this period.

And the prostitutes do what any good entrepreneur would do: they raise prices by about 30 percent and work as much overtime as they can handle.

Most interestingly, this surge in demand attracts a special kind of worker — a woman who steers clear of prostitution all year long but, during this busy season, drops her other work and starts turning tricks. Most of these part-time prostitutes have children and take care of their households; they aren’t drug addicts.”

“As of 1940, an astonishing 55 percent of all college-educated female workers in their early thirties were employed as teachers.”

Birth

“Some parts of Michigan have a substantial Muslim population, as does SE Uganda. Most Muslim women still participate in Ramadan fasting even while pregnant. Almond and Mazunder found by analyzing years’ worth of natality data that babies that were in utero during Ramadan were more likely to exhibit developmental aftereffects.”

“Such birth effects aren’t as rare as you might think. Douglas Almond, examining U.S. Census data from 1960 to 1980, found one group of people whose terrible luck persisted over their whole lives. They had more physical ailments and lower lifetime income than people who’d been born just a few months earlier or a few months later. They stood out in the census record like a layer of volcanic ash stands out in the archaeological record, a thin stripe of ominous sediment nestled between two thick bands of normalcy.

What happened?

These people were in utero during the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. It was a grisly plague, killing more. than half a million Americans in just a few months — a casualty toll, as Almond notes, greater than all U.S. combat deaths during all the wars fought in the twentieth century.

More than 25 million Americans, meanwhile, contracted the flu but survived. This included one of every three women of child-bearing age. The infected women who were pregnant during the pandemic had babies who, like the Ramadan babies, ran the risk of carrying lifelong scars from being in their mothers’ bellies at the wrong time.

Other birth effects, while not nearly as dire, can exert a significant pull on one’s future. It is common practice, especially among economists, to co-write academic papers and list the authors alphabetically by last name. What does this mean for an economist who happened to be born Albert Zyzmor instead of, say, Albert Aab? Two (real) economists addressed this question and found that, all else being equal, Dr. Aab would be more likely to gain tenure at a top university, become a fellow in the Econometric Society (hooray!), and even win the Nobel Prize.

“Indeed.” the two economists concluded, “one of us is currently contemplating dropping the first letter of her surname.” The offending name: Yariv.

Or consider this: if you visit the locker room of a world-class soccer team early in the calendar year, you are more likely to interrupt a birthday celebration than if you arrive later in the year. A recent tally of the British national youth leagues, for instance, shows that fully half of the players were born between January and March, with the other half spread out over the nine remaining months. On a similar German team, 52 elite players were born between January and March, with just 4 players born between October and December.

Why such a severe birthdate bulge?

Most elite athletes begin playing their sports when they are quite young, Since youth sports are organized by age, the leagues naturally impose a cutoff birthdate. The youth soccer leagues in Europe, like many such leagues, use December 31 as the cutoff date.

Imagine now that you coach in a league for seven-year-old boys and are assessing two players. The first one (his name is Jan) was born on January 1, while the second one (his name is Tomas) was born 364 days later, on December 31. So even though they are both technically seven-year-olds, Jan is a year older than Tomas which, at this tender age, confers substantial advantages. Jan is likely to be bigger, faster, and more mature than Tomas.

So while you may be seeing maturity rather than raw ability, it doesn’t much matter if your goal is to pick the best players for your team. It probably isn’t in a coach’s interest to play the scrawny younger kid who, if he only had another year of development, might be a star.

And thus the cycle begins. Year after year, the bigger boys like Jan are selected, encouraged, and given feedback and playing time, while boys like Tomas eventually fall away. This “relative-age effect,” as it has come to be known, is so strong in many sports that its advantages last all the way through to the professional ranks.

K. Anders Ericsson, an enthusiastic, bearded, and burly Swede, is the ringleader of a merry band of relative-age scholars scattered across the globe. He is now a professor of psychology at Florida State University, where he uses empirical research to learn what share of talent is “natural” and how the rest of it is acquired.

His conclusion: the trait we commonly call “raw talent” is vastly overrated. “A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with,” he says. “But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born.

And yes, just as your grandmother always told you, practice does make perfect. But not just willy-nilly practice. Mastery arrives through what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” This entails more than simply playing a C-minor scale a hundred times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket.

Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

The people who become excellent at a given thing aren’t necessarily the same ones who seemed to be “gifted” at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love — yes, your nana told you this too because if you don’t love what you’re doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.

Once you start to look, birthdate bulges are everywhere. Consider the case of Major League Baseball players. Most youth leagues in the United States have a July 31 cutoff date. As it turns out, a U.S.-born boy is roughly 50 percent more likely to make the majors if he is born in August instead of July.”

