Hey, let out of all the things that are in your power to do at this very moment in time What would be your very most favorite thing to do? If I could be doing anything right now, what are you doing? Yeah, probably playing golf. Right if let's say you can't play golf what comes next?
Probably sleeping. I can't be playing golf or sleeping. What's third? Probably being here talking to you.
From WNYC and APN American Public Media, this is for Gonna Tree Yo. The podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host Stephen Dothner. Every now and then, Steve let it not ask you, our listeners and readers to send us your questions, then we try to answer them on this podcast.
We call it frequently asked questions. I think it's quite interesting if we can be of any help from David Rossetti. He says is modern life more specifically the fact that we no longer follow our circadian rhythm killing us. There are all these rises in diseases, cancer, autoimmune, and certain developed countries that do not exist in numbers anywhere close to what they have elsewhere in the world.
And no one really knows what's going on. So could simply go into bed when it gets dark and waking up on their late reduced billions of hours in health care costs, increased productivity, reduced addiction to alcohol and drugs and depression, etc. Levit, circadian rhythms having to do with rise in diseases and more broadly than tied to cost and productivity. You know anything about that?
We're probably not the right people to answer David the exact question, which is more of a medical question about is there a link between staying up all night and dying of things like cancer. And I do want to challenge his first premise, which is cancer and heart disease and all those things that are way higher in the developed world than other places. And in the part is because in the developed world we've done such a good job of getting rid of the other things that kill you that you got to die of something. So that's the sorts of things that now kill us are the diseases of senecence old age, heart disease, cancer, things like that.
But I'm being realistic and not knowing the fact of discussing. I cannot imagine that working the night shift in terms of life expectancy could take more than a year off your life. I mean, maybe two years, but that would be amazing to me if the kinds of things we're talking about could not imagine that. And my guess is actually that accident.
Accidentity is the greatest thing that gets elevated when you work the night shift because we're just so darn tired all the time that you end up getting into car crashes and falling down the stairs and things like that. So if you're saying that a year less of life expectancy, compare that for a minute to, let's say, an unhealthy habit, whether it's very poor diet or let's say smoking. You think that working the night shift continuously throughout your adult life would have less of a physiological detriment than the others. Yeah, that's my conjecture.
I don't really know. But whatever it is, what I want to compare it to is the gains that we've had in the modern world that in some ways necessitate a bunch of people staying up all night to make it possible for the rest of us to have a great life. And the gains we've had in life expectancy over the last 100 years are probably 35 or 40 years increased from mid-50 years. So that doubled in the US for a US formula, about double the last, so roughly 38 to 76.
But again, a lot of that is also hidden in childbirth. It's death in childbirth, which is still higher in the US and sometimes it's almost went away. And once you get rid of those deaths, it used to be that once you got the middle age, you did have a relatively good chance of being longer. Yeah, absolutely.
But I just think it's part of my life that we get tremendous consumption value from being able to go drive late to Taco Bell and get whatever we want to eat. And if we get sick, the hospitals are open. And that the capital and the factories can be used productively by doing three shifts instead of two. So it's not perfect.
Look at all those we've already sleeping when it's dark and you're waking up to the sun and the rooster isn't stuff like that. I think that it's a cost of modernity. And maybe the answer is how do you lower that cost? What can science and technology do to reduce the cost of that campaign?
One thing I think that we know is that it's very difficult to be switching from daytime to nighttime to daytime to nighttime, which is what sometimes they do in police departments and in hospitals. I believe there's a body of evidence that says you just kind of get used to the night shift if you do the night shift for years and years and years and a way that moving back and forth is very hard. All right. Let me ask you this.
Here's a question that came in actually kind of two versions of the same question. One from Steve Adam out of the email and one from Miguel Sandoval. One asks, is there hidden cost to intelligence? I feel a lot of people assume, wrongly question mark.
There's a trade-off between intellectual and social ability. And the other if I ask, can you be too smart for your own good? I've heard this used often however, tend to disagree. It can be too smart for your own good.
I'm glad that you're a relatively smart guy. Have there been instances in your life where you've been too smart for your own good? And do you know anything about this more generally? I can't say I've ever remember being too smart for my own good.
