0:00:06 Hey, there, it’s Steven Dubner, and today we’ve got a bonus episode for you.
0:00:12 It is an update of a 2022 interview we did with Roland Friar, a much acclaimed and frequently
0:00:15 controversial economist at Harvard.
0:00:18 When we spoke, Friar had recently returned from a two-year suspension, which you will
0:00:20 hear about in the episode.
0:00:25 The person who suspended him was Claudine Gay, who at the time was the Dean of Harvard’s
0:00:27 Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
0:00:32 Gay went on to become president of Harvard, but then she famously resigned amidst plagiarism
0:00:38 charges and criticism of Harvard’s response to anti-Semitic demonstrations.
0:00:42 The reason we thought you might like to hear this episode now is because it follows naturally
0:00:47 from the two-part series we just published on the Rooney Rule, that is the National Football
0:00:51 League policy that was designed to increase diversity among coaches, and the Rooney Rule
0:00:56 has since been adopted by many firms and institutions outside of sports.
0:01:02 Roland Friar, who is black, has his own thoughts about how firms and institutions have handled
0:01:05 diversity hiring, and you’ll hear about that, too.
0:01:08 We have updated facts and figures as necessary.
0:01:13 As always, thanks for listening.
0:01:19 In 2005, I wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine called “Toured a Unified Theory
0:01:21 of Black America.”
0:01:27 It was a profile of a young Harvard economist named Roland Friar, whose journey to Harvard
0:01:31 was beyond surprising, beyond unpredictable.
0:01:37 Given his background, it may have seemed impossible, and yet there he was.
0:01:43 A lot of things happened to get Friar into the upper echelons of academia, and even more
0:01:47 has happened since, much of it controversial.
0:01:50 How does Friar describe his research agenda today?
0:02:05 So Roland, it feels like most public discussions about race these days, at least the ones that
0:02:13 I read in academia, in journalism, and elsewhere, do treat blackness as essentially a handicap.
0:02:17 What are the costs to that perception?
0:02:21 I mean, how much time you got?
0:02:24 We’ve got plenty of time.
0:02:30 Today, on Freakin’omics Radio, a conversation with Roland Friar about his research on policing.
0:02:37 I had a five-hour meeting with Obama and other folks, and we got zero done.
0:02:38 On education?
0:02:42 The thing that drives me nuts is that this woman is doing everything that she thinks
0:02:43 is right.
0:02:46 We’ll get his take on corporate diversity programs.
0:02:49 It made me sick in my stomach, man.
0:02:55 And we’ll hear about Friar’s personal controversy, including a two-year suspension by Harvard.
0:02:58 I broke a lot of glass early on in my career, and I don’t think that was helpful.
0:03:03 To be fair, Roland Friar is still breaking glass.
0:03:05 All that on Freakin’omics Radio right now.
0:03:23 This is Freakin’omics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything,
0:03:35 with your host Stephen Dubner.
0:03:40 In 2007, at age 30, Roland Friar became the youngest African-American to receive tenure
0:03:41 at Harvard.
0:03:46 He would go on to win a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant, as well as the
0:03:51 John Bates Clark Medal, one of the top prizes in academic economics.
0:03:56 He got his own research lab at Harvard to study the achievement gap between black and
0:03:57 white kids.
0:03:59 He even made it onto late-night TV.
0:04:02 Please welcome Roland Friar!
0:04:07 He has some controversial areas you study here.
0:04:15 You say that blacks are the worst-performing ethnic group in our school system, but that
0:04:18 is a pretty racist thing for you to say.
0:04:34 A lot of Friar’s research pushed boundaries and crossed ideological lines.
0:04:41 My life’s work is about making those communities better, and so whatever cost there is, frankly,
0:04:46 to me of telling what I think is the data-driven truth about these issues, whether it’s health
0:04:50 or police or education, I’m going to do it!
0:04:56 In 2019, Friar was suspended by Harvard over allegations that he had engaged in “unwelcome
0:05:01 conduct of a sexual nature” and charges that he had violated some of Harvard’s finance
0:05:02 rules.
0:05:07 In a letter he sent to his dean, Friar wrote, “I apologize for the insensitive and inappropriate
0:05:09 comments that led to my suspension.
0:05:14 I didn’t appreciate the inherent power dynamics in my interactions which led me to act in
0:05:20 ways that I now realize were deeply inappropriate for someone in my position.”
0:05:24 In 2021, Friar returned to teaching and research.
0:05:28 Today he is permitted to advise students again, but his research lab remains shut down.
0:05:34 We’ll hear more about his suspension later in today’s conversation, but let’s start
0:05:36 with Friar’s origin story.
0:05:41 When I wrote that Times magazine piece years ago, he and I spent time together in New York
0:05:46 and Boston, and we visited his grandmother and father in Central Florida.
0:05:52 We went to the small city outside Dallas, where Friar spent his unproductive teens,
0:05:57 and we went to Oklahoma to visit his mother from whom he had long been estranged.
0:06:03 When we spoke recently, I asked Friar to summarize his unlikely path to becoming an Ivy League
0:06:05 economics professor.
0:06:09 I was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, oddly enough, and this will tell a lot of the story,
0:06:15 brought home from the hospital with my grandmother and lived the first few years of life in Florida.
0:06:19 My mother kind of disappeared out of my life very, very early.
0:06:20 My father was still there.
0:06:25 He was kind of a copy salesman, and my uncles were there.
0:06:30 I grew up in this really ironic, strange, I don’t know quite what to do about it, environment
0:06:36 in which my grandmother was a teacher, and my great aunt, my grandmother’s mother’s sister,
0:06:38 was also a teacher.
0:06:44 The other sister ran one of the largest distributors of crack cocaine in Central Florida.
0:06:47 High achievers in different realms, we’ll call it.
0:06:53 She was the CEO of a street pharmaceutical company, and yet we would chat with each other,
0:06:57 and there was no judgment and love of each other, and so I grew up in this strange world
0:07:02 where my grandmother viewed it as hard work and get ahead, though she thought discrimination
0:07:04 was omnipresent in the world.
0:07:08 And my great aunt, who was, for lack of better words, an entrepreneur, who did lots of illegal
0:07:13 stuff to get ahead, and I spent, I’d say, four months out of the year, even when my father
0:07:15 and I moved to Texas.
0:07:18 Early on, my father and I had a reasonable relationship.
0:07:23 It deteriorated over the years, and by the time I was a teenager, I was just angry, man.
0:07:25 I was really angry at the world.
0:07:30 Pretty good at sports, but just an angry kid, and I wasn’t trying hard at school at all.
0:07:34 They used to pass out books in school, and I’d say, “You just keep them, I’ll lose them.”
0:07:38 My father did a liquor homework, managed to eke out of high school with a GPA of, I don’t
0:07:43 know, two point something, but had really high test scores, oddly.
0:07:47 And got involved in a bunch of little petty crimes when I was 15, like was driving a car
0:07:52 without a license, stealing stuff out of stores, forged my birth certificate so I could work
0:07:53 in McDonald’s.
0:07:57 My father eventually lost his house, and he ended up going to prison and all that kind
0:07:58 of stuff.
0:08:03 I didn’t know my mother, and I just felt really, really angry and alone in the world.
0:08:11 I made my way to a college, not a great one, but a good enough one, and it’s there that
0:08:13 I took principles of microeconomics course.
0:08:17 It was 8 a.m. He had office hours at 7 a.m.
0:08:20 I know now that was a joke, but back then, I thought it was pretty convenient because
0:08:22 I’m an early morning guy.
0:08:27 And I was there before every class at 7 a.m., and we started arguing about welfare and economic
0:08:32 policy and how to use food stamps, what the restrictions should be, and really fell in
0:08:33 love with it.
0:08:40 But let me just say, I have been on an absolute quest for the last 25 years to catch up because
0:08:45 I spent the first 20 goofing off and being angry at the world.
0:08:49 I was just meeting with a guy who’s a really accomplished businessman, and he came from
0:08:52 the golf course, and he says, “Well, why do you work so hard?
0:08:53 What are you doing?
0:08:54 It’s time to enjoy life.”
0:08:58 I said to him, “I gave you a 20-year head start, man, and a better family,” and all
0:08:59 that stuff.
0:09:01 So every time you play golf, I catch up a little bit.
0:09:03 Every time you take the night off, I catch up, right?
0:09:06 And that’s been my attitude, and you know that for years.
0:09:11 I remember when I was spending time with you, you were a relatively young professor at Harvard,
0:09:14 and there was that car in the parking lot.
0:09:20 This car was outside early every morning, late at night, and you were like, “Damn.
0:09:24 He is out working me,” and you were pissed off, and then you later found out they were
0:09:26 on vacation, just parked there.
0:09:28 It was like a silver one, right?
0:09:31 I remember that, and I was worried about that, but that’s my attitude.
0:09:37 I’m in a big hurry to catch up, and my upbringing, it really has formed my view of how to do
0:09:38 this.
0:09:42 Number one, data first, obviously, but this is why I don’t have any politics in this
0:09:49 stuff because I have seen that, yes, there are things that need to be changed in black
0:09:56 communities, but I also see the effects of discrimination, whether perceived or real,
0:09:57 on these communities.
0:10:00 The only thing I care about is making them better.
0:10:01 That’s it.
0:10:05 I really don’t care otherwise.
0:10:11 Friar is probably best known for a 2016 research paper called An Empirical Analysis of Racial
0:10:14 Differences in Police Use of Force.
0:10:20 It incorporated a variety of data sets, including a federal survey on interactions with police
0:10:26 and the data on police shootings from 10 police departments around the country, including Houston,
0:10:29 Jacksonville, and Los Angeles County.
0:10:30 What did he find?
0:10:36 On average, in any given stop, black people are 50% more likely to have force used on
0:10:37 them than white people.
0:10:38 Okay.
0:10:41 That’s on average not controlling for anything.
0:10:42 That’s exactly it.
0:10:43 That’s just in the raw data.
