68. The Power of the President -- and the Thumb

How much does the President of the United States really matter? And: where did all the hitchhikers go? A pair of "attribution errors."

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:48Speaker 01

  Oh, the president matters a great deal.

• 2:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  You may recognize that voice.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  I'm Don Rumsfeld, and I've just written a book, Known and Unknown: A Memoir.

• 2:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  He's also a former Navy pilot, congressman, a US ambassador to NATO, White House Chief of Staff, and a two-time Secretary of Defense.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Needless to say, our Constitution divides the powers between the legislative and the judicial and the executive branches. So no president of the United States has the overwhelming power that dictators do, for example. However, a president of the United States has the bully pulpit. He can talk and be heard, and people listen. And of course, in our society with a free political system, you lead not by command, but by persuasion. And persuasion, my uncle used to tell me, is a two-edged sword. Reason and emotion. Plunge it deep.

• 3:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, we're going to plunge deep into a couple of questions. The first one, the one I asked Rumsfeld. Well, I have a feeling you're not going to like it. Most people, if you ask them this question, their heads explode. They sputter, they swear, they tell you you're a moron for even thinking this question. But let's ask it anyway. How much does the president of the United States really matter?

• 4:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, we know the rhetoric. The president is the leader of the free world, the most powerful human being on the face of the earth. But how true is that? How much does the president really matter?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I'm Frank D. Delano Roosevelt. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Richard Billhouse Nixon. I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear

• 4:36Speaker 03

  that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States. And will, to the best of my ability.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  To the best of my ability. Preserve, protect, and defend

• 4:46Speaker 03

  the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, how much power does the president really have? And later, we hit the road to see if hitchhiking is as dangerous as it seems. Did we ditch a good thing? Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Donald Rumsfeld is 79 years old. During his nearly 50 years in and out of Washington, he got a good look at the powers of the president via seven different men, from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. In between, he spent a lot of time in the private sector.

• 5:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've been a CEO a couple of times. You've worked in the White House. Now, there's been academic research looking at the actual impact of a CEO on a firm. And perhaps not surprisingly to you, economists have found that CEOs are far less influential than, let's say, their pay packages might connote. But there's this kind of leadership perception, much as there is with the presidency. So talk to me for a moment about the parallel between the CEO and the president.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Well, they're really very, very different. And being good at one doesn't suggest that one would necessarily be good at the other. The political world is a thing of a different order. Because the powers are divided, a president has to spend a great deal of time dealing with the Congress and dealing with the media, because you communicate to the Congress and the public through the media. And almost anything that's proposed is going to be debated and discussed openly, immediately. In business, conversely, I mean, I could go into a corporation and decide that I want to freeze the dividend, and I could do it as CEO.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I could decide I'm going to open a research facility in country X instead of country Y. I could decide I'm going to downsize or sell off a division, and I did it. And you can be wrong as well as right, to be sure, but at least you are able to do it. You know, in government, if we put something in place in one of the departments or agencies, the Congress wants to have hearings on it. They want to pull the plant up by the roots every five minutes to see if it's still growing and traumatize it. And the press wants to critique it before it's even 15 minutes old. It's enormously different.

• 7:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, that's a very, very compelling argument, but I have to say, it sounds a little bit at odds with how we began this conversation, when I just asked you kind of the baseline question, how much does the president matter? You answered that, well, of course, it matters a great, great, great deal. But you're telling me now that in terms of influence, in terms of ability to get things done, to move things from step one to step 10, the president, man, he's just got a whole heap of trouble. He's just got to keep plowing through. Is that right?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, think of what presidents have accomplished in my adult lifetime. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt got things through the Congress and changed the way America functioned during the Great Depression. He carefully moved the country towards World War II and began assisting with Len Lees, the British, in recognizing the threat that Adolf Hitler posed. He did some bad things, like impounding all the Japanese-Americans in the Pacific Coast and putting them in detention centers, but he could do those things.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Throughout the Depression, you have been patient. You have granted us wide powers. You have encouraged us with a widespread approval of our purposes.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And look at what George W. Bush did. I mean, 9/11, there was no roadmap or guidebook for him, what he should do. And yet, he did. And he got a lot done, and this country's been protected for a decade.

• 9:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're implying that the circumstance of the presidency is what confers the shape of the power, I guess. You mentioned FDR and President Bush, and in each case, we're talking about dramatic circumstances. Depression and war, on the one hand, and a massive terrorist attack, on the other.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  No, it's both. It's both. It's both the circumstance and the personality, the individual.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  We're a nation at war. And America and our allies are fighting this war with relentless determination across the world.