I've seen other people, not tell you the biggest thing that happens in academics, is that really smart people become convinced that they can trick. Not just a single person, but they can trick everyone at once. I've seen it a number of times where the smarter you are, the more you think you can get away with, ends up being your end of doing. The people who are really, really smart actually can run circles around people, and they're very good, very smart and want to know, and develop and attitude of confidence.
People talk about this with doctors sometimes, called God complex. You think that if you can figure out something like what you think about, you can figure out anything. Do you see that? No, we're doing right now.
You and I are good at one thing. You're good at writing. I'm good at taking a paladin. And we sit here and talk like we're good at answering questions about what we're doing right now.
And it's something that you and I are all going to solve the time. We have some fun with it just because we know we're my friends on that podcast. But the people listening understand that we're just kind of screwing around on the questions. We're not really giving the truth.
Now if you go back to that first question about the trade-off, the social media, I think there are at least two really good reasons to believe that people who are intelligent will not possess particularly good social skills. And one of those is that if I take this example of math ability, there's a lot of evidence that autism is a sort of extreme form of mathiness. And thinking like a mathematician or like a scientist. And that that interferes with the way that you think about people and interact with people.
And so there's a lot of different categories and why being smart in a math way might get in the way of being good with people. I think we've all seen some things. I think the other thing is just what you invest in. So when you're a kid, if you're smart, you invest in things that's marketing is investing.
Doing well in school and pressing people and trying to get in college. You're not smart. Make a lot of investment and being social and the cheerleader type or the homecoming. And those investments are really important.
That's interesting. Let me say this though. I'm curious hearing you talk about gender. So I think two things that gender one and smartness.
One is why is the autism spectrum so much more? Why are there so many more males and females? I have a friend, a member of Dr. Oz who's known for a long time.
Before he was famous and he's always been brilliant and kind of great. And he was telling me not long ago that with boys, he put it away only scientists. There's a lot of quality control with boys. He said, right?
So for girls, we're going to be carrying the next generation. Their wiring needs to be further along in boys who can survive in a different way. But it makes me think when you're talking about the relation between smartness and either success or social value, you're answering from the perspective of the male without women. Women are penalized more for being smart or smarter than their peers than men are.
And so on what dimensions? Certainly in the marriage market. In the dating market, smart women don't get rewarded in any way. Smart men get rewarded.
I think we wrote about a little bit about the dating. And smart men who had a lot of education did quite well. Women do a lot of education did poorly. It was hard to tease out the education for women in income.
Because both of them were turned off for the other men. If you go back to the 1960s and you look at the marriage rate of highly educated women, it was really loud. They were of all the people in the side, at least like they did married. It was women who went and got PhDs.
I think women really do pay the price for at least historically paid the price for being too smart and too successful. I think that's certainly the data suggests that's changing. And that's my feeling as well. There's a lot more room for smart women in society to date than there was.
There's more room for smart women's societies that the matching markets are better. They're a better, easier ways for smart women to find the men that they want to find than they're used to be. Well, it's certainly true that places like Silicon Valley where it used to be that men who would be, say computer programs would marry women in their college. I think now they're more likely to marry other women who are computer programs.
So to accept men and women are more and more doing the same jobs, I think that that does help very much successful women to meet the kind of men who are equally successful. But that's also according to some people, including a student-minded age-old, is one of the reason why autism is going up because the men who are good at math are not much more likely to have babies with a women who are good at math. And that seems to be triggering and increasing autism. Coming up on 3.0, since fighting cancer is big business, what's the incentive to find a cure?
So I would say the incentive for cancer care is not really more incentive. It's being a hero kind of incentive. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is for Economics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dopner.
Here's a question from someone in Dallas, with making marriage legal for the LGBT community improved the economy. If so, how much? Well? Yes?
No, I would say. I don't think that would have a big impact on the economy for public reasons. First, I think that when you talk about marriage versus not marriage, if all you're talking about is just everyone has the same relationship, you just change the title of the relationship, then maybe you're talking about having some big weddings. But that to me feels like James and economics.