0:10:49 Now, if we control for lots of other things where they are in terms of the city, we had
0:10:54 millions in data points, so we could really be very strict on the controls.
0:11:00 If we do that, then the difference decreases substantially, but this number I find the
0:11:05 most compelling in this entire research is that we looked at the cases in which the police
0:11:12 officers themselves said the civilian was perfectly compliant, didn’t have contraband,
0:11:14 was not arrested.
0:11:19 Even in those instances, blacks were roughly 20% more likely to have force used on them
0:11:20 than whites.
0:11:25 So the conclusion that one would almost be forced to draw from that is that police are
0:11:27 on average racist against blacks?
0:11:30 No, I’m not going to say racist, but there’s discrimination going on.
0:11:31 Okay.
0:11:32 Noted.
0:11:36 So that’s the part of your research about what’s called the non-lethal use of force,
0:11:42 and then there’s lethal use of force, which essentially means a police shooting, correct?
0:11:43 Yes.
0:11:44 Yes.
0:11:45 Whether it’s fatal or not?
0:11:46 Exactly.
0:11:47 So what’d you find there?
0:11:50 What we found there was no racial differences whatsoever in lethal uses of force.
0:11:52 Roland, that can’t be right.
0:11:55 Roland, my friend.
0:11:56 That cannot be right.
0:11:58 I read the newspapers, Roland.
0:12:00 Yeah, I know.
0:12:02 Well, it surprised me as well.
0:12:06 We had 10, 15 cities by the time we finished that research.
0:12:11 In no city was it true because the thing is, if you read the Washington Post or the Guardian,
0:12:19 they’ll say things like the fraction of black people who were unarmed and were shot at by
0:12:23 police is higher than the fraction of white people who were unarmed and shot at by the
0:12:24 police.
0:12:28 But that’s just not the right way to do those statistics.
0:12:29 Because why?
0:12:30 Because they’re not accounting.
0:12:35 That’s comparing apples with cars, and I’d like to compare apples with apples.
0:12:36 I don’t understand.
0:12:37 Why is that not a relevant variable?
0:12:40 It’s not that it’s not a relevant variable, it’s incomplete.
0:12:44 There are a lot more things about a police interaction than whether or not the person
0:12:46 eventually has a weapon.
0:12:53 Before you got into this big data analysis, as I understand it, you also felt the need
0:12:58 or at least the intellectual curiosity to understand the day-to-day life of a police
0:12:59 officer a little bit better.
0:13:05 Let me back up slightly before that even, which is, we all saw what was going on in
0:13:11 these videos, and the Walter Scott video was the one that got me off the couch, so to speak.
0:13:12 I just couldn’t take it.
0:13:13 I was furious.
0:13:17 He was the guy that was running away after a traffic stop, is that right?
0:13:19 Yeah, running is generous.
0:13:24 It was shuffling across an abandoned field, and somehow because I think it was in South
0:13:29 Carolina, the picture of it reminded me of Daytona Beach, and there was something about
0:13:34 that that said to me, “There but for the grace of God, go I,” and it just woke me up.
0:13:41 I was upset, and I went to my colleagues in the economics department, and I was all fired
0:13:45 up about this in the hallways, and they weren’t as fired up as I was, but I was pretty fired
0:13:47 up about it.
0:13:51 One of them, Andre Schleifer, who is a dear friend of mine, he said to me, “I don’t know
0:13:52 really.
0:13:54 Do you even know what police do?”
0:13:55 It was like a gut punch, man.
0:13:56 I didn’t know.
0:13:57 The truth is, I was biased.
0:13:58 I don’t like police.
0:13:59 I don’t like them now.
0:14:02 I was driving down the highway yesterday.
0:14:03 Police put his lights on.
0:14:05 I started remembering stuff I did in seventh grade.
0:14:06 I mean, it was scary.
0:14:09 Luckily, it wasn’t for me, but anyway.
0:14:15 So I decided, maybe I should go embed myself in police departments, and so I did just that.
0:14:21 I went to Camden and did a couple double shifts in Camden, riding around, went to Houston
0:14:26 and did that, and even did some simulation and de-escalation training with another police
0:14:27 department.
0:14:32 The truth is, I didn’t like who I became riding around in a police car after three to four
0:14:33 hours.
0:14:39 If you ride around looking for bad guys, lo and behold, you see bad guys.
0:14:41 I was the worst police officer you can imagine.
0:14:47 They kept saying, “Rolling, it’s not illegal to dribble a basketball,” I’m not sure.
0:14:52 What was interesting though, in all seriousness, was in Camden, I met police officers who walked
0:14:53 a beat.
0:15:00 What happens there is that when you see someone who might look dangerous or at least uncertain
0:15:05 or random to me, because they know the person, he’s like that on Thursdays.
0:15:10 It was really interesting for me to see them say that, because most police officers see
0:15:11 you at your worst.
0:15:15 But if you’re hanging out in the communities, it gives you a denominator for which to understand
0:15:17 the other behavior.
0:15:22 So were these ride-alongs before you actually started analyzing the police data?
0:15:24 Didn’t have any data yet.
0:15:27 Part of the ride-alongs were to try to understand what data existed, to really understand from
0:15:31 the police the types of data they collected, the types of data they wanted to collect,
0:15:35 and also to get their sense of what was going on in these interactions.
0:15:37 What were we missing in the videos?
0:15:38 We had only seen 12.
0:15:43 We had all made these huge conclusions because we had seen 12 horrific videos.
0:15:45 But police stops happened thousands of times a day.
0:15:51 Look, 80% of the police shootings in our data came from a 911 call, not someone pulling
0:15:57 someone over and escalating, which is how we typically see it on TV, but a 911 call where
0:16:01 the police show up, the person has a weapon, there are multiple witnesses and a shooting
0:16:02 happens.
0:16:06 And if that’s 80% of the data, it’s not that surprising that there are no racial differences,
0:16:07 right?
0:16:11 Whenever we talked about lethal use force, they would become very earnest and say things
0:16:16 like discharging your weapon is a life-changing event.
0:16:22 I heard that in city after city, discharging your weapon, sir, is a life-changing event.
0:16:28 Not one police officer told me roughing up a black kid in an alley is a life-changing
0:16:29 event.
0:16:32 So these are categorically different in their frame?
0:16:33 Categorically different.
0:16:38 And the incentives or disincentives as it were are not the same.
0:16:42 Because once you discharge your weapon, then what happens?
0:16:46 There’s a real investigation that happens, independent of if many people saw it and they
0:16:48 think it was fully justified.
0:16:54 But we don’t put the same scrutiny on how we treat young black men civilians, right?
0:16:58 So how did these ride-alongs change the shape of your understanding of this job?
0:17:02 It gave me a better sense of how complicated the job is, man.
0:17:04 It’s really complicated, okay?
0:17:07 And you realize that the job is really difficult.
0:17:08 Okay.
0:17:11 And let’s go back then to your findings on lethal use of force.
0:17:15 On lethal use of force, we found no racial differences in those.
0:17:18 And it caused, you know, some alarm among people.
0:17:19 What do you mean by alarm?
0:17:22 Was there alarm even before you published the research?
0:17:23 Oh, man.
0:17:27 I mean, I had colleagues pull me to the side and say, “You’re crazy.
0:17:28 Don’t publish this.
0:17:30 You’re going to ruin your career.”
0:17:31 Because why?
0:17:32 I don’t know.
0:17:33 They didn’t give a full example.
0:17:38 Ruin your career because here you are a black economist who’s saying what exactly?
0:17:40 You know, that’s the difference between you and I, Steve.
0:17:41 When someone said, “Man, that’s going to ruin your career.”
0:17:46 I don’t go, “Exactly how, bud?”
0:17:50 But they came to me and said, “Look, after a seminar, here’s what you do.
0:17:53 You take the lower level uses of force, publish that.
0:17:54 Don’t publish the other.”
0:17:58 And I said to this person, “If the results were that there were racial differences in
0:18:02 lethal use of force that looked like discrimination, do you think I should publish them then?”
0:18:05 And they said, “Yeah, because then it would fit with the first part.”
0:18:08 And I said, “Well then, you just insured I’m going to publish it all because I’m not
0:18:11 going to hide a result because you don’t like it.”
0:18:16 I have heard you refer to other researchers who analyze police bias and police behavior
0:18:18 as cowards.
0:18:23 Is this what you’re talking about, that scholars are withholding either evidence or emphasis
0:18:26 at least on the lack of racial bias in police shootings?
0:18:28 Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.
0:18:33 Because you can look at the papers and people have similar findings, but it’s an appendix
0:18:35 table 157.
0:18:36 And they bury it.
0:18:38 And here’s the difference, man.
0:18:43 You’re one of the rare people who have actually been to the communities where I grew up.
0:18:46 And they haven’t changed much since I was a kid.
0:18:50 My life’s work is about making those communities better.
0:18:53 And I refuse to lie to them, right?
0:18:59 I just refuse because the folks in those communities, they know when they’re being lied to.
0:19:04 And we think we’re making all this progress because we now capitalize the letter B in black.
0:19:07 No one in that neighborhood gives a crap about that.
0:19:08 They don’t.
0:19:13 These are real issues, and I’m not going to bury the truth that can actually help folks
0:19:16 just because people are going to be upset about it, right?
0:19:21 Like the thing about lower level uses of force is that actually, for me, provides some optimism
0:19:27 because that’s a place that with the police, we can dig in and try to actually make real
0:19:29 progress together.
0:19:34 If folks would just stay true to the data instead of trying to make it be what they want
0:19:37 it to be, we’d all be in a better place.
0:19:42 I’ve heard you use the word dignity before in discussing this or the absence of dignity.
0:19:44 Can you talk about how that works?
0:19:50 Really important when I wrote this, someone I respect shot me a text and said, “I don’t
0:19:55 see this as a big problem because this is about black lives matter and not about being
0:19:57 roughed up.”
0:20:03 And that really upset me because as a person who’s been roughed up by police, it is a very
0:20:05 stressful, stressful interaction.
0:20:07 It is not a good interaction I have.