• 9:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me an example, if you could, of where you were surprised by a given president's inability to get something done. It might have been a legislative something, it might have been a leadership something, it might have been a foreign policy something.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Well, Gerald Ford, of course, was a man of the House of Representatives. He'd served there for a long time and was highly respected. In fact, his hope in life had been to someday maybe be Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He got in the presidency, and the war in Vietnam was coming to an end. And he decided that if they could get the Congress to provide some additional funds, they could very likely affect how the outcome ended. That is to say, conceivably save lives. There were hundreds of thousands of people killed after the end of the Vietnam War in Indochina.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  And conceivably strengthen the South Vietnamese government sufficiently that they could survive and not be totally overrun by the North. He worked with the Congress and tried to get the funds from the Congress and couldn't. And if there's anybody, now admittedly, he didn't have control of either house. They were in the hands of the Democrats. But, but as a president, he was loved up on Capitol Hill. He was respected. In my view, he had the benefit of being on the right side of the issue, trying to do the right thing, and he was not successful.

• 11:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you at the time surprised, frustrated, chagrined?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I suppose I was surprised. I don't get frustrated or chagrined.

• 11:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you do that?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I don't know. You just get up every morning and look ahead.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  Unless every able American pitches in, Congress and I cannot do the job.

• 11:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me an example, if you would, of where a president took the blame for something that was really entirely out of his control.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think one would have to say not entirely out of his control, but certainly Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War.

• 12:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  It was, it was, you know, started in the Kennedy administration. He inherited it after the assassination of the John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. And he ended up having to announce that he wouldn't run for reelection.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

• 12:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you ever, did you come down more on the right side of President Johnson or on the wrong side in your encounters with him?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Well, I was a big supporter of civil rights, so, so, I mean, that was no problem. I did, I had troubles with some of his approaches on Vietnam, but we would not have had a civil rights legislation in the 1960s had Lyndon Johnson not resolved to have it. And, and it was that masterful combination of the cooperation between the Republicans and Lyndon Johnson and, and his determination. Now, there's an example of a president using the powers of the presidency brilliantly for the good of the country.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  But really, it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

• 13:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  What makes a leader powerful? If it's all about persuasion, like Rumsfeld says, Lyndon Johnson was one of the best, a master of the trade. This was a man who could get his dog to sing.

• 13:40Speaker 06

  Come on, sing for me.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Oh, you're silly now.

• 13:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  But let's get back to the present for now.

• 13:53Speaker 07

  Out of many, we are one. That while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes, we can.

• 14:11Speaker 08

  I've probably never been more wrong about anything than I was about my projections for what the Obama administration would look like.

• 14:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Steve Levitt. He's my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. He admits he usually doesn't pay much attention to politics, but in the last election, he did.

• 14:39Speaker 08

  I think the problem for Obama is that he's the greatest speaker who ever lived. And I've said this from long before I came here. The very first time I heard Obama speak, I thought he was like the Pied Piper because even though I disagreed with most of what he said, I immediately wanted to do them. I would have done whatever he would have told me to do. And in fact, that's why I voted for Obama. I never vote, but I voted for Obama because I thought there's a good chance that Obama will be the greatest president in the history of mankind. And I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Barack Obama.

• 15:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt doesn't usually vote for two reasons. One is that, like a lot of economists, he thinks that casting one vote in a sea of millions is basically just a waste of time. Now, it should be said that most people don't think about voting like economists do. But the other reason he doesn't vote is that he doesn't think the president matters all that much.

• 15:38Speaker 07

  It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes, we can.

• 15:48Speaker 08

  What I think a president can do is I think a president can set a tone for a nation. So whether it was someone like a Ronald Reagan. Tear down this wall. Or Franklin Roosevelt.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  The only thing we have to tear is tear itself.

• 16:06Speaker 08

  But that's really what great leaders do, is they set a tone. And I really thought that Obama would be able, through his unbelievable intellect and eloquence, be able to set an incredible tone for our country.

• 16:17Speaker 07

  And of course.

• 16:19Speaker 08

  And what's strange and surprising to me is that exactly the opposite happened. As soon as he got into office, the tone of the debate was just rancorous and off tune and off pitch.

• 16:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt imagined Obama strolling into the White House and blasting away all the negativity, blazing a path toward a shining future. Obama and his staff probably have the same idea. Here's one of them, who happens to be a colleague of Levitt's.

• 16:52Speaker 09

  Hi, I'm Austin Goolsbee. I'm a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and I'm the former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

• 17:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which means that you worked as an economist in the White House bending the president's ear.

• 17:07Speaker 09

  Something like that.

• 17:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Something like that. So you might think, from the way that everybody talks during an election, including the candidates, that there's some kind of magic button in the Oval Office that the president can just kind of press whenever he needs to jack up the economy to create more jobs or whatnot. But you guys, you got in there, you found there are no such buttons at all, are there?

• 17:29Speaker 09

  You know, I spent a lot of the first month there wandering all around in the basement, trying to figure out the tunnels, whether I could find if there was a bunker under there, or whatever it was. I never found that button. I never found the bunker or the tunnels either. But I think the bigger mistake that people make is assuming that they can go turn the crank in the White House, or in Congress, or somewhere in Washington, and just get the economy going, because such a big share of the economy has nothing to do with Washington, that it doesn't quite work like that.