Terrorism

“The economist Alan Krueger combed through a Hezbollah newsletter called Al-Ahd (The Oath) and compiled biographical details on 129 dead shahids (martyrs). He then compared them with men from the same age bracket in the general populace of Lebanon. The terrorists, he found, were less likely to come from a poor family (28 percent versus 33 percent) and more likely to have at least a high-school education (47 percent versus 38 percent).

A similar analysis of Palestinian suicide bombers by Claude Berrebi found that only 16 percent came from impoverished families, versus more than 30 percent of male Palestinians overall. More than 60 percent of the bombers, meanwhile, had gone beyond high school, versus 15 percent of the populace.

In general, Krueger found, “terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle-class or high-income families.” Despite a few exceptions — the Irish Republican Army and perhaps the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka (there isn’t enough evidence to say) — the trend holds true around the world, from Latin American terrorist groups to the al Qaeda members who carried out the September 11 attacks in the United States.

How can this be explained?

It may be that when you’re hungry, you’ve got better things to worry about than blowing yourself up. It may be that terrorist leaders place a high value on competence, since a terrorist attack requires more orchestration than a typical crime.

Furthermore, as Krueger points out, crime is primarily driven by personal gain, whereas terrorism is fundamentally a political act.

In his analysis, the kind of person most likely to become a terrorist is similar to the kind of person most likely to…vote. Think of terrorism as civic passion on steroids.”

Healthcare

“Until the 1960s, hospitals simply weren’t designed to treat emergencies. “If you brought someone to a hospital at night,” Feied says, “the doors would be locked. You’d ring the bell, a nurse would come down to see what you wanted. She might let you in, then she’d call the doctor at home, and he might or might not come in.” Ambulances were often run by the local mortuary. It is hard to think of a better example of misaligned incentives: a funeral director who is put in charge of helping a patient not die!”

“You could purchase an annuity, a contract that pays off a set amount of income each year, but only as long as you stay alive. People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don’t, and not because they are healthier to begin with. The evidence suggests that an annuity’s steady payoff provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging.”

“In most other cases, chemotherapy is remarkably ineffective. An exhaustive analysis of cancer treatment in the United States and Australia showed that the five-year survival rate for all patients was about 63 percent but that chemotherapy contributed barely 2 percent to this result. There is a long list of cancers for which chemotherapy had zero discernible effect, including multiple myeloma, soft-tissue sarcoma, melanoma of the skin, and cancers of the pancreas, uterus, prostate, bladder, and kidney.

Consider lung cancer, by far the most prevalent fatal cancer, killing more than 150,000 people a year in the United States. A typical chemotherapy regime for non-small-cell lung cancer costs more than $40,000 but helps extend a patient’s life by an average of just two months. Thomas J. Smith, a highly regarded oncology researcher and clinician at Virginia Commonwealth University, examined a promising new chemotherapy treatment for metastasized breast cancer and found that each additional year of healthy life gained from it costs $360,000–if such a gain could actually be had. Unfortunately, it couldn’t: the new treatment typically extended a patient’s life by less than two months.”

“From 2002 to 2008, the United States was fighting bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; among active military personnel, there were an average 1,643 fatalities per year. But over the same stretch of time in the early 1980s, with the United States fighting no major wars, there were more than 2,100 military deaths per year. How can this possibly be?

For one, the military used to be much larger: 2.1 million on active duty in 1988 versus 1.4 million in 2008. But even the rate of death in 2008 was lower than in certain peacetime years. Some of this improvement is likely due to better medical care. But a surprising fact is that the accidental death rate for soldiers in the early 1980s was higher than the death rate by hostile fire for every year the United States has been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It seems that practicing to fight a war can be just about as dangerous as really fighting one.”

“For every extra year a young person was exposed to TV in his first 15 years, we see a 4 percent increase in the number of property-crime arrests later in life and a 2 percent increase in violent-crime arrests. According to our analysis, the total impact of TV on crime in the 1960s was an increase of 50 percent in property crimés and 25 percent in violent crimes.”

“Some governments have gone so far as to legally require grown children to visit or support their aging moms and dads. In Singapore, the law is known as the Maintenance of Parents Act.”

“The normal supply of cadavers couldn’t keep up with the demand for organs. In the US, the rate of traffic fatalities was declining, which was bad news for patients awaiting a lifesaving kidney. (At least motorcycle deaths kept up, thanks in part to many state laws allowing motorcyclists — or as many transplant surgeons call them, ‘donorcyclists,’ to ride without helmets.)”