0:20:11 So I wrote back to him, “Black dignity matters as well.”
0:20:15 If you talk to kids in the communities that I care about, when you ask them about their
0:20:19 prospects and how fair the world is and how much effort matters, things like that, one
0:20:22 of the things they will mention is police.
0:20:28 How can it be that effort matters so much and there’s this true meritocracy if I can’t
0:20:30 get a home safe for my own police?
0:20:33 And so I think it erodes trust in the American dream.
0:20:36 It erodes trust in American institutions.
0:20:41 And it’s something that we could spend some good time really working on, right?
0:20:47 Because there’s a place where we’re not hardly at all collecting data to hold police accountable.
0:20:48 We don’t have an incentive scheme.
0:20:54 It feels like that is ripe for reform and if it were me, that’s where I would start.
0:21:00 Seven days after that paper came out, I had a five-hour meeting with Obama and activists
0:21:01 and other folks.
0:21:03 Al Sharpton was there.
0:21:06 And Al Sharpton and I probably don’t agree on hardly anything, but there’s one thing
0:21:07 we agreed on.
0:21:13 He said, “Look, if we weren’t being harassed daily, then we’d be willing to listen on
0:21:15 some of these shootings that weren’t clear.”
0:21:17 That’s a profound point.
0:21:22 If we could take away the discrimination that we know exists, then there’d be room for
0:21:24 common ground on these other things.
0:21:26 So Roland, what happened next?
0:21:31 Did the president or the Justice Department issue a new manual on best policing practices
0:21:35 as determined by Roland Fryer, for instance?
0:21:37 Not even close.
0:21:38 Not even close.
0:21:42 But we did have some follow-up meetings with other senior White House officials.
0:21:49 And the hope was to try to get the head of the FBI at that time, Comey, involved because
0:21:53 they serve for much longer, typically, than administrations.
0:21:57 And to start doing these things where we can potentially look at tying federal resources
0:22:00 to police, collecting the right data, et cetera.
0:22:01 And just none of it happened.
0:22:03 I was failed.
0:22:04 Because why?
0:22:05 Because that’s just how it works in government.
0:22:06 Is that the easiest answer?
0:22:07 I don’t know.
0:22:08 Maybe I suck.
0:22:09 I don’t know.
0:22:15 I really don’t know, but it was extraordinarily frustrating to me because this is something
0:22:20 that matters so much and it felt like there was a wedge to really make progress.
0:22:24 After the break, Roland Fryer and the push for corporate diversity.
0:22:28 I said, why aren’t they doing what we know works?
0:22:29 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:22:31 This is Freakin’omics Radio.
0:22:41 We’ll be right back.
0:22:46 In 2019, the economist Roland Fryer started a firm called EO Ventures.
0:22:48 The EO stands for Equal Opportunity.
0:22:53 Then he got a two-year suspension from Harvard and had time on his hands.
0:22:57 He worked 100 hours a week to get EO Ventures off the ground.
0:23:03 We really want to invest in companies that move the levers that we know are important
0:23:06 for increasing economic mobility.
0:23:11 Most companies in their portfolio were founded by women and people of color, people who traditionally
0:23:14 don’t have the best access to venture capital.
0:23:17 I mean, as you know, Stephen, I did fight the good fight.
0:23:21 I wrote a bunch of papers for academic journals, like seven people read them.
0:23:22 You’re one of them.
0:23:23 Thank you.
0:23:28 I spent pretty good time with folks in Washington and other state governments, but I just had
0:23:29 no impact whatsoever.
0:23:30 I didn’t get anything done.
0:23:34 At some point, I had to look myself in the mirror and go, would Milton Friedman go around
0:23:37 all these foundations and beg them to do the right thing?
0:23:38 No.
0:23:42 We would try to use the market forces to increase opportunities.
0:23:44 When I was a kid, people told me capitalism was the problem.
0:23:47 What I’m trying to say here is it’s going to be part of the answer.
0:23:53 One of your portfolio companies I see is called Intus Care, which is described as a data-driven
0:23:54 elder care company.
0:23:59 Can you tell me about that firm and how that fits into this notion of investing in a business
0:24:01 that increases opportunity?
0:24:02 Yeah.
0:24:07 This is an interesting one because two of the co-founders are two young black men from
0:24:09 Brown University.
0:24:14 They’re former athletes, they marched into my office, these in-shape young black gentlemen
0:24:21 with this passionate plea for elder care, and it was like, what the heck is going on?
0:24:27 It’s an interesting field because they are using data in really sophisticated and interesting
0:24:32 ways to essentially, not to sound like buzzwords, but to risk group people.
0:24:36 What they’re saying is to actually increase the quality of care.
0:24:39 Maybe I should check on Steven three times a day because he’s in a higher risk group
0:24:40 and other people one time a day.
0:24:44 That would have been great when trying to care for my grandmother at the final stages
0:24:48 of her life because I never could tell from Boston whether or not she was getting the
0:24:52 right care, whether or not someone was stopping by to check on her.
0:24:57 There are big differences by population in terms of how that care goes based on how much
0:24:58 income you have.
0:25:03 There’s another company that I guess is a portfolio company in your venture capital
0:25:05 firm, but you are also involved in this company.
0:25:10 This is called Sigma squared, which is described as science-driven diversity.
0:25:13 Can you just give me the top line description on that?
0:25:22 Sigma squared really is trying to help companies, universities, not for profits, increase diversity,
0:25:27 but do it in a way that frankly makes sense that is data first.
0:25:30 That isn’t just hand waving, let’s say.
0:25:35 The hand waving is, that’s why I started it because after George Floyd, I saw what a lot
0:25:39 of corporations did in terms of the, I would call it value signaling, and it made me sick
0:25:41 my stomach, man.
0:25:46 On the other hand, I went to a friend of mine and I said, “Why aren’t they doing what we
0:25:47 know works in this area?
0:25:49 Theorem’s proven.
0:25:50 There are simulations that have been run.
0:25:52 Why aren’t they using that?”
0:25:57 They rolled their eyes at me and said, “Because most CEOs and people in HR are not reading
0:25:59 papers and economics from the 1990s.”
0:26:00 I said, “Oh.”
0:26:04 We wanted to make it easy for them, so we essentially created software that does the
0:26:06 analytics for them.
0:26:11 It seems as though just about every kind of institution these days, corporations and
0:26:17 government departments and universities and so on, have embarked on diversity, equity,
0:26:20 and inclusion, or DEI programs.
0:26:25 This was certainly boosted by the outrage around the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
0:26:32 McKinsey Analysis found that Fortune 1000 companies committed to $66 billion in 2020
0:26:35 to spending on racial equity initiatives.
0:26:37 How well do you think that money’s being spent?
0:26:42 I don’t know, but I would say the jury’s still out, and that’s being very gracious.
0:26:45 You recently published a piece, Roland, in Fortune magazine.
0:26:51 It was headlined, “It’s time for data-first diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
0:26:53 Here’s one sentence I found particularly interesting.
0:26:59 The average impact, you write, of corporate DEI training is zero, and some evidence suggests
0:27:04 that the impact can become negative if the training is mandated.
0:27:11 Uh-oh, that doesn’t sound like a very good return on $66 billion or whatever these firms
0:27:12 are spending.
0:27:16 Walk me through that, and then I want to know when it’s failing, why it’s failing, and what
0:27:17 you want to do differently.
0:27:21 Yeah, this is not my research, but there have been lots of others who worked on this.
0:27:27 Professor Princeton Betsy Pollock has a recent paper, and she reports that the impact of those
0:27:28 trainings is zero.
0:27:34 Frank Dobbin at Harvard and Sociology Department has also written things that show that not
0:27:39 only is the impact zero, but he has shown data from companies that when it was mandated,
0:27:45 the actual share, the percentage, of minority managers goes down.
0:27:50 So I’m looking at something that I think is from the Dobbin research done with Alexandra
0:27:54 Kalev in the Harvard Business Review.
0:27:59 One of the reasons they write that it doesn’t work when it’s mandated, and I just found
0:28:07 this surprising, but in retrospect maybe not, was that when it’s mandated, managers don’t
0:28:11 like it because they, quote, “resist strong arming.”
0:28:14 Can you just talk about how it actually works, how it plays out?
0:28:16 It varies a lot, company by company.
0:28:22 Some will put folks through mandatory trainings, some people will just add it as a resource
0:28:24 for those who want to use it.
0:28:32 Others will do things like mask information on resumes of applicants because they think
0:28:35 that is the right thing to do.
0:28:39 All of these things, even when they have really, really great intentions, scare the heck out
0:28:40 of me.
0:28:41 Because why?
0:28:45 Because they are the equivalent of giving antibiotics no matter what happens when someone
0:28:46 comes into the doctor’s office, right?
0:28:50 So you come in with a broken leg, antibiotics, you come in, you got an earache, antibiotic,
0:28:55 and what happens inevitably is that, let’s suppose that antibiotics works in 10% of the
0:29:00 cases, then those 10% go, “I told you antibiotics worked, maybe I need a different dosage.
0:29:03 I can’t quite get this broken ankle to feel better.”
0:29:08 And so what we really need to do, in my opinion, and this should be controversial, I do this
0:29:13 in every other research project I’m in and corporations do it in every other aspect of
0:29:16 their business, is to start with the data.
0:29:18 Where do we actually have issues?
0:29:24 And I mean, deeper than, “We don’t have enough black people in the engineering department.
0:29:25 We know you don’t, okay?
0:29:26 We don’t have to look.”
0:29:27 Right?
0:29:28 Like most companies, that’s true.
0:29:34 And so the question becomes, “Can I get a full picture of what’s going on in my company?”
0:29:38 And what type of bias is producing those disparities?
0:29:41 Social scientists tend to group disparities in different parts.
0:29:47 Maybe it’s good old fashioned bigotry, but bucket number two could be information.
0:29:52 Maybe you don’t have perfect information when you hire or promote or assign work.
0:29:56 And in those cases, maybe you rely on your stereotypes accidentally or on purpose.
0:30:01 The third one is what I loosely call structural bias.