• 18:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well before Obama was president, Goolsbee was one of his economics go-to guys, an adviser on both his presidential and 2004 senate campaigns. So you personally, Austin, have been with President Obama for a long time, longer than any political ally that I know of at least. So tell me, here's a question I've always wanted to ask you. When it comes to actually having the power and the influence to get things done, how much does the President of the United States actually matter?

• 18:36Speaker 09

  For the macroeconomy, not a ton. I mean, I say about 98% of the economy has nothing to do with Washington at all, much less the President in a normal time. I think he certainly can set the tone, and then there are a bunch of particulars where, I don't know if it's like flying an airplane or something, where they said it's 98% boredom and 2% terror or something. In the White House, it's got an element like that. Look, the economy's doing what it's doing, but then every once in a while, there are these catastrophic events and the world is about to blow up, and then the President

• 19:19Speaker 09

  of the United States makes a really big difference, as does the head of the Fed, because the decisions that they make in a crisis can either make things worse and worse and start to spiral the wrong way, or they can get some wind back under the sails and start to fix it. I'd say, if I had to summarize, I think the world vests too much power, certainly in the President, but probably in Washington in general, for its influence on the economy, because most all of the economy has nothing to do with the government.

• 20:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's a sobering thought, isn't it? Here's President Obama's former top economist saying that the whole idea of the president affecting the economy is a bit of a charade. Now, can that possibly be true? And how do you even try to answer that question empirically? How do you isolate the president from all the other forces at work on the economy? Justin Wolfers is an economist who's taught at Penn and Princeton. He tried to answer that question in a study of the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential election.

• 20:39Speaker 10

  2004 was a social scientist's dream. So, the thing is, if you want to try and study the effects of the presidency on anything, in my case, on the economy, then if you're a doctor, what you'd do is you'd run a big randomized trial. Half the time, you'd randomly make it a Republican president, half the time, you'd randomly make it a Democrat president, and you'd see how those two treatments did in terms of effects on the economy. The problem is, we're not allowed to do that in the social sciences. I can't randomly make someone president.

• 21:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yet. Yet, you're not allowed.

• 21:17Speaker 10

  Yet. But if you remember the 2004 race, around about 3 o'clock on Election Day, the exit polls got leaked. And the exit polls said that John Kerry had won in a landslide. Now, around about 7 o'clock at night, they'd counted enough votes, it had become quite clear that, in fact, Bush was going to win. But what you have is this four hours, I'm a Democrat, so I'll say four beautiful hours, in which we basically had a Kerry presidency. And it was random, because the only reason people thought John Kerry was president was because of a misinterpretation of the early exit polls. And so what we can do is we can look at how the financial markets performed during those four hours of the Kerry presidency and compare that to either the four hours

• 22:02Speaker 10

  prior, when it was clearly a Bush presidency, or the four hours after, when we learned it was actually going to be the second George W. Bush presidency. So when we do that, you see, in fact, that stocks fell a little bit during the four hours of the Kerry presidency. And then they rose a bit when it became the Bush presidency. So that tells us that the stock market preferred George Bush over John Kerry. Sounds like good news for Republicans. Now, let me give the Democrats' response, which is, in fact, it didn't move very much. It looks like the difference between having a Bush presidency and a Kerry presidency for the value of US stocks was maybe 1.5% or 2%, which is really a pretty small effect.

• 22:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  You might think the stock market effect that Wolfers measured isn't very meaningful in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, it does seem to show that the people who pay the most attention to the economy and who stand most to profit or lose money agree that the president isn't such a big kahuna.

• 23:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'll bet you $100 you can't name this piano player. He was from the state of Missouri, town of Independence. He loved the piano, sometimes thought about a career in music. Instead, he opened a haberdashery, and later he became President of the United States. That's right, Harry S. Truman.

• 23:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Truman had an eventful presidency, deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a tough post-war economy at home, the founding of the United Nations. He didn't always get his way. The Taft-Hartley Labor Law was passed despite the most powerful objection a president possesses: the veto.

• 24:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what if we just woke up tomorrow and there wasn't a president?

• 24:11Speaker 11

  I think we would continue functioning in almost the same way.

• 24:21Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:05Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:23Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:56Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:31Speaker 03

  My fellow citizens. My countrymen. My fellow Americans.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 26:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bernadette Myler is a Cornell Law professor who specializes in the Constitution and executive power. I asked her, what would happen if, whether by miracle or tragedy, depending on your point of view, we woke up tomorrow with no president?

• 27:09Speaker 11

  I don't think that, actually, the day-to-day experience would change all that much. How we wound up without a president would probably dictate certain kinds of responses, or change public opinion, or change the ways in which people were responding. But I think that just not having a president, I'm not sure would really change the way things happen every day all that much.

• 27:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what can the president do? Myler thinks the president has real power in only five areas.