And the idea that if there's more demand for things that will make the economy better. But I think the modern view of the world, at least my modern view of the world, is that for the economy be better, you need to be better at making things. So the supply side of the economy productivity is everything. If we can make workers more productive than we end up being richer.
But consumption is, if people just can do more stuff, I very much am of the view that things like stimulus, stimulus, when I just have very successful, because what you need to do is figure out how to make everybody more productive and producing them. Okay, but let's talk about, let's say a couple that's not married that wants to be married, it's not able to be a couple that wants to be married, it's not able to be married, it's not able to be married, it's able to legally. And some of the economic changes that might take place around that. Let's say healthcare consumption or at least paying for healthcare, how much they're actually paying.
Let's say taxation and air collection is going to pay more than two individuals not. Can you imagine any way around those avenues and which has any kind of real impact or is it still not much of an issue in your view? Yeah, it sounds to me a lot like a bunch of transfers. I don't think that people are going to have to make different choices, maybe the stores are twice as less if they're married.
Let's take the healthcare market. Maybe it's true that because of small-scale coverage people will make different types of choices. But that seems to me like a crazy way to think about the problem. We have a terrible healthcare system in which employment and healthcare should not be linked.
We should fix that problem first, not try to back your through. Right, but until we fix that problem, at least having it linked to one percent in a couple's employment, then two is an improvement or a disagreement. I think that's a triviality on issues like this, whether it's this or abortion or capital punishment. I mean, these are issues that economically.
I'm just not very important. I mean, capital punishment isn't very important to crime. Abortion and dollars and cents are not important. But they stand for something much greater.
They represent what America means or ideology or personal rights or whatever. And the relative importance of the issues of liberty and fairness are got to be 100 times bigger than the direct economic impact. So I think it's just confusing the issue to even talk about economics when these are more or less used. That would be my good answer to that question.
Let's give all that other jump. This is interesting. The question from Damon, even what would be the economic impact of a cheap readily available cure for cancer. Here's the basic scenario.
Imagine somehow we find a cure for cancer that involves something cheap and simple like drinking a spinach smoothie with every meal for five days. We have entire industries and charities are geared toward finding cancer cures and treatments. What would be the economic impact of those industries and charities? We're something out of business overnight.
One reason I ask is because I often argue that there's no clear market incentive to find a cure for cancer treatments are expensive. And there are repeat customers that's a nice profit model. A cure would slowly eliminate the customer base for treatment. Other than altruism, where is the incentive for a cancer cure?
So I would say the incentive for cancer cure is not really a market incentive. It's a being a hero kind of incentive. There are so many doctors out there, researchers, medical researchers, who, if they could be the one who was forever remembered as the one who prevented cancer, who never knew anything to do that. So I think they are really strong incentives out there.
And they aren't exactly market incentives. I don't think that person would be quite rich. But incentives are even more powerful than markets. But on the flip side, this is a really important point in economics that many people don't understand.
It is always better to be able to get something for nothing than to have to put real resources into doing. So any time that we can find a way to get rid of a problem for nothing we want to do it. So we're going to be right now investing in enormous resources and trying to find cancer. But if we didn't have to spend the resources for cancer, we would spend them on something else that people like.
And there will be a much better place. So I'm going to say that in seven, eight hours for a person to produce 100 wallets or whatever their job is. Let's say they could do that in four hours. They could produce 100 wallets.
Well, then they just bought four free hours of leisure. And that would be a great thing. The less labor you need, the less capital you need to make something, the better. And so there's just crazy occasions in argument about how you need people to be busy, and you need the man to win out.
But it absolutely for certain no doubt about it. If you can suddenly make things for free that you should cost money, the world is a much better place. You just reallocate all the resources you were purchasing on solving cancer before and put them to something else. It also makes me think of a small issue, but not insignificant what happened in this country elsewhere with polio, right?
Which is at one point, you know, polio was never that massive disease. It was crippling for those who had a bit of inclement crippled them. And most of the money was put into treatment. And then there can for a long time, there was not much thinking about the idea of a vaccine.