0:30:08 And that is you’re doing something that on its surface seems absolutely fine, but unknowingly,
0:30:11 it’s got a disparate impact on one group or the other.
0:30:17 I was talking to a company a couple of months ago and they had some supply issues.
0:30:20 They couldn’t get enough people to apply to their internships.
0:30:21 Okay?
0:30:22 And I said, “Well, how do you find people for your internships?”
0:30:24 They said, “Oh, Roland, it’s really random.”
0:30:26 I said, “What do you mean random?”
0:30:30 “Well, we all just, you know, look at our alma maters and we kind of select any random
0:30:32 kid from our alma mater who wants to work here.”
0:30:34 And I said, “Well, where’d you go to school?”
0:30:36 He said, “Yeshiva University.”
0:30:40 And that’s fantastic, but he might not get the diversity.
0:30:44 That is not a historically black school, as far as I understand, correct?
0:30:45 Not historically.
0:30:46 And again, it’s unwittingly.
0:30:52 In my experience, the vast majority of the disparities that we see in companies are being
0:30:54 produced by buckets two and three.
0:30:59 But you need to know that because imagine it is an information problem, okay?
0:31:03 The last thing you want to do is hide information on the resume.
0:31:07 And so that’s my antibiotics versus ankle pain issue, which is you have to take the
0:31:11 data, diagnose, and then figure out solutions that actually work.
0:31:12 We’re doing it all wrong.
0:31:18 So this magic software viewers sounds to me from the outside a little bit like science
0:31:24 fiction in that you have some kind of magic X-ray wand that you can wave across a firm
0:31:27 and you can glean what is in people’s minds and hearts.
0:31:31 But I assume this is real science.
0:31:34 Persuade me that it’s real and tell me how it actually works.
0:31:36 It is not at all science fiction.
0:31:40 It’s going to be embarrassingly simple when I tell you how it works.
0:31:46 What happens is we integrate into their HR data where they may have data from their applicant
0:31:48 tracking systems, et cetera.
0:31:55 The first thing we try to do is understand what the real disparities truly are because
0:32:00 average disparities are very different than once you actually account for apples and apples,
0:32:01 right?
0:32:03 Let me give you an example from a case study.
0:32:10 So a hospital network reached out to us and said we have a 33% difference in wages.
0:32:13 So women earn 33% less in our hospital.
0:32:15 We’ve done all the training we can do implicit bias.
0:32:17 We’ve done everything.
0:32:18 And so what can we do?
0:32:25 We got their data and that 33% was true on average, but it’s a hospital network.
0:32:30 You can’t compare doctors’ salaries with nurses’ salaries and things like that.
0:32:34 And so once you’re actually accounted for some basic demographics to compare apples
0:32:38 with apples, that 33% went down to 8.9%.
0:32:44 Now that wouldn’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with the research of your Harvard colleague
0:32:51 Claudia Golden, who’s been writing about the gender pay gap and how we get it wrong.
0:32:55 But still 8. something percent is not zero.
0:32:57 So what did you want to do next?
0:32:58 Oh, and that’s important.
0:33:00 It’s not zero, but it’s not 33%.
0:33:04 So you’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, that this emboldened the COO.
0:33:07 The COO was a woman who said 8.9%.
0:33:09 I can do something with 33.
0:33:11 I don’t know what to do.
0:33:14 That’s step one, understanding what the true disparities are.
0:33:21 And for this particular network of hospitals, once you accounted for overtime hours, that’s
0:33:23 what explained the 8.9%.
0:33:28 And so we had to figure out why is it that women weren’t working as many hours?
0:33:33 Was it because they didn’t demand as many hours, or was there a structural barrier to
0:33:35 them getting the hours they wanted?
0:33:37 Like family care, perhaps.
0:33:38 There you go.
0:33:43 And so what happened is very simple, they had shifts from 7 to 7.
0:33:46 That’s just the way they’ve always done it, 7 to 7.
0:33:50 And when they changed the shifts to 10 to 10, then this disparity went away.
0:33:51 Walk me through that.
0:33:54 7 to 7, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. that is?
0:33:58 Yeah, that was the shift for the nurses, for the hospital network.
0:34:02 And the issue for this particular network of hospitals, not all, obviously, but this
0:34:08 particular one, that many of the female employers who were working those shifts told the administration,
0:34:11 it’s really hard to find childcare in the morning.
0:34:14 But if I can get my kids to school and come to work, it’s easier to find in the evenings.
0:34:18 And so therefore, if you shift the schedule back, we can work as many hours because we
0:34:19 want to work hours.
0:34:20 They were demanding more.
0:34:27 The C-suite of this hospital network had put themselves in pretzels trying to understand
0:34:30 why these big 33% disparities were going on.
0:34:33 Turns out it was actually 8.9%.
0:34:37 Turns out if you made a scheduling change, even that was dramatically reduced.
0:34:43 And so by using data in a matter of a few weeks, it completely transformed how they thought
0:34:46 about the disparities in their organization.
0:34:48 That example is incredibly compelling.
0:34:54 It also strikes me as very different from a lot of what we read about as DEI awareness
0:34:56 and training and hiring.
0:35:01 Because the example you gave was so empirical, it was so concrete, it was so actionable and
0:35:02 so on.
0:35:04 I hate to be cynical about it.
0:35:10 And I’m sure that the cases that become public that we read about are just a small fraction
0:35:11 of them.
0:35:13 But they make a really big impression.
0:35:17 I remember there was a story about Wells Fargo, which had done all kinds of illegal junk
0:35:19 over the previous several years.
0:35:27 But in 2020, they pledged to increase diversity and they took up this policy that all hires
0:35:29 over a certain salary level.
0:35:34 I think it was $100,000 would include at least one interview with a candidate who was female
0:35:36 or a person of color.
0:35:40 It was kind of the corporate version of what’s called the Rooney Rule in the NFL.
0:35:44 It was later revealed, and this was just a couple of years ago, that Wells Fargo had
0:35:51 conducted fake interviews with women and minorities after the job had already been promised to
0:35:54 someone else, which I’m assuming is often a white man.
0:35:59 So when you read that kind of story, you say, “Oh gosh, $66 billion worth of hand-waving
0:36:00 and window dressing.
0:36:05 I’m sure it’s not that bad, but can you talk to me about how bad it actually is?”
0:36:07 Well, I read the same story as you do.
0:36:10 I just approach it from a different way.
0:36:16 Some training and those programs, they can work, but when targeted to the problem, this
0:36:18 is not controversial.
0:36:19 This is not a magic wand.
0:36:25 This is, let’s start with the data, and if the data lead us to a particular empirical
0:36:30 issue that we think the Rooney Rule can solve, let’s do it.
0:36:34 Let’s actually do it, and it’s not fake do it, but let’s actually do it.
0:36:40 If the data lead us to a place where we think training is really important, so be it.
0:36:43 But the issue, I believe, is people are desperate to make a difference.
0:36:47 They are desperate to show that they are an ally.
0:36:51 They are desperate to show that they are on the right side of history here.
0:36:57 So they’re in a big scramble to just do something, and I think that is dangerous because over
0:37:04 and over again, we have examples that even if they’re earnest attempts, guessing hurts
0:37:07 the people a lot of times that we’re trying to help.
0:37:10 And DEI were scared to make mistakes.
0:37:14 And so I want to introduce, lo and behold, I’m an economist, a little bit of experimentation,
0:37:19 a little bit of trying things, data-driven to try to really make progress.
0:37:24 This approach is about getting 2% better every day, not about checking a box so that you
0:37:28 can appear on the nightly news and say, “We did this great thing and move on.”
0:37:34 So let me ask you this, Roland, you’ve said in the past that your research on police bias
0:37:41 hasn’t changed policing, and that your research in education hasn’t really changed education.
0:37:46 I’m guessing your work on DEI programs probably isn’t going to change DEI also?
0:37:51 It’s doing amazing, third time’s a charm.
0:37:57 No, the truth is, I don’t know what impact it has had, but it’s not enough for me because
0:38:00 I’m committed to what we’re doing, but I don’t want a lot of myself either about the
0:38:02 impact we’re making.
0:38:09 The reason that we started EO Ventures was because founders have real power.
0:38:12 The schools in my grandmother’s neighborhood in Florida are all still bad, but everybody’s
0:38:14 got an iPhone.
0:38:18 These founders, these technology companies have really changed the way, obviously, changed
0:38:20 the way we live and work.
0:38:26 Can we use that same power to make real changes in the neighborhoods that I’ve been concentrating
0:38:29 on my whole career and in companies and things like that?
0:38:30 I really believe that’s true.
0:38:37 And so I am 100% behind the strategy of using market forces to close racial gaps.
0:38:38 Hey, that’s pretty good.
0:38:43 I got to put that on a t-shirt.
0:38:49 Coming up, after the break, more Roland Friarisms that ought to go on a t-shirt.
0:38:50 Shalom, brother.
0:38:55 And what happened when the New York City schools made Friar their chief equity officer?
0:38:57 Well, kids have a lot of cell phones in schools.
0:38:59 Do I get credit for that?
0:39:00 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:39:01 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:39:11 We’ll be right back.
0:39:12 A quick reintroduction.
0:39:15 This is who we are speaking with today.
0:39:20 I’m Roland Friar and I am a professor of economics at Harvard University and the managing partner
0:39:21 at EO Ventures.
0:39:27 And then there’s another project you’re involved in called the Reconstruction Education Project,
0:39:31 which offers what one person calls an unapologetically black education.
0:39:34 And this is not instead of school, right?
0:39:36 It’s online classes on top of school.
0:39:38 Yeah, this is supplemental.
0:39:41 But you know, it’s Hebrew school for black kids, right?
0:39:42 It is.
0:39:43 Shalom, brother.
0:39:47 Shalom to you too.
0:39:51 My co-founder and CEO on that is Kaya Henderson, who is like an American hero, right?
0:39:56 She did amazing work in DC public schools and with other organizations.