• 27:44Speaker 11

  One is as commander in chief of the Army and Navy. A second area is not of unilateral power, but is a very significant power. And that's the power to decide whom to appoint, especially with judicial nominations. Then a third power that I think is often under reflected upon is the power not to enforce laws. So the president has the executive power, which means he can execute the laws, but it also means he can decide not to execute the laws. And then a fourth power, I think, is the power to persuade Congress to take certain kinds of action. And then a final area is really a power in relation to negotiating with foreign countries, a power over foreign affairs.

• 28:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, all right. Let's not kid ourselves. Those are real powers, powerful powers. But it's hardly the unilateral authority that goes with all that leader of the free world rhetoric. But that's how we want it. Remember, this is a country that got rid of a king in favor of a democratic republic. Are some people in that republic much, much more powerful than others? Of course they are. And the president is a very powerful individual, but he's an individual. It's easy to overestimate his influence. So when you think of the role of the president in relation to Congress, in relation to the states, in relation to the public and so on, what's the best metaphor for the president?

• 29:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is he or she a puppet master pulling every string? Or is he or she more like the Wizard of Oz, this very mortal man behind the curtain? How do you see it?

• 29:28Speaker 11

  I would say, actually, the Wizard of Oz is a better analogy, partly because I think so much of what is important about the president is an image.

• 29:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if the president is, for the most part, just another guy with a really big microphone, why even have a president?

• 29:53Speaker 12

  I think people think the president is almost like a benevolent despot determining our fortunes. And when in reality, I think the president is really just someone who's sitting in the co-pilot seat in a plane that's already on autopilot. And certainly, there are some things that can do, and we always have pilots in planes, just like we need a president.

• 30:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's J.C. Bradbury. He's a professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He's known as the baseball economist. He's studied things like how much the manager of a baseball team really matters.

• 30:24Speaker 12

  What we've found when we look at managers is that while some might be slightly better than the others... It's not a big difference between one manager than the next in terms of the decisions that they make. What I've tried to do is look at players who've played for many different managers and coaches and see how they perform differently under different managers. I have not found much differentiation at all between how well players perform with different managers. That is, as they move from team to team, they tend to perform about as well as they always have.

• 30:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, leading a baseball team is, of course, nothing like leading an entire country. So, it'd be ludicrous to compare the two jobs. But, let's do it anyway.

• 31:05Speaker 12

  Well, I think the reason you finally have to have a guy in the dugout is because if you've ever played intramural sports in college, you know that when there's no coach, people aren't on the same page, people disagree. So, it's just nice to have one person to say, "Okay, this is what we're going to do. This is the plan to move forward." And so, the manager there has to be there, even though he may not be doing anything that's much different than any other manager might do.

• 31:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, it's like, you kind of need dad in the house.

• 31:32Speaker 12

  Exactly. You need that final arbiter to say, "Okay, this is the decision we've made, and we're going with it."

• 31:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sounds a little bit like what the President of the United States does.

• 31:42Speaker 12

  Absolutely. And the President, if you think about the control that a President might have over the economy, for instance, just one area, the President is just a third of our government, and we have the legislative and executive branches. And if the two Houses of Congress agree, and the President agree, we can get policy. But, it's very complicated for them all to agree. And so, it's very hard for the President to even have an impact on the economy directly, and especially when much of what goes on in the economy is determined outside by market forces. So, the President sort of serves as a focal point to say, "How are we doing? Are we doing good? Are we doing bad?" And voters sometimes look to blame the President when things aren't going well, even though there's not much he or she could have done about it. Or, they may try and reward him when things are going well, just happen to be riding

• 32:27Speaker 12

  good times.

• 32:30Speaker 13

  My friends, we did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. All in all, not bad.

• 32:38Speaker 14

  It's an attribution problem.

• 32:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Bill James, another baseball scholar. He helped revolutionize the field of baseball statistics. James says the attribution problem is a common one, like with pitchers.

• 32:54Speaker 14

  In baseball, for many years, people believed that baseball was 75% pitching. And the essential reason that they believed this is that they credit the pitcher with wins and losses. And if you credit the pitcher with winning and losing the game, it becomes a tautology that the pitcher is always responsible for winning and losing the game. And it creates the illusion that the pitcher is responsible for much more than he actually is.

• 33:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm. Interesting, no? Let's listen back to what James just said, but swap out the word pitcher.

• 33:29Speaker 14

  And if you credit-

• 33:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  President.

• 33:31Speaker 14

  ...with winning and losing the game, it becomes a tautology that the-

• 33:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  President.

• 33:35Speaker 14

  ...is always responsible for winning and losing the game. And it creates the illusion that the-

• 33:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  President.

• 33:41Speaker 14

  ...is responsible for much more than he actually is.

• 33:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  No matter how illusory his powers may be, the president plainly matters, just not in the black and white, binary way most people think.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  And that's the genius of our system, was this divided power.

• 33:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Don Rumsfeld again.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And it has worked amazingly well. I mean, the American political experiment is probably the most amazing and probably the most brilliant creation that mankind has fashioned. And it's been an example for countries all across the globe.

• 34:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let's leave the question of presidential power behind, but linger for one more minute on what Bill James was saying about attribution errors. As he sees it, such errors are hardly confined to politics and baseball.

