Urbane Sprawl

In my last post, I theorized — okay, conjectured — that there might be a link between states’ population densities and their organ donor registration rates.

My causal conjecture was that less dense states (whose populations live in small communities rather than big cities) are richer in “social capital,” the connection amongst members of a community driven by neighbors knowing each other and sharing values. Contrary to people in dense and accordingly anonymous states, people in scarcely populated states might feel closer ties to the hypothetical recipients of their donated organs.

Judd kindly sent me some actual data about state registration rates, which I then crudely compared to population density statistics. Data analysis is not my strong suit, but here are some basic observations:

1. The states I mentioned in the last post as having particularly extreme registration rates do indeed vary highly on the axis of population density, too.

In Texas, there is a 7% rate of “Actionable Donor Designation” in the adult population. And, according to Wikipedia, Texas has 98.07 inhabitants per square mile (ipsm). The Dakotas are different: North Dakota has a 65% ADD rate and 9.916 ipsm; South Dakota’s numbers are 54% and 10.86 ipsm. The Dakotas are 1/10 as populous as Texas while their adults are 10 times as likely to be registered organ donors.

2. The three least dense states in the union — Alaska (1.264 ipsm), Montana (6.858), and Wyoming (5.851 ipsm) — are in the top four states by “Donor Registration Rate”* with rates of 76%, 63.2%, and 59.6% respectively.

I haven’t correlated all the states’ densities with their levels of organ donation registration, but there does indeed seem to be a correlation — if not a causal relationship. I’m not controlling for what are no doubt hugely important factors: income, education level, demographic homogeneity (which itself may lead to a social capital effect), etc. Even with a direct correlation established, the causal mechanism would be opaque.

Still, based on this basic smell test, the theory/conjecture seems to hold water. Or, to not mix metaphors, it smells okay. My takeaway: If you want to live in a state where each adult you meet is more likely than not to be someone willing to give you an organ, move somewhere where everybody knows your name (cause there’s no one else around to know).

*DRR is a slightly more timely measure than ADD, but with less complete data. It’s defined as “the rate at which individuals join the state donor registry as a percentage of all driver’s licenses and ID cards issued within a specific period of time.”

Judd Kessler, who Forbes recently named one of the 30 most influential people under 30 in the field of Law and Policy, does a lot of interesting research on organ donation.

Though I understand this research only tenuously, I have picked up from him that there is a very high — and as-yet-unexplained — variance in organ donation registration rates in US states. For example (if I remember correctly), Texas has about a 9% rate of adults registered to donate organs, while states in the north-central US (ex. the Dakotas) have registration rates upwards of 60-70%.

Though I’m sure there are myriad factors contributing to this discrepancy — perhaps as localized as the specific language used in the registration forms at different states’ DMVs — a recent NY Times blog post on social networking made me think about the question in a new light.

In the big cities of India and China, it seems, people can’t help being social. Nearly everyone who uses the Internet there is also active on social networks, according to a vast global survey by Forrester Research, and most of them do much more than read and watch what’s posted online. Three out of four of them write blog posts or upload pictures and music.

Cultures reveal themselves online. Italians are twice as likely to visit a social networking site as Germans. The Japanese prefer anonymity and eschew Facebook, which demands real names, for the more flexible Japanese network called Mixi.

Norms of privacy and interpersonal interaction vary more highly between countries, I think, than they do between US States. But there’s an insight in that first paragraph that I think can be applied to how we think about US States and organ donation.

In big cities, where population density is high, social networking is also high. Social scientist Robert Putnam, who pioneered the concept of social capital, might say that we network online when we live in communities where we have weaker ties to the people actually physically around us. Living in Manhattan, most of the people I see and interact with every day are strangers, and I interact often with my friends and acquaintances online. If I lived in North Dakota, I might know personally a lot more of the people in my daily path, leading to less necessity for networking online.

I wonder — Judd, look into this — whether these things are all correlated. Places with high population density (i.e. states where much of the population is clustered in high-density cities and towns) might have less social capital, more social networking, and, perhaps, lower rates of organ donation registration.

Perhaps US states with higher organ donation rates are those in which much of the population engages each day with people they personally know. If our DMVs were full of the people who’d been our lifelong classmates and neighbors and friends, perhaps we’d be more likely to check the organ donation box when asked.

I was in Los Angeles for the first time last week, and, obviously, parking is a major aspect of LA life, given the necessity of cars to get anywhere.

My brother and I parked one day at a little lot catty-corner from his office, and I was amazed at what a wonderful business parking lot ownership must be.