0:40:02 And Kaya’s got a real vision that black communities should support and nurture and take over how
0:40:06 we tell history and how we get a chance to write our own story.
0:40:12 She wants kids to see themselves differently in life and in school, again, very similar
0:40:16 to what lots of other groups do, whether it’s a Saturday school for folks who are Korean
0:40:19 or Hebrew school, that’s what Reconstruction is.
0:40:21 And they’re doing really, really quite well.
0:40:26 You know, what’s interesting is I hear you just describe Kaya and that project.
0:40:32 It seems that the public discourse about race treats blackness as a problem.
0:40:38 And it seems that you not only never thought like that, but think quite the opposite.
0:40:42 And that feels manifest in something like this Reconstruction project.
0:40:44 Can you talk about that for a moment?
0:40:45 And maybe I’m wrong.
0:40:46 Tell me if I’m wrong, Roland.
0:40:47 No, man.
0:40:49 That’s a great point, Stephen.
0:40:50 You are exactly right.
0:40:55 And you met years ago, my grandmother, who was really close to me.
0:40:59 And we had our issues, but love, love, love that woman.
0:41:05 And one of the things that she did when I was a kid was anytime we saw a white person mess
0:41:10 up anything, it could be accidentally tripping over a curb.
0:41:12 It could be that they weren’t quite dancing on beat.
0:41:16 It could be that they gave the wrong change at the grocery store.
0:41:21 She would look at me, right in the eyes, and then she would roll hers and she would say,
0:41:24 “Hmm, that’s that superior race.”
0:41:28 And she just made me always feel like I was so lucky to be black.
0:41:33 And so I’ve never, ever, for one second, thought of blackness as a problem.
0:41:34 And you’re right.
0:41:39 Many people are seeing that, or at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly, saying that in public
0:41:45 discourse, we as a community can take over what we teach our kids, what we signal to
0:41:51 them, and reconstruction is a celebration of black culture.
0:41:53 It’s a celebration of black love.
0:41:55 It’s a celebration of black excellence.
0:42:01 So Roland, you are not what I think of at least as a behavioral economist, but you certainly
0:42:08 know enough about behavioral ideas like anchoring and framing to understand how strong those
0:42:13 concepts are for many people and how they can set expectations.
0:42:19 It’s huge because it implicitly puts a cap on what kids think they can achieve, right?
0:42:28 Like I really thought I could be anything, and I didn’t understand that we grew up without
0:42:32 money until I got to Harvard and someone says, “Wow, you grew up without money.”
0:42:33 I didn’t understand.
0:42:35 We didn’t summer in places.
0:42:38 And so I think it’s really important.
0:42:41 You mentioned framing and anchoring.
0:42:45 Let’s add another one to that, which economists don’t know a whole lot about, which is identity,
0:42:46 right?
0:42:50 Two of my favorite economists, George Akerlof and Rachel Cranton, somewhere around 2000,
0:42:54 wrote a paper on the economics of identity, and they start this paper with this beautiful
0:43:00 sentence that identity is one of the most important choices that an individual can make.
0:43:01 That’s what I think this is about.
0:43:02 Who am I?
0:43:03 Who are my people?
0:43:08 You know, when I was in school in Texas, it was like, well, there was slavery, and then
0:43:11 there was Jim Crow, and then there’s you, right?
0:43:17 Let’s take a test, whereas we didn’t learn about the rich history that all of us come
0:43:18 from.
0:43:26 And other cultures have institutions or organizations that help them understand their history and
0:43:33 their role in promoting their own culture and how they situate positively in that history.
0:43:35 And we don’t do a good job of that.
0:43:39 I’m really influenced by that question, Stephen, because I just returned a couple of weeks
0:43:45 ago from Israel, and I called Kaya from Israel, and I said, wow, right?
0:43:53 This is an example of some of the things we were trying to do in terms of a shared understanding
0:43:59 of our history, the ups and the downs, and building upon that history to make a generation
0:44:03 of super kids who, like me, felt like they could do anything.
0:44:10 Way back in 2008, you went on the Colbert Report, and you said that the achievement
0:44:14 gap in this country is our biggest civil rights concern.
0:44:18 That statement has some echoes, to me at least, of Du Bois saying the problem of the 20th
0:44:21 century is the problem of the color line.
0:44:22 Yes.
0:44:25 15 years later, how do you think about that statement of yours?
0:44:28 The achievement gap is the biggest civil rights concern.
0:44:29 You think that’s still the case?
0:44:30 Yeah, absolutely.
0:44:33 The issue is development, and that’s what I meant.
0:44:35 It’s development, period the end.
0:44:39 Yes, of course there’s discrimination in the world.
0:44:45 Of course there is, but if you just look at the data, the vast majority of the disparities
0:44:48 are driven by differences in development.
0:44:51 This is opera pro of everything we’ve been talking about.
0:44:54 Folks have now decided it’s not the achievement gap anymore because that’s offensive.
0:44:55 It’s the opportunity gap.
0:44:56 Give me a break.
0:44:57 You think that’s helping the people in the neighborhood?
0:44:58 Oh, thanks.
0:44:59 Appreciate that.
0:45:01 I can really go now.
0:45:06 But yes, that’s it.
0:45:12 If we can solve that problem, many of the other things that are social ills, there’s
0:45:16 no magic bullet here, but they will get a lot better.
0:45:21 When I wrote about defunding the police, I was like, why don’t we invest in kids and
0:45:28 they’ll have productive jobs and the police can defund themselves?
0:45:35 Years ago, you were something called the chief equity officer in the New York City schools.
0:45:37 Tell me how that went and what you learned from it.
0:45:40 I was fresh out of graduate school, wanting to make a difference.
0:45:45 I called up PS70 in the Bronx, which was off of Colgate Avenue in the South Bronx, close
0:45:48 to where my uncle used to live.
0:45:50 They wanted to do an incentive program.
0:45:52 I love the idea of an incentive program.
0:45:54 It fit everything I knew as a young economist.
0:45:59 They would take tests and they would literally email me the results and I’d order pizza.
0:46:00 That’s how it started.
0:46:03 Meaning the kids who did well got pizza or cash later, right?
0:46:04 Absolutely.
0:46:05 No cash pizza, man.
0:46:06 They got pizza.
0:46:07 Well, didn’t you try some cash later?
0:46:08 No.
0:46:09 I tried a whole lot of cash later.
0:46:10 Yes.
0:46:16 That was the start of it, one school, and then that blossomed to 14 and then to 140 in New
0:46:22 York City and half of the school district in Washington, D.C. and schools around the
0:46:23 country.
0:46:28 Yes, one of our first things as the chief equity officer in the New York City Department
0:46:34 of Education was to try innovative programs and rigorously evaluate them, okay?
0:46:36 Data first.
0:46:41 Really simple stuff here, like collect data, analyze it, be honest about the answer, don’t
0:46:45 bury the results when you don’t like them, and then have a real strategy about how to
0:46:48 execute on ideas that are promising.
0:46:50 That’s all we were trying to do in the New York City DOE.
0:46:53 That’s all I’ve tried to deal with the police and all I’m trying to do now with corporate
0:46:55 DEI.
0:46:58 In that case, we ran incentive programs, some of them worked, some of them didn’t.
0:47:02 But then the cool thing that we tried to do, Stephen, that we never quite got off the ground
0:47:08 was I wanted to rebrand education for kids and communities.
0:47:11 We had this campaign called School Is Money.
0:47:16 One of my ideas was, let’s get a rare shoe that LeBron James will wear, and the only
0:47:22 way to get that shoe is to make good grades in New York City public schools.
0:47:27 All the adults, they were like, “Oh, this is great, Roland, this is so smart,” right?
0:47:30 We focused group this with kids, and in 37 seconds, a kid looked at me and said, “Man,
0:47:36 I want those air nerds.”
0:47:37 That was done.
0:47:40 But we tried all sorts of things like that, so we tried an initiative called the Million
0:47:44 Program where we gave kids cell phones and then we texted them things throughout the
0:47:50 day to try to give them messages to change the culture around trying hard in school.
0:47:54 We would say stuff like, “Your average life expectancy is 72 years, that’s a long time
0:48:01 to be broke,” or give them the fraction of millionaires who also have a high school or
0:48:06 college degree, things like that, to try to get them to rebrand education.
0:48:11 This was all a part of that job of chief equity officer, and again, some things really
0:48:12 worked and some things didn’t.
0:48:13 But that’s the whole point.
0:48:17 It was kind of an R&D unit within the New York City Department of Education, and kudos
0:48:21 to Joe Klein and Mike Bloomberg for letting a 28-year-old kid come and try new things
0:48:24 that would be kind of unheard of now.
0:48:29 Are any of those programs, or ones like them, still in existence, either in New York or
0:48:30 elsewhere?
0:48:32 Well, kids have a lot of cell phones in schools.
0:48:33 Do I get credit for that?
0:48:34 Yes.
0:48:36 I think we’ll give you all the credit for that, yeah.
0:48:37 Thank you.
0:48:38 Thank you, Verizon.
0:48:42 The incentive programs going on across the country, they’re just not well-publicized
0:48:46 because they’re still controversial, oddly enough.
0:48:50 Controversial because of the idea that learning should be driven intrinsically, right, by
0:48:52 the love of learning versus rewards?
0:48:54 Yes, absolutely, yes.
0:48:55 What do you think of that idea?
0:48:56 I agree with that.
0:49:00 I also think that there should be peace in the Middle East, and I think global warming
0:49:01 should stop.
0:49:02 Okay.
0:49:03 Anything else?
0:49:07 But no, seriously, I took it the opposite direction, right?
0:49:09 They thought you’re going to destroy the love of learning.
0:49:11 I thought this is a way to cultivate it.
0:49:14 Do you think you were mostly right then or now?
0:49:15 I think both of us were wrong.
0:49:20 I think it had no effect because we measured, lo and behold, there’s that data again.
0:49:25 We measured using their measures, pre- and post-love of learning, and the coefficient
0:49:27 was positive, but it wasn’t statistically significant.
0:49:32 So we had no real effect or big effect on love of learning either way.