• 35:04Speaker 14

  The same syndrome works in almost every area of life. This also includes, for example, safety from violent crime. In the 1950s, the 1960s, people routinely hitchhiked, routinely picked up hitchhikers. We stopped doing that because of stories that hitchhikers were violent criminals. Well, hitchhikers had no more tendency to be violent criminals than anyone else. There was always a chance that they were. But stopping the practice of hitchhiking really did nothing whatsoever to reduce the incidence of violence crime and had no social value whatsoever. We had attributed to hitchhiking the violence of a few hitchhikers and had closed down the wrong thing.

• 36:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we ask our second question.

• 36:05Speaker 08

  When's the last time anybody saw a hitchhiker on the road? I haven't seen a hitchhiker on the road in 20 years. But it makes you wonder, why did hitchhiking disappear?

• 36:23Speaker 15

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• 36:51Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 37:35Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 37:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring, great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 38:44Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 39:18Speaker 05

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 39:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  How is the killer? Jason, what are we watching here?

• 39:30Speaker 16

  This is the beginning of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where these kids are going to visit a graveyard, and they pick up a, you know, pretty scraggly looking hitchhiker.

• 39:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jason Zinneman is a theater critic for The New York Times, and he's the author of a book called Shock Value, which is about the horror films of the 1970s. So in this movie, a van full of teenagers decide, after some debate, to pick up a hitchhiker. He just got off his shift at the slaughterhouse, so his face is streaked with blood, and he's talking about bludgeoning cows to death. It's pretty clear by now that we're wishing that he hadn't been picked up.

• 40:11Speaker 16

  Pretty much, yes.

• 40:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's not really any good scenario we can imagine coming out of this.

• 40:18Speaker 16

  No, no, it's true. It only gets worse. It only gets worse.

• 40:23Speaker 16

  Ah, now here's where he crosses by. He cuts them.

• 40:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is why, OK, I'm gonna...

• 40:31Speaker 16

  That's enough. That's the final straw. You can, is that they, you cut the guy, and he gets kicked out.

• 40:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Franklin's arm is just bleeding like a... Franklin, just a little cut, you know, it's...

• 40:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you're asking the question, why did hitchhiking pretty much disappear? Movies like this one give a compelling answer because it's so dangerous. If you hitchhike, you will die. That's the lesson we learned, at least. Here's Steve Levitt again.

• 41:07Speaker 08

  If even anybody thought there were homicidal maniacs who were killing hitchhikers, or hitchhikers killing people to pick them up, then certainly that would have the kind of chilling effect on a market that very few things could have.

• 41:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. Levitt, the economist, thinks of hitchhiking as a market, much like any other.

• 41:27Speaker 08

  Hitchhiking is a classic example of what an economist would call a matching market, where there's a person who wants a ride and this person who's willing to give a ride. And there's actually usually typically no money change hands. So somehow there are people getting benefit on both sides of the transaction. The 50s, the 60s, maybe even the 70s, there were some sort of equilibrium in which there were a set of people who wanted to hitchhike and there were a set of people who were willing to pick them up. And somehow that equilibrium got destroyed. So the question is, what happened to the equilibrium?

• 41:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  The assumption is that hitchhiking was so dangerous that people just wised up and stopped doing it. But how dangerous was it? We went looking for data on hitchhiking itself and on the violence associated with it. And we found pretty much nothing, at least no worthwhile data. So how common was hitchhiking violence? Did we maybe overreact? Do you remember a few years back when the media talked about the summer of the shark? All those scary stories about horrible, disfiguring shark attacks? Now, guess how many fatal shark attacks there were that year? The whole year around the world? Go ahead, guess. All right. The actual number was four.

• 42:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  There were probably more people killed by TV news vans going to cover all the shark attacks, right? But when something is really frightening, we get a little bit number blind. With something like hitchhiking, it might take just one story.

• 43:07Speaker 17

  I woke up in the morning, it was just a gorgeous day. The wildflowers were out, the trees, you know, are all sprouted, all their leaves. The grass is green because it's spring and it hasn't dried up or anything yet. It was just, so it was gorgeous.

• 43:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Colleen Stan. It was May 19th, 1977.

• 43:29Speaker 17

  I had just turned 20 in December and I was very young and had a very carefree spirit about me and I was quite impulsive.

• 43:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Stan was living in Eugene, Oregon, and she was planning to visit a friend in Westwood, California, about 360 miles to the south. But her car wouldn't start, so she decided to hitchhike. She got a ride with some truckers who were hauling grape juice. They let her off in Red Bluff, California, about an hour and a half from her friend's house. The truckers even gave her a gallon of juice when they dropped her off. She put out her thumb again.

• 44:04Speaker 17

  A car stops and there's like five guys in it and I said, "Uh, thanks, but no thanks," you know. So they went on their way.

• 44:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Her next ride was a blue Dodge Colt. There was a young couple inside with a baby, looked safe enough, so Stan got in the car.

