An economist walks into a bar...

First, HOLY COW IT'S BEEN A WHILE. Well, that's what having a baby will do to you, I suppose. That, and Twitter. I'm still recovering, but in the meantime, I'll be posting some short stuff I wrote that didn't, for whatever reason, end up in print. Some of it is...old. But still fun! Enjoy.

Cheers,
Nathan E. Science

Liquor is big business in the U.S., and with drunk drivers involved in about 40 percent of traffic fatalities, it’s also a serious public health threat. Acting on the assumption that drinking leads to increasingly risky decisions, many states prohibit happy hours or serving alcohol to clearly intoxicated people. But is the “more liquor, worse choices” axiom correct?

To find out, a team of economists armed with a breathalyzer and a laptop headed to a bar in New York’s Lower East Side. Once there, they asked 317 men and women of varying inebriation to make different bar-oriented decisions—between different combinations of sliders and dumplings, or between different cash lotteries—all the while looking for subtle inconsistencies in their subjects’ choices. Remarkably, even stumbling-drunk participants made sensible choices. The main exception: as they drank more, women became slightly more comfortable taking risks when choosing between lotteries.

If confirmed by further experiments, the results suggest that efforts to curb drunk driving or other negative consequences of drinking should focus on making better decisions while drinking rather than on discouraging drinking in the first place. The paper appeared last June in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.

Nathan Answers Questions: What About Manipulation?

Over on Facebook, reader Jonathan Wang asks,

"…how about cases where politicians or interest groups deliberately misrepresent the facts?"

It's a good question with a number of facets. Three issues come to mind immediately: framing, media priming, and the many ways in which people either ignore or fail to use new information that could correct false beliefs.

Here's a quick overview, with some examples. Well, we'll see about quick, but there will be examples.

Why People Know What They Know About Politics

In my two previous posts, I looked at what people know about politics, and I looked a bit at who knows what about politics. The general theme is that people don't know very much overall, but there's variation—people know more about some things than others, and some people know more than others.

Today, I want to look at why people know what they know, and fortunately we've already seen some hints at the explanation. For example, we've seen that more people know about high-profile issues than about others. Putting that together with everything else we've seen so far suggests a fairly simple explanation for why people don't know that much about politics: it's actually kind of hard to follow, and most people have better things—or at least more pleasant things—to do than think about the awful state of the economy or whether gay people should be allowed to marry each other.