“One country, Iran, was so worried about its kidney shortage that it enacted a program many other nations would consider barbaric. The Iranian government would pay people to give up a kidney, roughly $1200, with an additional sum paid by the kidney recipient.”

“There are currently 80,000 people in the United States on a waiting list for a new kidney, but only some 16,000 transplants will be performed this year. This gap grows larger every year. More than 50,000 people on the list have died over the past twenty years, with at least 13,000 more falling off the list as they became too ill to have the operation.

If altruism were the answer, this demand for kidneys would have been met by ready supply of donors. But it hasn’t been. This has led some people to call for a well-regulated market in human organs, whereby a person who surrenders an organ would be compensated in cash, a college scholarship, a tax break, or some other form. This proposal has so far been greeted with widespread repugnance and seems for now politically untenable.

Recall, meanwhile, that Iran established a similar market nearly thirty years ago. Although this market has its flaws, anyone in Iran needing a kidney transplant does not have to go on a waiting list. The demand for transplantable m kidneys is being fully met.”

“Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was intended to safeguard disabled workers from discrimination. A noble intention, yes? Absolutely — but the data convincingly show that the net result was fewer jobs for Americans with disabilities. Why? After the ADA became law, employers were so worried they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire bad workers who had a disability that they avoided hiring such workers in the first place.”

“Over the next fifty years, the population more than doubled, reaching well beyond 6 billion. If you had to pick a single silver bullet that allowed this surge, it would be ammonium nitrate, an astonishingly cheap and effective crop fertilizer. It wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that ammonium nitrate feeds the world. If it disappeared overnight, says the agricultural economist Will Masters, “most people’s diets would revert to heaps of cereal grains and root crops, with animal products and fruits only for special occasions and for the rich.””

Climate Change

“Atlantic hurricanes generally strike between August 15 and November 15. They travel westward through “Hurricane Alley,” a horizontal stretch of ocean running from the west coast of Africa through the Caribbean and into the southeastern United States. And they are essentially heat engines, massive storms created when the topmost layer of ocean water edges above a certain temperature (80 degrees Fahrenheit, or 26.7 degrees Celsius). That’s why they start forming only toward summer’s end, after the sun has had a few months to warm up the ocean.”

“”The trick is to modify the surface temperature of the water,” Nathan says. “Now the interesting thing is that the surface layer of warm water is very thin, often less than 100 feet. And right beneath it is a bulk of very cold water. If you’re skin-diving in many of these areas, you can feel the huge difference.”

The warm surface layer is lighter than the cold water beneath, and therefore stays on the surface.

“So what we need to do is fix that,” he says. It is a tantalizing puzzle — all that cold water, trillions upon trillions of gallons, lying just beneath the warm surface and yet impotent to defuse the potential disaster.

But Nathan has a solution. It is basically “an inner tube with a skirt,” he says with a laugh. That is, a large floating ring, anywhere from thirty to three hundred feet across, with a long flexible cylinder affixed to the inside. The ring might be made from old truck tires, filled with foamed concrete and lashed together with steel cable. The cylinder, extending perhaps six hundred feet deep into the ocean, could be fashioned from polyethylene, aka the plastic used in shopping bags.

“That’s it!” Nathan crows.

How does it work? Imagine one of these skirted inner tubes — a giant, funky, man-made jellyfish — floating in the ocean. As a warm wave splashes over the top, the water level inside the ring rises until it is higher than the surrounding ocean.

“When you have water elevated above the surface in a tube like that,” Nathan explains, “it’s called ‘hydraulic head.”

Hydraulic head is a force, created by the energy put into the waves by wind. This force would push the warm surface water down into the long plastic cylinder, ultimately flushing it out at the bottom, far beneath the surface. As long as the waves keep coming — and they always do — the hydraulic head’s force would keep pushing surface water into the cooler depths, which inevitably lowers the ocean’s surface temperature. The process is low-impact, non-polluting, and slow: a molecule of warm surface water would take about three hours to be flushed out the bottom of the plastic cylinder.

Now imagine deploying these floats en masse in the patches of ocean where hurricanes grow. Nathan envisions “a picket fence” of them between Cuba and the Yucatán and another skein off the southeastern seaboard of the United States.”

“The float might also improve the ocean’s ecology. As surface water heats up each summer, it becomes depleted of oxygen and nutrients, creating a dead zone. Flushing the warm water downward would bring rich, oxygenated cold water to the surface, which ought to substantially enhance sea life. (The same effect can be seen today around offshore oil platforms.) The float might also help sink some of the excess carbon dioxide that has been absorbed by the ocean’s surface in recent decades.”