• 44:24Speaker 17

  It was a very warm day because it was May and Red Bluff's in the valley and it's very warm there. It can get, in the summer times, it can get like 115 there, you know, so it's a very warm place. And so, it was a warm day and I was thirsty from traveling and I had taken the juice and I tipped it up to take a drink and about the same time I tipped it up, the driver presses on the accelerator and jets out back onto the highway to take off. Well, this caused the juice to pour all down me. So I was a little irritated with him at this point and I remember I looked up to

• 45:05Speaker 17

  the front, to the rearview mirror, and he's looking in the rearview mirror and it gave me like a chill down my spine.

• 45:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  The man, whose name was Cameron Hooker, and his wife Janice, wound up kidnapping Colleen Stan. They held her captive for more than seven years. They did a variety of horrible things to her. Finally, in 1984, she escaped. Hooker was sentenced to 104 years in prison. His wife got immunity for testifying against him. It became a big media story. The message was clear.

• 45:46Speaker 17

  This is why people shouldn't hitchhike. Because when you get into a car with someone, you are literally handing your life over to them. It's just, it's not worth it. It's too dangerous. Because you can look at someone, you can look at the situation and evaluate it, just like I did, and say, oh, this looks like a safe ride. But you don't know what the intent is in someone's heart, because they don't show that on the outside, and you don't know. And it's just not worth it. Because life's too valuable to just give it away like that.

• 46:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can hardly blame Colleen Stan for feeling this way. But how common are these really bad hitchhiking outcomes? Again, we really don't know. But life is all about trade-offs. Every time you do anything, you consider the trade-off. Should four fatal shark attacks each year keep everyone out of the ocean? Apparently not. But what number would? Forty? Four hundred? Four thousand? What happens when you start letting relatively small numbers balloon into such a large sphere?

• 47:14Speaker 14

  My father was the kind of person who would stop and help anybody.

• 47:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Bill James again, the baseball statistician. He was born in 1949 in Kansas.

• 47:25Speaker 14

  One time with two small kids in the car, late at night, coming back from a movie, we saw two black guys, two black adult males, standing beside the road. And my father was not Spencer Tracy. I mean, he was not a violent racist, but he was a man of his generation and he had the racist attitudes that were very common in his generation. Nonetheless, we stopped, we asked them if they needed a ride, and we took them where they needed to go. And the reason why is you just did. It was in the time and place where I grew up, if you saw somebody in need of a ride, you gave them a ride.

• 48:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  As James got older, that changed. He remembers hearing PSAs on the radio, warning drivers not to pick up hitchhikers.

• 48:09Speaker 18

  Good advice for the cross-country motorists. Although it may seem a kind act, it is not a wise act to pick up hitchhikers indiscriminately.

• 48:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  In retrospect, he says, hitchhiking took the blame for crime in general. That's another topic he likes writing about. His latest book is called Popular Crime.

• 48:28Speaker 14

  If you have a certain number of violent people running around hitchhiking, the fewer other people you have running around hitchhiking, the more dangerous it becomes to pick up a hitchhiker. It drove itself out of existence. Basically, nobody hitchhikes anymore, and the practice has all but disappeared. My point about it was, what's really the social value in this? I mean, hitchhiking is economically efficient because it puts more people in a car. The real danger was not hitchhiking, it was the fact that you have a certain number of random crazy people who will hurt you. As long as you have the same number of random crazy people, you have the same number of violent crimes. And eliminating hitchhiking doesn't, in my opinion, do anything to change that. So it was a social change that protects the individual. I mean, I don't pick up, I wouldn't pick up hitchhikers either. I mean, I'm not nuts.

• 49:15Speaker 14

  I do that to protect myself, but protecting myself has no value to the society.

• 49:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the demand for hitchhiking fell because of fear, a breakdown in trust, a selfishness, whatever. But maybe those aren't the only reasons that demand fell.

• 49:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you ever hitchhike, Levitt?

• 49:35Speaker 08

  I did not hitchhike. I was just a little bit too young. By the time I was 15, I think hitchhikers had pretty much disappeared.

• 49:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, not quite. I was hitchhiking then.

• 49:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I was about 14 or 15, I started thumbing a ride most mornings before school, in the dark, to get to my job in town stocking shelves. I hitched all during college, all over the South, a couple of times from North Carolina to upstate New York and back. It was a pretty simple calculation. I wanted to get somewhere, and I couldn't afford a car. I mean, why else would anyone hitchhike?

• 50:14Speaker 03

  I headed for down to Destin, just to Redland.

• 50:19Speaker 19

  Redland? Do you want to go halfway, or do you want to wait?

• 50:22Speaker 15

  I'd go halfway.

• 50:24Speaker 19

  All right.

• 50:25Speaker 15

  Are there good hitchhiking spots there, do you know?

• 50:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here are a few hitchhikers we found out in Oregon. There were three of them: Teriyani, a guy named Stove, and their friend George Jamat.

