“So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and
consequences in this world that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a
sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants,” said
Thomas Jefferson while reflecting on the effects of a seemingly inconsequential
tea tax in colonial America, which then led to the Boston Tea Party, and,
consequently, the American Revolution.
Big things have small beginnings. The avalanche
effect. A multitude of things led to the separation of American from Britain,
which seem only mostly clear, even in now retrospect. The cumulative effect of
everything happening in our world, all at once, seems impossible to calculate.
From short stories about the unfathomable
consequences of time travel (“A Sound of Thunder,” by Ray Bradbury, perhaps?)
to suave explanations of chaos theory from a black leather-clad mathematician
(Jurassic Park)1, I think it’s say to safe that humans are interested in our, for the
most part, inability to predict the future in complex, multifaceted systems --
like the weather, politics, and the economy.
In Freakonomics, authors Dubner and
Levitt explore such convoluted relations in regards to personal motives and
incentives.
In the first chapter of Freakonomics, our
authors tell the story of motivation and prediction.
A common struggle for many school teachers,
especially for those teaching younger grades, is dealing with parents. In
particular, parents who come to pick up their students late. It makes sense:
teachers are paid to work set hours, and parents who come to pick up their
students late essentially force teachers to work for free out of hours.
To study this, a study was conducted in an
Israeli daycare.
For the first few weeks, scientists only
observed the parents coming to pick up their children. A small and consistent
number of parents came late to pick up their students. After the fifth week,
the researchers implemented a fine: 3 dollars for every time parents were late
to pick up students. Though seemingly low, the fines accrued to nearly 400
dollars a month.
What did the researchers find?
After a few weeks, the number of parents who
came late to pick up their students actually increased after the fine was
implemented -- counterintuitive, I know.
Let’s go through with Dubner and Levitt.
According to them, economy is the “study of
incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other
people want or need the same things” (16). And incentives are broken down into
three main groups: economic, social, and moral.
In the case of the Israeli study, parents were
offered a monetary, economic incentive to pick up their students: not paying a
fine. However, the other incentives (because, presumably, you -- like me --
predicted that the parents would further refrain from picking up students late
in order to avoid a fine) were not taken into consideration. In the case of the
Israeli study, firstly, $3 is much cheaper than a babysitter. Secondly, the
economic price paid also paid off social guilt: parents did not feel as guilty
when arriving late since they paid for their mistakes.
It’s always interesting to look at success
stories. To wonder how business tycoons make their wealth, how geniuses like
Elon Musk and Bill Gates have their beginnings.
Canadian journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell
examines such wonderings in Canadian hockey players in his book Outliers.
In Canada, the cut-off for hockey players’ birthdays
is January 1. So you have to join an age group in the beginning, and are judged
based on your peers in that group. Potential hockey players from before
kindergarten are grouped like this. Every year, the more talented players are
selected to progress onto higher levels. Gladwell describes Canadian hockey as
a meritocracy: if you’re good, you move onto better groups. Your success only
relies on individual merit and ability and tenacity.
Supposedly.
A snapshot of a high league hockey game, except
with the names of players replaced with their birthdays: March 11 starts
around one side of the Tigers’ nest, leaving the puck for his teammate January
4, who passes it to January 22, who flips it back to March 12, who shoots at
the Tigers’ goalie, April 27. April 27 blocks, but the shot’s rebounded by
Vancouver’s March 6. He shoots! Defensemen February 9 and February 14 dive to
block the puck while January 10 looks on helplessly.
If you’d looked at the birthdays of players in a
high-end game, you’d see they all have very early birthdays.
Why is that?
Because when you have a group, if a player is
born January 2 versus a player born December 31, the player in January at the
age of five is more developed, mentally, physically, socially, and has every
bit of advantage over a smaller almost four-year old. A coach looks at the
group and sees the January player as better, chooses him for a better league.
There he gets more attention, more time on the ice, more training. By the time
the older kid turns six, he’ll have almost twice as much practice as his
younger competitor, and therefore a higher chance of getting picked for a
better team the following year. And the advantage continues, accumulates,
snowballs. This is the phenomenon of relative age. Of course the kid is a
decent hockey player to begin with, but he has that extra practice, that extra
mentoring and support that adds up up up.
Gladwell adds in a footnote that this is an
example of “self-fulfilling procephy.” Essentially, these players born in the
beginning of the calendar year are told they are more talented, supported and
expected to be better. They begin with a “false definition,” -- a proposition
that they are more talented than their peers when really they may only have the
advantage of age and development -- which leads to a new behavior, new
environment, that, actually, makes “the original false conception come true.”
This perpetuates a false assumption, since the prediction becomes true, though
not necessarily in the way one may expect.
We all love the story of rags to riches, a
“self-made man,” but the truth is, there are always factors we overlook, always
small advantages that a tycoon has.
I end this post with an except from Outliers:
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage
and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all
by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden
advantages and extraordinary opportunities and culture legacies that allow them
to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It
makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the
legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in
ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people
are like, in other words. It’s only by asking where they are from that
we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.
Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest
oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest
acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the
soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a
sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that
successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the
sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down their roots, and the
rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?
1 Chaos theory was actually formulated by an MIT professor who
attempted to simulate weather (he was a meteorologist). When inputting numbers
into his system, he found varying results even though he’d submitted the same
numbers twice. Upon closer inspection, the professor realized that he had
rounded to a different decimal place than before, which resulted in a slightly
different answer. From this insight, professor Lorenz formulated chaos theory,
claiming that slight variations in initial conditions in complex systems lead
to enormous consequences in the future. “Chaos: when the present determines the
future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the
future.”
