Freakonomics

Getting a date is hard enough as it is. Fifty-seven percent of the men who post ads don’t receive even one e-mail; 23 percent of the women don’t get a single response. The traits that do draw a big response, meanwhile, will not be a big surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the sexes. In fact, the preferences expressed by online daters fit snugly with the most common stereotypes about men and women.

For instance, men who say they want a long-term relationship do much better than men looking for an occasional lover. But women looking for an occasional lover do great. For men, a woman’s looks are of paramount importance. For women, a man’s income is terribly important. The richer a man is, the more emails he receives. But a woman’s income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off. Men want to date students, artists, musicians, veterinarians, and celebrities (while avoiding secretaries, retirees, and women in the military and law enforcement). Women do want to date military men, policemen, and firemen (possibly the result of a 9/11 Effect, like the higher payments to Paul Feldman’s bagel business), along with lawyers and financial executives. Women avoid laborers, actors, students, and men who work in food services or hospitality. For men, being short is a big disadvantage (which is probably why so many lie about it), but weight doesn’t much matter. For women, being overweight is deadly (which is probably why they lie). For a man, having red hair or curly hair is a downer, as is baldness—but a shaved head is okay. For a woman, salt-and-pepper hair is bad, while blond hair is very good. In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hair on a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree—and, with a $100 dye job versus a $100,000 tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.

In addition to all the information about income, education, and looks, men and women on the dating site listed their race. They were also asked to indicate a preference regarding the race of their potential dates. The two preferences were “the same as mine” or “it doesn’t matter.” Like the Weakest Link contestants, the website users were now publicly declaring how they felt about people who didn’t look like them. They would act on their actual preferences later, in confidential e-mails to the people they wanted to date.

Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their email queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across—especially to potential mates of their own race—as open-minded?

The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast. (Or, put a more familiar way: we say one thing and do another.) This can be seen in personal relationships, in commercial transactions, and of course in politics.

By now we are fully accustomed to the false public proclamations of politicians themselves. But voters lie too. Consider an election between a black candidate and a white candidate. Might white voters lie to pollsters, claiming they will vote for the black candidate in order to appear more color-blind than they actually are? Apparently so. In New York City’s 1989 mayoral race between David Dinkins (a black candidate) and Rudolph Giuliani (who is white), Dinkins won by only a few points. Although Dinkins became the city’s first black mayor, his slender margin of victory came as a surprise, for pre-election polls showed Dinkins wi

Duke, though he never won the high political office he often sought, proved himself a master of information abuse. As Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he was able to compile a mailing list of thousands of rank-and-file Klansmen and other supporters who would eventually become his political base. Not content to use the list only for himself, he sold it for $150,000 to the governor of Louisiana. Years later, Duke would once again use the list himself, letting his supporters know that he’d fallen on hard times and needed their donations. In this way Duke was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for his continuing work in the field of white supremacy. He had explained to his supporters in a letter that he was so broke that the bank was trying to repossess his house.

In truth, Duke had already sold his house for a solid profit. (It isn’t known whether he used a real-estate agent.) And most of the money he raised from his supporters was being used not to promote any white supremacist cause but rather to satisfy Duke’s gambling habit. It was a sweet little scam he was ru

Levitt fits everywhere and nowhere. He is a noetic butterfly that no one has pi

—THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003

3. Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?

The two previous chapters were built around a pair of admittedly freakish questions: What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? and How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents? But if you ask enough questions, strange as they seem at the time, you may eventually learn something worthwhile.

The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that haven’t been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers.

But if you can question something that people really care about and find an answer that may surprise them—that is, if you can overturn the conventional wisdom—then you may have some luck.

It was John Ke

So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false—noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking—is a nice place to start asking questions.