• 50:41Speaker 20

  So I'm George Jamat, and I have an engineering degree that I only sometimes use, but my real passion and addiction is travel, well, and fixing things.

• 50:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  George has hitchhiked a good bit, in about 10 foreign countries and all over the US. So you do hitchhiking because you want to, not because you have to, really, right?

• 51:02Speaker 20

  Almost always, yeah.

• 51:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Almost always. So you're a 25-year-old American with an engineering degree and parental support and all that kind of stuff, who helped you buy a car, gave you a hand-me-down car, offered to buy you a train pass to get home, and you say, "No, you know, I just want to go down to the road and put my thumb out." What does that say about you and folks like you in the hitchhiking community now, who do it not out of necessity, but out of desire for experience?

• 51:28Speaker 20

  I think you just hit the nail on the head there, is desire for experience. About me particularly, it's that I'm addicted to travel and novelty, and I definitely could not normally, and sustainably, extend my vacations and travels as much as I have without hitchhiking.

• 51:49Speaker 20

  The other big motivation for a lot of us hitchhikers, the ones that I've talked to, is just learning other people's perspectives on life. And it's much easier, I think, to get a sort of feeling for how someone else lives quickly if you're riding in a car with them for hours.

• 52:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So a guy like George Jamar hitchhikes not really because he needs to, but to get a sort of feeling for how someone else lives. But what about all the people who might need to hitchhike out of necessity, but don't out of fear? On the other hand, maybe there's not as much need as we think.

• 52:34Speaker 08

  Clearly, people getting richer.

• 52:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Steve Levitt again. Did you hear what he said?

• 52:39Speaker 08

  Clearly, people getting richer and cars getting better made has to be a big part of it because it's an extremely ineffective way to travel hitchhiking. It's slow, it's unpleasant, it's uncertain. And so if you can do something better, whether it's take a bus or take a plane or drive your own car, it's hard to believe there are many people who wouldn't prefer a different mode of transportation.

• 53:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  So maybe hitchhiking started to disappear because fewer people needed a free lift.

• 53:16Speaker 21

  Most reporters ask me, how do I get to work? And I tell them I walk about 30 feet from my bedroom to my office.

• 53:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is Alan Pisarsky. He's what you might call a scholar of transportation behavior. He used to work for the US Department of Transportation, and he wrote a series of books called Commuting in America.

• 53:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So we are in agreement that there used to be quite a bit of hitchhiking, although we don't know how much. We are in agreement that there's much less now, correct? Yes. Okay. So we want to know. Where did all those hitchhikers go? Why did so many people stop hitchhiking?

• 53:53Speaker 21

  I guess my reflex, statistical reflex, is the greater availability of automobiles.

• 54:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah.

• 54:01Speaker 21

  Well, the first, the first part of it is, is simply driver's licenses. In the 70s, is when women began to gain greater access to driver's licenses. If you look at the distributions today, men and women in terms of driver's licensing is almost, almost identical and almost ubiquitous. It's in the 92, 93 percentile for both men and for women.

• 54:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so a lot more people driving, but also, says Buzarski, there were a lot more cars. In 1969, only three in 10 households had more than one car. By 2009, six in 10.

• 54:44Speaker 21

  Well, the really significant change occurred in the two and three-car households. That's where you saw an explosion and all of the growth.

• 54:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so you're telling me more driver's licenses, more cars. Talk to me about the cars themselves and longevity.

• 55:02Speaker 21

  I think that's an important component. One of the things that people, I think, don't recognize, the great, one of the great technological changes that we've seen in America in the last 30 years, is simply the longevity of the vehicle fleet. Back in the 60s, cars did not last all that long. Today, the average age of a vehicle in America is, is north of nine years. What that means is that it's entirely possible to buy a 10 or 12-year-old small car, perfectly serviceable, still functioning quite adequately, at a very reasonable cost.

• 55:43Speaker 21

  So, the automobile, in that sense, has become much more accessible to many parts of the population. I, I came down to the studio in a 14-year-old car.

• 55:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  That makes sense. Cheap and easy car ownership helped drive down demand for hitchhiking, along with big changes in how we get around generally.

• 56:05Speaker 21

  The one is the, the advent of the interstate. Which took people off of Main Street and on to roads where walkers are not permitted. And then, of course, deregulation of aviation in roughly 1980. That had an extraordinary effect on the price of air travel. And so, you know, that made it a whole lot cheaper than standing on a street corner with your thumb out.

• 56:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  But here's something else worth thinking about. If you care even a little bit about transportation, about the cost, the growing congestion and the risk of accident, about the carbon emissions from all those cars on the road, then consider this very sobering statistic. The average car commuting to and from work in the US today rides around with about 80% of its passenger capacity empty. If our auto fleet were a bus or train fleet, it'd be considered a massive failure.

• 57:03Speaker 21

  One of America's greatest transportation resources are all those empty seats and automobiles traveling around America. I mean, it's a colossal resource that we do waste.

• 57:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Given that there is this massive inefficiency with all this empty capacity in cars, do you wish that hitchhiking could come back?