0:49:34 What we did have an effect on is test scores went up.
0:49:36 And is that not enough?
0:49:38 To me, that’s fantastic, right?
0:49:41 You can get test score gains, and you don’t change the love of learning.
0:49:43 That to me is a policy worth doing.
0:49:44 Never mind it.
0:49:46 It’s really inexpensive relative to other reforms, right?
0:49:51 This isn’t changing the number of kids in a classroom, which is really expensive, but
0:49:55 this is something where you can actually increase student achievement at a relatively low price.
0:50:02 Most education reformers, even the most idealistic, also care about test scores, and you are offering
0:50:07 here a route to a relatively inexpensive intervention that raises them.
0:50:13 I would think, therefore, that incentive programs in schools would be everywhere and widely
0:50:14 publicized.
0:50:15 Why are they not?
0:50:20 Because there’s real pushback on incentive programs in schools by lots of folks.
0:50:25 It’s not just the progressives who believe that we should do it for the love of learning.
0:50:29 I mean, I published this piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple months ago about using
0:50:31 incentives to battle COVID loss.
0:50:33 I got it from both sides there again.
0:50:35 Some people said you’re going to destroy the love of learning.
0:50:38 The other says, “Here you go again wanting another welfare program.”
0:50:42 It’s just a controversial thing, and I think that schools are doing it in secret.
0:50:44 I think they’re doing it without cash.
0:50:47 They’re doing it with school t-shirts and pizza parties and things like that.
0:50:51 There’s lots of charter schools and public schools who are doing this that I know about.
0:50:54 It’s just not as publicized as you might think.
0:50:59 I want to read a little section of an article that recently appeared in The New York Post.
0:51:03 This was an opinion piece called, “A New York City School Diploma Isn’t Worth the Paper
0:51:04 It’s Written On.”
0:51:06 It’s by Wai Wai Chin.
0:51:08 She’s a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
0:51:13 She’s also the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York.
0:51:15 Here’s the opening of this piece in the post.
0:51:20 When renowned economist and education innovator Roland Fryer served at the School Board of
0:51:27 Massachusetts and attended a public meeting to close a failing school, a black mother walked
0:51:30 up to him and told him that the school was a good school.
0:51:32 “No, ma’am,” said Fryer, who was also black.
0:51:33 “It’s not.”
0:51:36 The mother pulled out her child’s report card from her purse.
0:51:37 It was all A’s.
0:51:40 The mother insisted, “This is a good school.”
0:51:45 Fryer had to tell her, “Ma’am, they have lied to you.”
0:51:49 That story sounds as though it must have come from you originally, so first of all, is that
0:51:50 a true story?
0:51:52 It is a true story, yes.
0:51:56 What does that even mean that the school lied to parents that the A’s that their kids were
0:51:58 getting weren’t real A’s?
0:52:03 The issue is this is one of the toughest things I did serve on the School Board of Massachusetts.
0:52:04 It was an amazing experience.
0:52:08 To see it from that angle, I took it very seriously.
0:52:12 The hardest thing I did during my tenure there was to have those meetings where busloads of
0:52:13 parents came.
0:52:19 It was really hard for me to watch parents fight to keep open a school where the literacy
0:52:23 rates and the test scores were so low.
0:52:28 What I meant by, they have lied to you, is that there’s no way a kid can get all A’s
0:52:34 and still perform so poorly on these exams that are measuring basic skills.
0:52:39 The expectations must be very low in that school, and so that’s what I was reacting
0:52:40 to.
0:52:41 It was sad, man.
0:52:43 The thing that drives me nuts, sorry I’m going to get fired up about this, is that this woman
0:52:47 is doing everything that she thinks is right.
0:52:51 Part of it is on us dumb researchers who keeps telling stuff in standard deviation units.
0:52:55 Just don’t understand things in standard deviation units, folks.
0:53:02 We are obfuscating the truth by providing this in a way that not all parents can digest
0:53:05 in the way they should.
0:53:06 That’s what I was seeing.
0:53:09 This woman looked at the school, saw a great report card, so she thought it was a good
0:53:11 school, but her kids were not being served there.
0:53:16 Is this what’s behind the motivation of a lot of schools to get rid of standardized
0:53:17 tests then?
0:53:19 I don’t know if it’s to get rid of them.
0:53:21 It may even be to make them easier.
0:53:25 I really do believe that kids will live up or down to your expectations.
0:53:28 That if we really held those things high, and this is not just role and talking when
0:53:34 we did our work on effective schools, one of the five tenants that makes the school
0:53:36 effective is high expectations.
0:53:41 When you don’t have that, then there is this gap between what a kid thinks that they’re
0:53:45 doing and their report card potentially, and actual skills.
0:53:50 You mentioned that high expectations are one of five behaviors or policies that make good
0:53:51 schools good.
0:53:57 This was in a study you did of charter schools, but as I understand it, this would apply universally.
0:53:59 Can you list the other four?
0:54:00 Sure.
0:54:03 More time in school, so basic physics of education.
0:54:04 That’s pretty simple.
0:54:06 Then there’s using data to drive instruction.
0:54:11 It wasn’t just that you use data, because nearly every school now has some form of data.
0:54:15 What was different about the schools that were effective is that they had a real plan.
0:54:21 If we take this assessment and 50% of the kids pass, then we pause and we reteach.
0:54:22 We don’t just keep going.
0:54:26 Number three was small group instruction, or what my grandmother would call it, good old
0:54:27 passion tutoring.
0:54:32 If you tutored kids in groups of six or less for four or more days per week, then your
0:54:35 test scores were a lot higher than human capital.
0:54:41 How you select, retain, and develop teachers, and particular teacher feedback, really, really
0:54:42 important.
0:54:46 The last one was, as I said before, a culture of high expectations.
0:54:50 They all understood that they were dealing with high poverty rates.
0:54:55 They all understood that they were dealing with, unfortunately, many single family households,
0:54:59 et cetera, but they didn’t use as an excuse not to teach.
0:55:03 Those five factors explained 50% of the variance and what made some charter schools good and
0:55:06 others not so good.
0:55:07 Let me ask you this.
0:55:14 If you look back at your life and career, how would you think about measuring the costs
0:55:19 and benefits of your being black, both professionally and personally?
0:55:24 Man, that’s a great question.
0:55:33 Never really think about it, except for, you know, I’m a lot cooler than my colleagues.
0:55:35 Honestly, I don’t really think about it.
0:55:41 Look, let’s be honest, it has open doors, it has closed windows, right?
0:55:45 I have been given tremendous opportunities, and I try to take advantage of them.
0:55:48 I don’t have any to spare, put it that way.
0:55:50 I think it’s helped me some.
0:55:51 It’s hurt me some.
0:55:52 What the net effect is?
0:55:53 Don’t know, don’t care.
0:55:57 Do you think race played some significant role in what happened with you at Harvard and
0:56:00 the suspension or no?
0:56:07 You know, I think that probably, but not in the ways that you might think, I also believe
0:56:12 that, you know, being an asshole probably didn’t help, right?
0:56:14 I’m no angel here either.
0:56:21 Early in my career, for example, I really tried not to have any money that I raised
0:56:25 privately go to overhead for the university.
0:56:28 I was trying to give it to poor communities, and that’s probably not the best way to build
0:56:30 teamwork.
0:56:34 And there was a point at which, like, folks inside the university didn’t want to be associated
0:56:38 with my incentives research, because it was too controversial.
0:56:42 So did I push the boundaries trying to do things for the kids in the neighborhoods I
0:56:43 served?
0:56:44 Yes.
0:56:47 Did I spend more time off campus, because I thought that the kids in these neighborhoods
0:56:49 needed my time more than the kids on campus?
0:56:51 Yes, I did.
0:56:54 And did that rub people the wrong way, and did that come across?
0:56:56 That’s all I’m sure it did.
0:56:57 Do you regret it?
0:57:01 Do you feel like that’s just who you are and you’ve learned from it and you’re in a different
0:57:02 mode now?
0:57:09 Of course, of course, I regret it and have apologized for it, and the thing that I worked
0:57:16 really hard on while I was off campus was trying to be authentically me, but not have
0:57:21 anything that could be even perceived as offensive to someone else, and that’s hard.
0:57:24 But I took it very seriously, and I’m back better.
0:57:25 I’m back stronger.
0:57:31 I used to—it would have been nothing for me to have on Thanksgiving, to have 20 students
0:57:34 over my house for Thanksgiving dinner, cook a bunch, they fall asleep on the couch, we
0:57:35 play video games.
0:57:37 I don’t do that anymore.
0:57:43 So I would say that there’s clear delineation from my living room to work, and I think that’s
0:57:44 a good thing.
0:57:47 I was worried that was not going to be—I thought, “How could I do really cutting-edge
0:57:48 burger?”
0:57:49 But I was wrong about that.
0:57:55 I can still be—me, you and I have mixed it up the whole time here—I’m still rolling,
0:57:56 I still care about these issues.
0:58:02 I refuse to not tell the truth, but I’m at a different and, dare I say, more mature
0:58:04 part of life.
0:58:07 I broke a lot of glass early on in my career that had nothing to do with that, but all
0:58:12 to do with me being impatient as hell and wanting to help and trying to do the right
0:58:16 thing, and I don’t think that was helpful.
0:58:18 Thanks to Roland Fryer for this conversation.
0:58:23 We covered a lot of ground, and even though I thought I knew his work pretty well, I learned
0:58:24 an awful lot.
0:58:25 I hope you did too.
0:58:29 We checked back in recently with Fryer to get an update on his various projects.
0:58:36 He told us that his early-stage investing fund EO Ventures raised $100 million in 2022,
0:58:42 and Sigma Squared, his data-driven diversity consulting firm, raised $10 million in Series
0:58:43 A funding.
0:58:47 It is now leveraging its analytics platform beyond enterprise HR.
0:58:52 Police departments around the country have started using Sigma Squared’s toolkit as
0:58:56 an early warning sign to flag bias in police practices.