We paid an attendant $7 to drive in and park the car, and that was it. Scores of other cars did the same that day, for varying lengths of time, and the feat had surely been replicated for years before and will be for years to come. All the lot owner has to do is pay the wage of one attendant to sit at the entrance and collect cash. Lot owners must be minting money all over town!

As I was relaying this thought to my brother, Judd, as we walked to the office, he noted that (a) the pricing schemes aren’t as simple as $7/car, since lots do crazy things like charge different amounts at different times of day, for different durations, etc. and (b) that there are many lots and — pun intended — lots of competition.

So, my thought: what if complicated pricing systems are a mechanism to hedge competition’s effect on price?

If two lots were next to each other and charged straight-forwardly — say, $7/car — then price competition would occur. One would charge $6.50, the other would counter with $6, etc., till both suffered.

Unlike, say, Coke and Pepsi, which build powerful brands and add new flavors, etc., to move their competition away from price wars, parking lots can’t do that.

Instead, they can exhaust drivers with nonsensical pricing schemes to distract them from actually comparing lots’ cost-effectiveness. One lot may be cheaper from 2:53 to 3:17, the other from 3:17 to 4:42. Drivers just won’t bother to do the math each time, and they’ll just park wherever their impulses take them — acting on the knowledge that prices are generally in the same range. This way, the lots can keep their prices up; they’re committing collusion by confusion.

It’s counterintuitive because we’d expect one lot to decide to make their prices very simple and straightforward in order to attract drivers — much like phone companies are simplifying their pricing plans (no more allowance of minutes per month: just one low price no matter how much you talk) — which would make other lots do the same.

Simplicity, in other words, would be a dominant strategy, and would lead to a price war. But somehow these lots have achieved a nice (for them) equilibrium of higher prices by making price calculations not worth the effort for Los Angeles drivers (who might not be the brightest, anyway).

The dearth of female hip-hop artists is not often in the forefront of my mind, considering my musical tastes veer more towards American Idol castoffs than any genre that lacks the belting of hypnotically catchy but artistically impoverished melodies.

Still, it’s a topic that keeps popping up in publications I’m reading. Just this week, Jonah Weiner asked in Slate “Where did all the female rappers go?” His conclusions generally center on a sociological-consumerist analysis of rap; after discussing most of the prominent female hip-hop acts of the last thirty years, he asks why they’ve made “so few lasting inroads” and answers:

For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female rap seem second class, occurring outside the “real,” “primary” work of hip-hop canon building, even as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they’re what feminists would call hip-hop’s unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it’s meant that many of the identities that female comers have carved for themselves—Boss’ gangsta bitch, Kim’s badass nympho, or, recently, Lil’ Mama’s lunchroom alpha girl—have registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white rappers, whether it’s the Beastie Boys’ nerdy boogie or Eminem’s white-trash horror-core.)

Female rap artists fall outside the prevalent narrative of the genre, and so their musical identities are necessarily sub-par — and, one must assume, in less demand by the hip-hop CD buyer. This is necessarily a demand-side explanation: female hip-hop artists are less popular to consumers of the genre because their product is less “authentic.”

But there might be a more basic economic supply-side explanation, too.

In September, Entertainment Weekly’s Margeaux Wilson wrote an article called “BET and VH1 Present…Awards Shows Without Women”:

Next month, VH1 and BET will air lavish awards shows celebrating hip-hop’s finest, including Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Jay-Z. But here’s the catch: Neither the Hip-Hop Honors (airing Oct. 6) nor the BET Hip-Hop Awards (airing Oct. 23) nominated a single female rapper. Next year’s Grammys may also follow suit, since the Recording Academy nixed its category for Best Female Rap Solo Performance in 2005. Why aren’t hip-hop’s leading ladies getting their props? ”Quite frankly, it’s a numbers thing,” says Stephen Hill, BET’s executive VP of entertainment, music, and programming. ”There were fewer than five videos submitted for the awards by female artists this year. None of them made the cut.’

But why are there so few? One source quoted in the article offered a very interesting perspective on the question:

Hair and makeup is killing female hip-hop…The grooming cost to break a female rapper versus a male rapper is 10 times as much per appearance. That tends to have an adverse effect on a record company’s willingness to even entertain a female rapper.

Could it really be as simple as this? If what the source says is true, then there’s a supply-side economic argument to be made for the dearth of female rappers. If rappers are generally launched by record companies, then — all else being equal re: the potential success of an act — the cheaper act to launch will be preferable.

