Why do traffic circles work some places and not others?

One day as an undergraduate student in a law and economics class, I listened to my professor tell a simple story about traffic rules in a quaint European town. I’ve forgotten where it was—probably somewhere in Holland—but the gist was that the municipality had gotten rid of all stops signs and traffic lights in the town center, and after the change, travel times and accidents both fell.

Almost a decade later, there are numerous examples of small European towns that did away with signal lights and traffic signs and, voila, traffic began to flow better, transit times decreased, and roadways became less dangerous for pedestrians and vehicle passengers alike. The absence of conventional rules improved outcomes.

...

In Haiti, there is no meaningful enforcement of any set of traffic rules. Virtually all road space could be called “shared”—pedestrians, motorcycles, and four-wheel vehicles use the same space everywhere; only the largest intersections have traffic lights; there are no crosswalks and almost no stop signs. Instead of following a rulebook, drivers rely on local, informal norms.

Traffic in Port-au-Prince is horrifying. People do not yield to each other and spontaneously fall into an efficient order, as in England’s Poynton. In Haitian transit, people approach shared space as if they’re homesteaders on an Oklahoma land run. It’s every-man-for-himself, where every man is trying to grab every centimeter of available road space before someone else does. Instead of a free-flowing circle, a roundabout becomes an immobile tangle of tap-taps, traffic jams radiating in all directions.

 Insightful. I'd long taken for granted the idea that doing away with traffic lights would encourage both drivers and pedestrians to be more vigilant and aware, leading to fewer accidents, but I had not considered that the context in which that would work required some established norms which don't exist everywhere.

Also:

Perceptions of risk and consequent trade-offs might explain other differences between countries. “Differences…between high- and low-income countries are probable,” the authors write, “because there may be differences in the hazardousness in the respective road traffic environments, and how much people choose to focus on such risks when there are other unmet needs such as food, stability and protection against diseases.” They suggest that people in low-income countries may “prioritise urgent needs such as food, water and stability over accidental risks such as road traffic accidents.” 

Make behavioral costs clearer

This same basic strategy – expressing the impact of our choices in quantities that really matter to us, rather than in quantities that don't – underlies The Norm Chronicles, a recent book by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter that translates a plethora of everyday hazards into what they call "microlives". Really, this is just a fancy term for "half an hour of life"; a burger, they explain, knocks one microlife off the average adult's expectancy, as do two cigarettes. It's a clever way of adding immediacy to "chronic risks". Those risks, unlike skydiving or playing chicken on the railway tracks, that accumulate so gradually they're easy to ignore. Thinking in microlives also makes it evident that unhealthy, life-shortening choices can be balanced by life-extending ones: the first 20 minutes of exercise each day, for example, adds two. (Further minutes of exercise, sadly, are less beneficial.)

More here.

This would make for a fun or interesting mobile app. Perhaps it could link up to RunKeeper, Moves, Fitbit, or other activity tracking apps to keep a running tally of microlives for you.  Run a few miles, earn enough microlife credits for a burger with all the fixings. Have a few extra beers and a cigarette on your weekly night out with the guys? You've just decreased the chance you'll see your grandchild graduate high school.

Why do we care what happens after we die?

Interestingly, the chief executives paid their employees less after becoming fathers. On average, after chief executives had a child, they paid about $100 less in annual compensation per employee. To be a good provider, the researchers write, it’s all too common for a male chief executive to claim “his firm’s resources for himself and his growing family, at the expense of his employees.”

But there was a twist. When Professor Dahl’s team examined the data more closely, the changes in pay depended on the gender of the child that the chief executives fathered. They reduced wages after having a son, but not after having a daughter.

Daughters apparently soften fathers and evoke more caretaking tendencies. The speculation is that as we brush our daughters’ hair and take them to dance classes, we become gentler, more empathetic and more other-oriented.

From the most emailed piece from the NYTimes today, Why Men Need Women. It goes on to note that men who grew up with more siblings, in particular sisters, were more nurturing and caring. Who knows what type of monster I would be today had I not had two sisters.

I chuckled at this bit: 

In a provocative 2007 presentation in San Francisco, the psychologist Roy Baumeister asked, “Is there anything good about men?” (The short answer, if you haven’t read “Demonic Males,” by Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, is not much.) But our saving grace, Professor Baumeister argues, is that across a wide range of attributes, “men go to extremes more than women.” Men are responsible for the lion’s share of the worst acts of aggression and selfishness, but they also engage in some of the most extreme acts of helping and generosity.