“The task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem: how to get thirty-four gallons per minute of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere?

The answer: a very long hose.

That’s what IV calls this project — a “garden hose to the sky.” Or, when they’re feeling slightly more technical, a “stratospheric shield for climate stabilization.” Considering its scientific forebear and the way it wraps the planet in a protective layer, perhaps it should be called Budyko’s Blanket.

For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better. Here’s how it works. At a base station, sulfur would be burned into sulfur dioxide and then liquefied. “The technology for doing this is well known,” says Wood, “because early in the twentieth century, sulfur dioxide was the major refrigerant gas “

The hose, stretching from the base station into the stratosphere, would be about eighteen miles long but extremely light.

“The diameter is just a couple inches, not some giant-ass pipe,” says Myhrvold. “It’s literally a specialized fire hose.”

The hose would be suspended from a series of high-strength, helium-filled balloons fastened to the hose at 100-to 300-yard intervals (a “string of pearls,” IV calls it), ranging in diameter from 25 feet near the ground to 100 feet near the top.

The liquefied sulfur dioxide would be sent skyward by a series of pumps, affixed to the hose at every 100 yards. These too would be relatively light, about forty-five pounds each — “smaller than the pumps in my swimming pool,” Myhrvold says. There are several advantages to using many small pumps rather than one monster pump at the base station: a big ground pump would create more pressure, which, in turn, would require a far heavier hose; even if a few of the small pumps failed, the mission itself wouldn’t; and using small, standardized units would keep costs down.

At the end of the hose, a cluster of nozzles would spritz the stratosphere with a fine mist of colorless liquid sulfur dioxide. Thanks to stratospheric winds that typically reach one hundred miles per hour, the spritz would wrap around the earth in roughly ten days’ time. That’s how long it would take to create Budyko’s Blanket. Because stratospheric air naturally spirals toward the poles, and because the arctic regions are more vulnerable to global warming, it makes sense to spray the sulfur aerosol at high latitude — with perhaps one hose in the Southern Hemisphere and another in the Northern.”

“On balance, Budyko’s Blanket is a fiendishly simple plan. Considering the complexity of climate in general and how much we don’t know, it probably makes sense to start small. With the fire-hose approach, you could begin with a trickle of sulfur and monitor the results. The amount could be easily dialed up or down — or, if need be, turned off. There is nothing permanent or irreversible about the process.

And it would be startlingly cheap. IV estimates the “Save the Arctic” plan could be set up in just two years at a cost of roughly $20 million, with an annual operating cost of about $10 million.

If cooling the poles alone proved insufficient, IV has drawn up a “Save the Planet” version, with five worldwide base stations instead of two, and three hoses at each site. This would put about three to five times the amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Even so, that would still represent less than 1 percent of current worldwide sulfur emissions. IV estimates this plan could be up and running in about three years, with a startup cost of $150 million and annual operating costs of $100 million:

So Budyko’s Blanket could effectively reverse global warming at a total cost of $250 million.”

““Sulfur is the most palatable choice “simply because we’ve got the volcano proof of feasibility,” Wood says, “and along with that, a proof of harmlessness.””

“Even man-made clouds — the contrails from a jet plane, for instance — have a cooling effect. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, all commercial flights in the United States were grounded for three days. Using data from more than four thousand weather stations across the country, scientists found that the sudden absence of contrails accounted for a subsequent rise in ground temperature of nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.1 degrees Celsius.

There are at least three essential ingredients for the formation of clouds: ascending air, water vapor, and solid particles known as cloud condensation nuclei. When planes fly, particles in the exhaust plume serve as the nuclei. Over landmasses, dust particles do the job. But there are far fewer cloud-friendly nuclei over the world’s oceans, Latham explains, so the clouds contain fewer droplets and are therefore less reflective. As a result, more sunlight reaches the earth’s surface. The ocean, because it is dark, is particularly good at absorbing the sun’s heat.

By Latham’s calculations, an increase of just 10 or 12 percent of the reflectivity of oceanic clouds would cool the earth enough to counteract even a doubling of current greenhouse gas levels. His solution: use the ocean itself to make more clouds.

As it happens, the salt-rich spray from seawater creates excellent nuclei for cloud formation. All you have to do is get the spray into the air several yards above the ocean’s surface. From there, it naturally lofts upward to the altitude where clouds form.

IV has considered a variety of ways to make this happen. At the moment, the favorite idea is a fleet of wind-powered fiber-glass boats, designed by Stephen Salter, with underwater turbines that produce enough thrust to kick up a steady stream of spray. Because there is no engine, there is no pollution.”