One could point to popular female pop acts to refute this assertion, but it seems that the sex appeal and vocal range of female pop stars makes them better financial bets than their male equivalents; female rap artists don’t seem to have any comparative advantages over male rappers when it comes to factors that will drive sales of their records.

In this case, it wouldn’t have to be a fact that consumers are less interested in female rap artists than male ones — they would only have to be equally interested in the two. Then, given equal chances at profitability, the record companies would be incentivized to launch acts with fewer associated launch costs.

It’s hard to know how profound the Hair and Makeup Effect might actually be for aspiring female hip-hop artists, but it could offer profound and simple insight into the under-representation of women in the hip-hop world.

Well, not really, but the similarities are uncanny…

From my September 26 post, Climate Change and The Winner’s Curse:

…the research on the rate and reach of climate change, even if it’s all done by good scientists using sound data-collection and analysis, is likely to result in findings that fall along a distribution. But while the truth of the matter is likely found in considering the distribution as a whole, the findings on the ends are going to be the ones that stick out to journal editors as the most interesting to prospective readers….

Let’s say there’s an auction of a good with an objective but unknown value (think fields for oil drilling, not a painting that each prospective buyer will value differently). Each buyer will estimate the value differently. Maybe they’ll each hire someone to professionally survey and appraise the good. The real value is probably around the mean estimate, but it’s the buyer with the high estimate who will buy the good, thinking the others suckers for passing on such a valuable purchase. But that buyer will almost certainly have over-valued the good. In an auction like this, you don’t want to be the winner.

Similarly, science journals are buying the articles that most highly estimate the costs of climate change — but they might be overpaying.

From an article in the current issue of The Economist, Publish and be wrong:

IN ECONOMIC theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.

The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.

More accurate, perhaps, than saying “The Economist Stole My idea!” would be to say “The Economist reported on scientific findings that support ideas I discussed!”

In an earlier post I talked about the impending demise of print media and offered a probably not-incredibly-useful proposal for improving the quality of new hires into the industry.

Here’s another idea, which I’m convinced could actually add a revenue stream for circulation-lacking papers like The New York Times. And with the demise of The New York Sun this week just another in a long line of portents, it’s time for them to listen.

During a car ride to the city the other day, my cousin Jarema was talking about how she wished she could read the newspaper every day, but she didn’t have the time. And she described how, in addition to listening to music, she loves using her iPod to listen to audiobooks while she works (as a painter for an art collective). If only she could listen to the newspaper on her iPod!

Well, why can’t she?

The Times needs subscription revenue, but readers are flocking to the website instead. The paper tried a pay-for-view scheme for some web content, but with the abundance of free news online there’s no reason to pay.

Meanwhile, many people (like me) love the content from the Times but just can’t read every article. We like the actual paper for the variety, depth, and quality of its coverage. In contrast, the local and even national TV news and news radio lack this quality and depth, and lack the user-side control of clicking around on the Times Online.

Add to that the efficiency of using iPods for purposes other than music. For instance, I download History Channel documentaries and listen to them while I walk around.

So what’s the prescription? The Times should team up with Apple to offer a daily download of the paper, divided into tracks for each article. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a few voice artists record the articles every night; use one artist for the dozen or so articles in each section — a Diane Sawyer type for International News; a Ray Romano sound-alike for Sports; for the Metro Section, Fran Drescher (she might be available for this, right?).

I don’t subscribe to the print version of the paper because I move around too much, it’s too bulky, and there’s not enough value added over the online version. But I’d subscribe to the audio downloadable paper for sure. Just as I get an email whenever there’s a new Mad Men episode available for download, I’d have an email in my inbox every morning with a one-click link to the audio of the day’s paper. A minute later, I’d have my iPod earbuds in, on my way to the elevator, hearing the day’s headline article read to me.

Maybe I’d skip articles on telecom mergers or soccer matches, but I’d get a much wider variety of news than when I click around the articles that pop out on me on the website.

Another benefit: people love to dissociate payment from their purchases — it adds utility. It’s why we convert money into chips when we go into a casino: we suffer the expense once and then we don’t have to think about it. Paying for a subscription to the Times on iTunes would be quick and painless, making us more likely to expend money we wouldn’t in increments of $1.50 over 365 days.

Bottom line: with minimal effort and expense, the paper can make a whole new generation into Times subscribers. By making our currently unproductive time productive — letting us hear the Times while walking the streets — they’ll add value to their reporting that makes it worthwhile for us to spend money on the news. New revenue abounds.