It wasn't really the main line of thought. Then that came to be. And then the vaccine mentality took and a vaccine two vaccines were actually created. So Damon's question is a little bit like saying, you know, the incentives of the people who make the iron lung are so strong that they will prevent anybody else from actually pursuing a vaccine.
But as we've seen over and over again, those aren't the same people in the pursuit of different paths. And so you compare that to something like car seats. I think it is true that right now the people in the car seats are the same kind of people who might push for other ways to keep kids safe in cars. And there I think there are more hospitals.
It's just in the world of medicine, the particular pharma companies who make a particular cancer book have zero control over the thousands of medical researchers who are scattered across the globe trying to solve these problems. And so I think exactly right, there's no cartel, which is blocking the production of a cancer vaccine. It's just a really hard problem that people are trying to make headway on in I don't see. Love here's a question from Marie.
She writes, since people are genuinely fair and pay for bagels on the honors. Okay, that's referring to our bagels study and frequency. I'm so gonna explain that a little more. Why does this not apply to song downloads or do most people pay for music?
I do what my students don't think that for free from their friends or online. Is the payment on the honors is only for small businesses where people feel a personal attachment? I think that's a great point. I think that on these issues of honor, it's very predictable the kinds of factors which make people be honest.
One is scrutiny. If you know you're being watched, you're much more likely to be honest. I think if you believe that the recipient of the money is deserving, you very much tend to be honest. And I also think that if you are in settings, which in general evoke honesty, like it happens to be inside of a church or a hospital, I think again, you're more likely to be honest.
So how do we compare from the bagels, which have a lot of these features of scrutiny and the bagel man, it was a sort of sit at that character who didn't have a line to big business and the downloading of songs. And I think here it's my impression that there's an amazing generational break where people who grew up having to pay for music when they were young people of our generation donner understand that you should pay for music and it doesn't seem strange. I do think we young people in that instance is that the internet is a place for free things and that they deserve to get their music for free. So let me just explain for people that bagel business will be a guy former Thomas in the DC area who distributed bagels and in some places don't.
The American Diabetes Association office for some reason consumes like half of his doughnuts. Everybody else wants to want to bagels, but he would deliver them and put a box out for money and he would post the price and he would then come back later to collect the money and it worked. It was an honor system scene that worked. But I think the key difference is so the ton of people, so they're all these pay what you wish schemes and honor system schemes that have floated up in the last many years.
I think there are a couple of huge differences between them and the bagels so where the people don't get one is it wasn't a pay what you wish the bagel thing. The word price is posted. The bagel costs whenever a buck and cream cheese is about an half. So what's interesting about this is not only do a lot of people pay something, but they pay exactly the right price in part because it seems, and we've written about this, you can really heard people into doing what you want them to do simply by telling them that everybody else is doing it and by kind of setting the parameters.
Right? Let it seems that people are much more willing than they might think to kind of go along with the herd. Yeah, that's absolutely true. But this is also a case of technology where you and I don't actually know how to steal music.
Well, I don't know how to steal music. I don't know how to steal music. I don't know how to steal music. I can tell you.
I think the other thing about the bagel story that people miss and they try to apply it to other instances is that he, Paul, fell in the bagel guy, had some real leverage, which was this. If the payment rate from the whole group in a given office fell below a certain amount, he would stop bringing the bagels. And that's what all these other scenes almost never have. Well, they may have it and it may be a bright line, but you don't know when you're getting to it.
So if you know that this thing that you want and it's being offered at a price that you have to contribute a certain amount forward, will no longer be delivered to you and I sort of be able to your office, then that's not really as altruistic as people seem to think. And so therefore it doesn't surprise me that when there's no leverage exerted that people would steal as much as they can get away with. Right. Thank you.
Right. I'm sorry, that was terrible. That was performance. No, no, no.
It's performance. No, you're good. You still have time to enter now. I should probably go in a couple, actually.
I think we're good. Okay. Good job, love it. Okay.
Great. Hey, talk to us listeners. Next time on Free Comics Radio, put down that steering wheel. That's right.
The driverless car is coming. So the problem that we're in for steering wheel, the turn signal is everything being controlled. I think we're going to go out and sit here. A few weeks ago, I went for a ride in a driverless car and I'll tell you all about it.
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