• 57:23Speaker 21

  Yeah, I think I do. And I think that maybe we will see some opportunity for it with the new technologies and people being more willing to spend time with each other and maybe having some kind of a vetting system that says, "This guy's okay." That puts people a little bit more at ease. And then that will, I hope, help people to be more comfortable with that kind of arrangement.

• 58:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Such technologies and vetting systems already exist in various forms. The ride-sharing board on Craigslist, or Avago, a technology company that provides realtime ride-sharing information via apps and the web. And then there's the practice known as slugging.

• 58:20Speaker 21

  Slugging, for those who don't know, is basically a kind of an organized hitchhiking world. People just line up on the streets. Sometimes there's a sign, sometimes there's not.

• 58:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  We sent Alan Pisarsky out on the streets of Arlington, Virginia, where there's a healthy slugging scene.

• 58:36Speaker 21

  Everybody going to a certain area clusters together. Cars will come along looking for people going their way so they can qualify to be on the HOV3 lanes, which gives them a much faster ride down to the southern suburbs. We're looking now at about seven or eight cars lined up to pick up people. When we ask folks questions, we have to be pretty quick, a little bit nimble, almost like talking to people at a checkout line in the supermarket because they're more interested in getting in the car and heading home.

• 59:08Speaker 22

  I pull up every day.

• 59:09Speaker 23

  It says, "Three for Roslyn, three for Pentagon, three for Crystal City."

• 59:14Speaker 22

  I might have to wait maybe 5, 10 minutes for a rider, and then I get on the road.

• 59:18Speaker 23

  It saves me about $20 a day in commuting costs. There's a website that actually has etiquette rules on it.

• 59:24Speaker 24

  Don't talk to the driver unless they talk to you. Don't touch anything in the car unless you ask the driver.

• 59:29Speaker 23

  Get to riding some pretty nice cars, too.

• 59:31Speaker 24

  Don't eat or drink in the car unless you ask.

• 59:33Speaker 23

  It's a pretty nice little arrangement.

• 59:34Speaker 24

  And some people will talk to you the whole way down, some people will just keep their mouths shut.

• 59:38Speaker 22

  I usually get home at the same time every day.

• 59:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Slugging is a lot more organized than hitchhiking, and a lot of these people are government employees. So they're wearing suits and ID tags. So they don't exactly conjure the image of the slaughterhouse hitchhiker from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the creepy couple who kidnapped Colleen Stan. Of course, the normal risks of auto travel still apply.

• 1:00:04Speaker 25

  I was a rider, and the driver was falling asleep behind the wheel. So, you know, you have to try to, wake up, you know, say, "Hey, either, you know, if you're gonna fall asleep, let me out, I'll find a way home." Or, you know, try to keep your eyes open.

• 1:00:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  What are you scared of and why? Are your fears rational? Or do you let the small likelihood of a terrible outcome stop you from doing things that you really want to do? You know what I think we fear most in this country? Strangers. We've done a great job through our media, our movies, even our politics, of convincing ourselves that strangers are dangerous. But if you look at the data, you might be surprised. Three of every four murder victims in this country knew their killer. And of course, each of us knows a lot fewer people than there are strangers. More than 60% of rape victims knew their attacker.

• 1:01:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you look at the data on missing children, you'll see that an incredibly small percentage of those incidents, way, way less than even 1/10 of 1%, are what we think of as the stereotypical kidnapping by a stranger. Now, how dangerous was hitchhiking? We may never really know, but almost certainly far, far, far less dangerous than we came to think of it. Are we worse off for abandoning it? That's what I asked Bill James. So there was an equilibrium that existed, and then it was destroyed, in large part because of fear. And the equilibrium went away, and it's probably impossible to recreate.

• 1:01:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think it'd be a good thing if that fear could be suspended, the equilibrium could be recreated, and hitchhiking could be reinvigorated?

• 1:01:59Speaker 14

  Yes, I do. And the reason I do is that we have a better society when we can trust one another. And wherever and whenever there's an evaporation of systems based on trust, I think there's a loss to society. I also think that one evaporation of trust in society tends to feed another, and that we would have a better society if we could, rather than promoting fear and working to reduce the places where terrible things happen, if we could promote trust and work on building societies in which people are more trustworthy. I think we're all better off in a million different ways if and when we can do that.

• 1:02:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let's see. Our economy is still sputtering, which means money is tight for transportation and everything else. When we drive to work, 80% of our passenger capacity is wasted. And, as Bill James puts it, "A loss of trust means a loss to society." And, oh yeah, about that sputtering economy, the President of the United States, despite the conventional wisdom, is nearly powerless to do anything about it. So if you're feeling a little bit patriotic today, a little bit optimistic, a little bit adventuresome, go ahead. Stick your thumb out, won't you?

• 1:03:36Speaker 05

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Catherine Wells, Diana Nguyen, and Andrew Gartrell. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Borey Lam, and Chris Bannon. Our engineer is David Herman. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 1:04:22Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:04:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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