Update (10/1/08): So it turns out that a company called Audible, bought by Amazon in January for $300 million, offers an “Audio Digest” version of the Times for like $13/mo. So someone over at the Times is recording an abridged version of the paper every night. They’re just not making it easily available — nor marketing it aggressively — to the iPod generation. To get it, one has to go to audible.com and find it, then create an account, download it, and import to iTunes. And let’s face it: nothing with the word “Digest” in its name is being marketed to millennials. This Digest should be made a lot sexier and be made easily available through the iTunes Store. Of course, it’s also worth noting that you can subscribe to some New York Times podcasts, but nothing akin to what I describe above.

An exciting potential natural experiment for the the Too Many Suitors Problem:

The current financial crisis is going to drastically affect the preferences of college seniors looking to go into investment banking and hedge funds. As those companies fail, these prospective workers will likely flock to consulting — a more stable and still incredibly lucrative area — in droves.

There is already evidence for this shift: a friend of mine who works at the Boston Consulting Group was at Harvard last week to do recruiting amongst the class of 2009. Not only did BCG see an incredible spike in attendance at their first recruiting event, but Bain (another firm with better student name-recognition) saw 700 people at their first event! (Remember that Harvard’s class size is about 1600.)

So, with extrinsic factors pushing many, many more applicants into the consulting labor pool, what will happen? Will, as conventional wisdom might lead us to predict, the consulting firms enjoy the much broader pool as giving them more great applicants to choose from?

Or, will the flood of applicants put a strain on recruiting, making companies like Bain more reliant on mechanisms like GPA cut-offs and shorter interviews to pick their incoming class — potentially working against the firms’ abilities to choose the best applicants?

Simply, will the tremendous increase in applicants lead to a worse incoming class of consultants, supporting the Too Many Suitors hypothesis? Time will tell.

Over the last few years, most mainstream doubt about the existence of climate change has been quelled — just think about Al Gore, Nobel Prize Laureate — and only the most strident of zealots resist the coalescing consensus that the activities of man are adversely affecting our environment.

As a result, I was surprised and intrigued to hear from a friend over dinner recently that her boyfriend — a Harvard business school student who holds numerous science degrees, including a master’s from Cambridge — is resistant to the forecasting that appears in major scientific publications like Science and Nature.

No one’s accusing these publications of being anything less than rigorously peer-reviewed bastions of scientific research, so why disbelieve them?

My friend said her boyfriend felt that lots of good, legitimate research is done on climate change, but the publications — and the media at large — focus on the extreme, the provocative, and so it’s the most pessimistic views that end up in their pages.

This makes perfect sense: the research on the rate and reach of climate change, even if it’s all done by good scientists using sound data-collection and analysis, is likely to result in findings that fall along a distribution. But while the truth of the matter is likely found in considering the distribution as a whole, the findings on the ends are going to be the ones that stick out to journal editors as the most interesting to prospective readers.

It’s a case of the classic economic phenomenon known as The Winner’s Curse.

Let’s say there’s an auction of a good with an objective but unknown value (think fields for oil drilling, not a painting that each prospective buyer will value differently). Each buyer will estimate the value differently. Maybe they’ll each hire someone to professionally survey and appraise the good. The real value is probably around the mean estimate, but it’s the buyer with the high estimate who will buy the good, thinking the others suckers for passing on such a valuable purchase. But that buyer will almost certainly have over-valued the good. In an auction like this, you don’t want to be the winner.

Similarly, science journals are buying the articles that most highly estimate the costs of climate change — but they might be overpaying.

Last week, New York ran a story by Boris Kachka about the impending demise of book publishing. It was called, depressingly, “The End.”

Lips are abuzz within the industry about the myriad forces that, like so many tribes looking to sack Rome, will weaken the centuries-old industry enough to banish print to the history books:

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

One by one, these would be difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

The article got me thinking about one force that I think has been overlooked. And even if it has nothing to do with the end of print, it’s an idea that’s led to a broader pseudo-economic theory that I call The Too Many Suitors Problem.

The print media is an industry that enjoys a large surplus of aspirant labor. Even while book publishers and newspapers shrink, the number of doe-eyed Ivy League graduates who want to board those sinking ships is growing. We need only look to reports-cum-cautionary-tales like Doree Shafrir’s in the Observer, “Ivy League Slaves of New York,” to understand how competitive entry-level jobs are in this industry.