On this point, the economists James Andreoni at the University of California, San Diego, and Lise Vesterlund at the University of Pittsburgh report evidence that whereas many women prefer to share evenly, “men are more likely to be either perfectly selfish or perfectly selfless.” It may be that meaningful contact with women is one of the forces that tilt men toward greater selflessness.

If you haven't read the first linked article, it's a great read.

The idea of empathy being learned or transferred through the practice of using the nurturing instinct (the causality is fuzzy) is an interesting one. 

I'm curious less about the gender results here than the influence of having children generally (the title of this post just uses the NYTimes article as a jumping off point).

It's long been a puzzle to me why a human might act in altruistic ways to future generations when that human will be dead long before the impact of their actions come to bear on the world. You might argue our treatment of the environment is just one example of how we show we don't care, but there are plenty of counterpoints that show that people do care about their legacy or for future generations in ways that are curious from an objective or maybe utilitarian standpoint.

[This, by the way, is a reason why the advice to "live every day like it's your last" is lousy advice as no one would go into work that day and society would collapse.] 

Perhaps having children forces us to have a time horizon that extends beyond our death and as such serves as a built-in defense mechanism for society against short-term destructive behavior on the behalf of its constituents.

How the NYTimes writes about men and women

Interesting results from statistical analysis of sentences about men and women from one week's worth of NYTimes articles earlier this year. 

My quick interepretation: If your knowledge of men's and women's roles in society came just from reading last week's New York Times, you would think that men play sports and run the government. Women do feminine and domestic things. To be honest, I was a little shocked at how stereotypical the words used in the women subject sentences were.

The top 10 words used disproportionately in referring to men were prime, baseball, official, capital, governor, fans, minister, sequester, league, failed. For women, they were pregnant, husband's, suffrage, breast, gender, pregnancy, dresses, birth, memoir, and baby. 

Some useful disclaimers within, but I'm more interested in this as an example of the type of analysis computers now enable which will unearth hidden patterns in language (as discussed in this earlier post on emotional expression in 20th century books). I'd love more access to tools like this.

Economics of Tiger Parenting

Ian Ayres: 

This choice made me proud because I want my children to be willing to delay gratification in exchange for probabilistically greater future rewards. When it comes to human capital, I want them to have low discount rates. One of the most foundational aspects of a person’s utility function is the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution, the willingness to forego current consumption in order to consume more in the future. If you (highly) discount future rewards, you’re less likely to be willing to invest in human capital; why give up leisure/consumption today for something in the future about which you don’t care very much?

Of course, if your discount rate is too low, you will sacrifice most of today’s pleasures for the prospect of even modestly greater rewards in the future. I want my kids’ discount rate to be low, but I don’t want it to be zero.? I don’t want them to sacrifice all of today’s pleasures for some future pie in the sky.

So, here’s a bleg for Freaknation: If you had to choose your child’s discount rate, what number would you choose, and why? How much pleasure would you want them to sacrifice now in exchange for more pleasure in the future? How low would you go?

Ayres goes on to endorse the value of the Suzuki method, one I'm familiar with from my many years playing the violin.

As a child of a Tiger Mom, I'm more empathetic to the sentiment that drives Tiger Moms the more the years pass. The payoff for hard work and perseverance often comes only years after the initial drudgery, and parents are often the only ones who realize it as they live in that future where they've reaped those benefits. How they get their children to appreciate those benefits before cashing them in is the trick of parenting, isn't it?

It can be taken too far, though, as in Japanese youth baseball. Young star Japanese pitchers are pushed to extremes that most of the world consider child abuse in efforts to win the mythical Koshien tournament, the most important Japanese high school baseball tourney. 

This spring, 16 year old Tomohiro Anraku pitched 772 pitches in 9 days for Saibi High of the Ehime Prefecture.  He pitched his team to the final, throwing four consecutive complete games — 232, 159, 138, and 134 pitches, respectively. It all caught up to him in the championship game, when he collapsed in the fifth and sixth innings, eventually getting pulled after 109 pitches in a 17-1 defeat as his velocity and mechanics disintegrated.

Modern pitchers already have a high injury rate, but the injury track record of Japanese pitchers coming to MLB has been even worse. There's a point at which pushing children for near-term gains (and college baseball coaches often subject star pitchers to high pitch counts in the NCAA tournament as well) at the expense of their future is a cruel inversion of the economics of parenting or mentorship.