0:59:00 Fryer is also now a Wall Street Journal contributor, and his first piece there caught my eye,
0:59:05 so he and I have decided to turn that into a future Freakonomics Radio episode, so keep
0:59:07 your ears open for that.
0:59:11 We will be back soon right here with our regular weekly episode.
0:59:15 Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.
0:59:18 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:59:24 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:59:25 transcripts and show notes.
0:59:28 This episode was produced by Alina Cullman.
0:59:33 Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman,
0:59:37 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Snarrs,
0:59:42 Julie Canford, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly,
0:59:44 Teo Jacobs, and Zac Lipinski.
0:59:48 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers, our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:59:52 As always, thank you for listening.
0:59:56 My favorite quote of all of our things when we were going around, you said, “Wow, man,
1:00:00 you’re really in shape for whatever it was at that point, 80,” and he said, “What’s
1:00:01 your secret?”
1:00:02 “Oh, man, eat well.
1:00:03 I don’t eat any pork.”
1:00:05 And I definitely don’t eat no pork.
1:00:08 He said, “Well, what are that in your beans there, sir?”
1:00:09 “Ham.”
1:00:24 The Freakin’omics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
1:00:24 Stitcher.
1:00:27 (gentle music)
1:00:29 you

0:00:09 In our previous episode, we talked about the ever expanding National Football League, which
0:00:14 is already the biggest, richest sports league in history.
0:00:20 The NFL is a tight confederation of 32 teams that are essentially run as individual firms.
0:00:24 Unlike the European soccer leagues, where the worst teams are pushed out each year and
0:00:30 placed by teams from the lower ranks, the NFL is a closed ecosystem.
0:00:33 And it is an extraordinarily powerful one.
0:00:38 The NFL lies at the center of not only sport, but also media and advertising, gambling, pop
0:00:42 culture and politics, and just about anything else you can think of.
0:00:45 It may be sacrilegious to say this, but it may also be true.
0:00:50 The NFL, which plays most of its games on Sunday afternoon, is the closest thing we
0:00:53 have today to a national religion.
0:00:58 In 1960, on Meet the Press, Martin Luther King Jr. made the following observation about
0:01:00 church going.
0:01:03 I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation.
0:01:08 One of the shameful tragedies at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated
0:01:14 hours, not the most segregated hours in Christian America.
0:01:20 If Sunday morning church time is or at least was the most segregated hour in America, would
0:01:26 it also be sacrilegious to say that the rest of Sunday is the least segregated?
0:01:30 There are countless constituencies attached to this game.
0:01:36 Because of that, the NFL draws enormous attention, and it often sets the cultural or political
0:01:41 agenda, especially when it comes to society and race.
0:01:45 The story we began last week looked at an NFL policy called the Rooney Rule, named after
0:01:48 the late Pittsburgh Steelers owner, Dan Rooney.
0:01:53 The rule was adopted in 2003, and it required that whenever an NFL team hired a new head
0:01:57 coach, which happens on average about every three years, that they interview at least
0:02:00 one candidate who isn’t white.
0:02:05 Some people saw this move as long overdue, since the majority of NFL players were black
0:02:09 and the vast majority of head coaches were white.
0:02:13 Dan Rooney’s name was attached to this policy not only because he helped build consensus
0:02:19 for it among the league’s 32 team owners, but because his Steelers have been out front
0:02:26 on diverse hiring at every level of the organization, players, coaches, scouts, team executives,
0:02:27 and more.
0:02:32 The Steelers also had the most Super Bowl wins in history, so there was some proof of
0:02:33 concept there.
0:02:38 The Steelers current head coach, Mike Tomlin, is a black man and the longest tenured coach
0:02:40 in the NFL.
0:02:46 Tomlin hasn’t won a Super Bowl since 2009, but he also hasn’t had a single losing season
0:02:47 in 17 years.
0:02:54 In other words, the Rooney family, which still owns the team, has lived out the Rooney Rule.
0:02:58 Several other teams followed them, and in the first decade of the rule, it seemed to
0:03:01 have the intended effect.
0:03:05 Today on Freakin’omics Radio, we’ll hear where things went wrong in the second decade.
0:03:08 Yes, I would call that a sham interview.
0:03:13 And we’ll hear how the Rooney Rule has reverberated in the corporate world, especially after the
0:03:15 police murder of George Floyd.
0:03:19 Yay, I hire a lot of diverse people and the ferries come and everything happens and there’s
0:03:21 sprinkle of dust and it’s great.
0:03:27 Along with a massive wave of DEI policy, there has been DEI pushback.
0:03:28 We’ll hear some of that too.
0:03:33 Part of the actors stirred up new theories that the way to fight racial discrimination
0:03:36 is with brand new racial discrimination.
0:03:41 As for the NFL, how can you measure the Rooney Rule’s long-term effect?
0:03:48 So we collected data on over 1,300 coaches, and it yielded a data set of over 10,000 coach
0:03:49 years.
0:03:54 Try not to Google number of black coaches in the NFL today until the end of this episode,
0:03:55 okay?
0:04:21 In the meantime, you won’t have to.
0:04:30 Let’s start with Tynesha Boyer Robinson.
0:04:35 I go by Ty, and I’m the president and CEO of CapEQ, and we work with businesses and
0:04:40 investors to embed equitable impact into their daily practices.
0:04:45 Most people would call Boyer Robinson a diversity consultant, but she is not a fan of that label.
0:04:50 I always say equitable impact because diversity opens a drawer in people’s heads that’s usually
0:04:51 people-related.
0:04:53 It’s just, “Do you look like me?
0:04:54 Are you the same gender?
0:04:55 Are you the same race?
0:04:56 Are you the same ethnicity?”
0:05:01 And to really build an equitable organization, it’s really about, “Is our workforce reflective
0:05:03 of our population?”
0:05:09 If you believe in all talent is created equal, then you would believe that your company should
0:05:12 be recruiting people in a way that reflects the population.
0:05:15 And if it isn’t, there’s something broken in your system that’s keeping certain people
0:05:17 out and keeping certain people in.
0:05:24 So in terms of equitable impact, how does she think about the NFL and the Rooney Rule?
0:05:27 The Rooney Rule is really about making sure that you have a diverse slate when you’re
0:05:30 selecting and hiring people.
0:05:31 That’s it in its nutshell.
0:05:37 There’s so much about the league itself that’s diverse that it’s bizarre not to have an organizational
0:05:41 structure that reflects its employee base.
0:05:43 How are you able to navigate the needs of the employee base?
0:05:46 Or even if you think about the consumer base, it’s incredibly diverse.
0:05:51 The NFL is such a powerful organization for bringing so many demographics together and
0:05:53 feeling like one, like feeling like one body.
0:05:57 You may not agree on your politics or whatever, but if you’re a chiefs fan, you’re like,
0:05:58 “Patty Mahomes, let’s go!
0:06:03 Yes, I love Kelsey and Swift.”
0:06:09 It’s nice to think about the NFL in that way as a big unifying force in America.
0:06:15 And when you hear, as we heard last week, that the 32 NFL teams adopted the Rooney Rule
0:06:20 in a unanimous vote, you might get a nice warm feeling, but it didn’t take much digging
0:06:25 on our part to learn that a unanimous vote isn’t as meaningful as it may seem.
0:06:26 Here is Jeremy Duru.
0:06:32 He is a legal scholar at American University and the author of a book called Advancing the
0:06:37 Ball, Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL.
0:06:43 What I will say is that it wasn’t two weeks after everybody had agreed to the rule that
0:06:47 it was totally flouted by an owner who just agreed to it.
0:06:49 I think a part of it was, Stephen.
0:06:53 All right, this thing, here’s another equal opportunity initiative.
0:06:54 Let’s just agree to it and keep moving.
0:06:56 Who was the owner who flouted it?
0:06:57 Jerry Jones.
0:07:00 Jerry Jones, Dallas Cowboys, and who did he hire as his head coach?
0:07:02 Bill Parcells.
0:07:03 And let’s be clear.
0:07:06 I mean, Bill Parcells, he’s a Hall of Fame coach.
0:07:07 He’s a great coach.
0:07:09 Nobody could argue that he’s not.
0:07:11 But this rule had just been put into place.
0:07:19 What happened was Jerry Jones interviewed Parcells over the course of I think 11 hours
0:07:24 during two trips, both of which he took his private jet to Jersey to interview Bill Parcells
0:07:25 and come back.
0:07:28 So two cross country chips.
0:07:32 And he called Dennis Green, who had previously been fired by the Vikings.
0:07:33 Black coach.
0:07:34 Black coach.
0:07:39 And they spoke on the phone for 20 minutes and Parcells was hired.
0:07:40 Now wait a minute.
0:07:41 He flouted the rule.
0:07:45 Sounds like he lived by the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
0:07:48 I wouldn’t say if not the spirit, Steve, that’s definitely not the spirit.
0:07:53 I mean, you have 11 hours in person versus 20 minutes on the phone.
0:07:55 So do you think of that as a total sham interview then?
0:07:56 Yes.
0:07:58 I would call that a sham interview.
0:08:04 Did anyone say to Jerry Jones, hey, we the owners just agreed to this rule where we’re
0:08:09 going to require at least one minority interview every time you hire head coach and you didn’t
0:08:12 what’s the story, did anybody confront him on that?
0:08:13 Yes.
0:08:17 The league looked into it and they said basically what you just indicated earlier, which is,
0:08:21 well, you know, the rule says you’re going to interview a person of color before the
0:08:23 hire and the club did that.
0:08:28 Now we recognize the club did not offer a full-throated interview to Green, but he didn’t violate
0:08:30 the rule.
0:08:33 And then you had the Lions, the Lions situation.
0:08:38 You had the general manager who desperately wanted a head coach for years.
0:08:44 Steve Meriuci was the coach that Matt Mellon wanted, Matt Mellon being general manager.
0:08:49 And when he became available, Mellon basically said it was clear to everyone in the community
0:08:51 as well as in the press, I’m hiring mooch.
0:08:54 That’s a nickname, Steve Merige, I’m hiring mooch.