But while it may seem like a boon to have the best and the brightest at the disposal of Human Resources departments everywhere, I’d argue that this large surplus of labor is actually a detriment to the quality of the young blood coming into the industry — the young men and women who could conceivably bring print into this, our new millennium.

At first blush, this probably makes no sense: the quality of the new class of media types should be better if the hiring companies have a bigger pool to choose from. But let’s take a step back.

Imagine you are a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. You have two suitors to choose from, and a finite amount of resources (in this case, time before you become un-marriageable) to make your choice. At first you think one is an asshole and one is charming, but, after a little more time and a few stalled marriage proposals, you realize that the charming one is immoral and the asshole is actually the man of your dreams. (Spoiler: your name is Elizabeth Bennet.)

Now imagine the same scenario, but you have 200 suitors instead of two, and you still have the same few years before you’re labeled spinster. The mechanism you’d have to develop to choose between the suitors would be much cruder than originally — instead of getting to really know each suitor, you’d have to do thirty-second interviews with each one (like they do on the first episode of the Bachelorette each season). With the same amount of time, but with a surplus of 199 suitors instead of a surplus of 1, you might completely miss Darcy in the pack. Especially since he’d give a bad first impression.

And that’s the crux of my Too Many Suitors theory: at a certain point, a surplus of labor supply (for skilled labor) will lead to a diminishing quality of the group ultimately selected. And this is because, as the surplus increases, the mechanisms for measuring quality become necessarily more crude.

Imagine you have a play with five characters to cast. You want more than five people to come audition, because if only five come and a few suck you’ll have a lousy cast. So maybe you want ten or twenty people to audition. But at a certain point, more auditionees will be detrimental: you’ll have to give each actor just a minute or two to read, and instead of gathering the amount of data necessary to see whether they are truly good actors fit for the roles, you’ll instead gather a smaller, much more chance-influenced amount of data; you’ll only know whether they happened to have a good reading of a one-paragraph monologue.

Here’s a concrete real world example about the cruder mechanisms that come along with too many suitors: Harvard gets a little more than half the number of applicants as the University of Michigan. Harvard, though it has to rely perhaps too much on SAT scores and class rank, gets to have an admissions officer carefully consider each applicant. UMich doesn’t have that privilege, since it gets nearly 30,000 applicants. Instead, it relies largely on a points system.

Obviously there is self-selection in the pools of applicants. But, I’d assert that if the 27,000-person pool applying to UMich were randomly cut down to the size of the pool applying to Harvard (16,000ish) and then the Harvard admissions office got to choose UMich’s freshman class, that class might be of an overall higher quality than the one they would get with their usual system and their bigger applicant pool.

We could do the same thought experiment for Harvard: cut the applicant pool in half and use the extra time and resources to let the admissions officers spend more time with the applications, get more essays and interviews, and ignore SAT scores. You might get a better freshmen class.

The Too Many Suitors Problem is, in some way, an application of the Tyranny of Choice (which asserts that having more options to choose between won’t necessarily make us happier) to the market for skilled labor, with Schumpeterian, i.e. self-undermining, consequences.

In print media, the sheer number of aspirants combined with the limited resources of the struggling companies means that the mechanisms used to filter people into the industry are crude and less meritocratic than they might be if the applicant pool were smaller. Job listings are posted on Mediabistro.com and on company websites as a formality; they’re filled instead through nepotistic connections and aggressive networking.

This isn’t sour-grapes complaining, though it’s true that during my junior year of college I applied to summer internships at the big publishing companies and never heard back. I promise I’m not bitter.

Instead, I understand the industry reality: this system is in the short-term interest of the companies. It’s simply easier and faster to fill positions this way — the alternative, filtering through the hundreds of summer internship and job applications and really trying to find the best candidates, would take far too much time and energy.

But perhaps it’s not in their long-term interest: because they can’t employ a truly meritocratic system, they are often scaring away the bright minds and high achievers who instead look to the clear(er) meritocracies of law school applications and i-bank recruiting. Those areas have large applicant pools but also have lots of seats to fill, so the proportionate size of the surplus is smaller than for the pressed-but-prestigious world of print, and so they’re equipped to handle the rush of prospective analysts and paralegals.

If newspapers and book publishers employed a truly energetic on-campus recruiting program at top-tier colleges, the short-term resource expenditure might pay back big time by getting the best applicants into the company walls — young minds who might be able to help fortify the industry’s walls against Kachka’s bogeymen and who might help figure out how to build print into a city for the future rather than a relic of the past.