0:08:57 And so I said to some black coaches, could you come up for an interview?
0:09:01 I want to be respectful of the rule, even though, you know, it’s going to be mooch.
0:09:03 And no black coaches would go in for the interview.
0:09:05 Because they knew that it was useless.
0:09:07 Because they knew it was useless.
0:09:11 And in this case, the Rooney Rules text was violated as well.
0:09:17 It was after the experience of the text being violated by the Lions and the spirit being
0:09:23 violated by the Cowboys that the league altered and strengthened the rule.
0:09:29 By the next summer, the league had altered the rule to require a meaningful interview
0:09:33 and meaningful is defined as similarly situated.
0:09:37 So if you only view one person in person, the other should be interviewed in person.
0:09:41 If you interview one person for five hours at the facility, then the other person should
0:09:44 be interviewed for roughly five hours at the facility.
0:09:48 So there really did seem to be progress being made.
0:09:55 It was expanded to the general manager ranks and the general manager ranks increased with
0:09:57 respect to diversity.
0:10:04 Around 2007, 2008, the rule was so well respected in the league and it’s been exported to organizations
0:10:07 across the world in this country totally apart from sport.
0:10:14 So most trends, once they start in a strong direction, positive or negative, they develop
0:10:20 some momentum and even if they might have been unusual 10 years ago, once they become
0:10:22 the norm, they just stay the norm.
0:10:25 But that was not the case here, correct?
0:10:26 That wasn’t the case.
0:10:27 No, that wasn’t the case.
0:10:28 So what happened?
0:10:30 A number of things happened.
0:10:36 When you have 32 different businesses, you’re going to have those 32 different perspectives.
0:10:40 You just had some organizations that just weren’t really into it.
0:10:48 There seemed to be a reduction in commitment to equity in the league generally and to the
0:10:50 Rooney Rule specifically.
0:10:55 And did that reduction translate into a reduction in minority coaches?
0:10:56 Yeah.
0:10:57 Yeah.
0:11:04 It was from the mid-20s up until the end of the decade.
0:11:09 In 2018, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, Mark Davis, essentially admitted that he broke
0:11:11 the Rooney Rule.
0:11:15 The Raiders, like the Detroit Lions in 2003, had already picked out the head coach they
0:11:21 wanted to hire, or in this case, rehire, John Gruden, who had a successful run as the Raiders
0:11:23 coach nearly two decades earlier.
0:11:30 This time around, once Mark Davis got a commitment from Gruden, he had his general manager conduct
0:11:34 two perfunctory interviews with minority coaches.
0:11:40 Gruden then signed a contract with the Raiders, worth a reported $100 million over 10 years.
0:11:46 He barely lasted three years, during which time he won just over 40% of his games.
0:11:50 And he resigned in disgrace after the discovery of a bunch of his old emails that were filled
0:11:53 with racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks.
0:11:58 The Raiders were never disciplined by the league for violating the Rooney Rule when
0:12:02 they hired Gruden, just as the Dallas Cowboys hadn’t been disciplined earlier when they
0:12:04 hired Bill Parcells.
0:12:09 In fact, only one team has ever been disciplined for violating the Rooney Rule, the Detroit
0:12:12 Lions, for how they hired Steve Mariucci.
0:12:18 That produced a $200,000 fine, which in the NFL is pocket change.
0:12:23 For what it’s worth, Mariucci also bombed out as coach of the Lions.
0:12:30 He won only around a third of his games, and he was fired midway through his third season.
0:12:36 These three head coach hirings, Mariucci, Gruden, and Parcells, are of course a tiny sample,
0:12:42 but if you pay even a little attention to the NFL, you will recognize a pattern.
0:12:48 Team owners hire coaches who look the part, who feel the part, even if they are no longer
0:12:53 right for the part, even if there might be better candidates out there who, for one reason
0:12:57 or another, don’t quite look the part to the team’s owner.
0:13:02 By 2019, there were just three black head coaches in the league, the same number as
0:13:05 in 2003, the year the Rooney Rule took effect.
0:13:09 Yeah, so the situation had become bad.
0:13:15 That was a situation among NFL head coaches, at least, but as Jeremy DeRue noted earlier,
0:13:19 other organizations had begun to take interest in the Rooney Rule.
0:13:22 The underlying policy is pretty simple.
0:13:26 It requires what HR people call a diverse candidate slate.
0:13:29 This was hardly a new idea in corporate America.
0:13:34 Companies like Goldman Sachs and Starbucks had already adopted it without much fanfare,
0:13:38 but there was something about the simplicity of the Rooney Rule, or maybe it was the catchier
0:13:45 name, or the halo effect of the NFL, that gave this policy a bit more buzz.
0:13:50 In New York, city controller Scott Stringer sent a letter to a few dozen big American
0:13:55 companies, including AT&T and Walt Disney, calling for them to adopt a version of the
0:14:01 Rooney Rule and noting its connection to the NFL, a nice halo effect.
0:14:05 Within a year, Stringer’s office announced that 14 of those companies had adopted the
0:14:06 policy.
0:14:12 The city of Portland, Oregon adopted the Rooney Rule for hiring municipal employees, so did
0:14:13 the city of Pittsburgh.
0:14:17 It was also adopted by the English Football League, which includes the three main soccer
0:14:20 divisions below the Premier League.
0:14:27 Back in the NFL, meanwhile, Dan Rooney had died in 2017, but the league kept building
0:14:29 on his rule.
0:14:35 In 2020, the policy came to cover not just general managers and head coaches, but also
0:14:41 the head coaches, three lieutenants, the offensive, defensive and special teams coordinators.
0:14:45 The new version of the rule also required that at least two non-white candidates be
0:14:48 interviewed for each job instead of one.
0:14:50 Jeremy DeRue again.
0:14:54 And that was a result of a number of studies, including one from the Harvard Business Review
0:15:00 that indicated that when you have one person of color being interviewed in otherwise homogenous
0:15:07 interviewee group, that person of color is automatically, albeit, perhaps subconsciously, recognized
0:15:11 as the outsider, the person who’s just here to check a box.
0:15:17 When you have more than one, let’s say you have two, that doesn’t attach to both, right?
0:15:20 Both of them are considered more seriously.
0:15:25 They call it two in the pool, and the Harvard Business Review study revealed that when you
0:15:30 have two in the pool, the likelihood of getting a person of color or a woman in this seat
0:15:31 is much higher.
0:15:39 And so these parties pushed through, changes to the Rooney Rule, and that time period coincided
0:15:44 with the spring and summer of 2020.
0:15:49 Less than a week after the NFL made these amplifications to the Rooney Rule, a black
0:15:53 man was killed by police in Minneapolis.
0:15:57 To the break, the consequences of George Floyd’s murder.
0:16:00 I’m Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.
0:16:11 We’ll be right back.
0:16:17 In the spring of 2020, the police killing of George Floyd set off a wave of despair and
0:16:22 protest that hadn’t been produced by similar incidents in the recent past.
0:16:27 Maybe it’s because it happened during the early terrible months of the COVID pandemic.
0:16:31 Maybe it’s because the incident was captured on video for everyone to see.
0:16:38 Whatever the case, Floyd’s death supercharged our national conversation on racial and social
0:16:41 equity, including in the NFL.
0:16:46 Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, felt compelled to say this.
0:16:54 “We the National Football League condemn racism and the systematic oppression of black people.
0:16:59 We the National Football League admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier
0:17:04 and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.
0:17:09 We the National Football League believe black lives matter.
0:17:16 I personally protest with you and want to be part of the much needed change in this country.
0:17:20 Without black players, there would be no National Football League.”
0:17:26 That line about admitting we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier.
0:17:29 That seems to refer to the NFL’s treatment of Colin Kaepernick.
0:17:35 Kaepernick was a San Francisco 49ers quarterback who a few years earlier began taking a knee
0:17:41 rather than standing during the pregame national anthem to protest police brutality.
0:17:47 Not long after, Kaepernick’s NFL career was essentially over, but now in the aftermath
0:17:54 of the George Floyd murder, the NFL pledged $250 million over 10 years to combat systemic
0:17:56 racism as they put it.
0:17:59 Some of this took the form of on-field messaging.
0:18:05 Players were allowed to wear social justice messages on their helmets, teams painted slogans
0:18:06 in their end zones.
0:18:09 It takes all of us and end racism.
0:18:13 The pregame now included a performance of “Lift Every Voice,” a song known as the
0:18:17 Black National Anthem, and if you’ve been watching NFL games this season and wonder
0:18:24 why you’re seeing so many get-out-the-vote ads, that too is part of the program.
0:18:29 The National Basketball Association made similar changes, even NASCAR got on board.
0:18:34 The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing has never been known for racial enlightenment,
0:18:37 in fact, quite the opposite.
0:18:42 But after the George Floyd killing, NASCAR banned the Confederate battle flag from all
0:18:44 its events and properties.
0:18:49 NASCAR President Steve Phelps later said that banning the flag had a surprising upside,
0:18:55 a big surge in younger fans who had been turned off by NASCAR’s redneck reputation.
0:19:00 Back in the NFL, meanwhile, the George Floyd aftermath produced a further strengthening
0:19:02 of the Rooney Rule.
0:19:06 This time, the league used a carrot instead of a stick.
0:19:07 Here’s the carrot.
0:19:12 If your team already had a minority coach or executive and if another team poached that
0:19:17 person, which happens all the time, then you would be compensated with extra picks in the
0:19:19 college draft.
0:19:22 You would literally get extra players for your team.
0:19:27 In last week’s episode, we spoke with Herm Edwards, a longtime NFL player and coach,
0:19:30 now an analyst for ESPN.
0:19:36 He told us what it was like to be the first black head coach at every team where he landed.
0:19:42 I also asked him what he thought of this policy of teams getting extra draft picks for losing
0:19:43 a minority coach.
0:19:47 Oh, because now you’re telling me, if you hire a black coach, you get compensation.
0:19:48 Really?
0:19:49 What?
0:19:52 I always tell people, he’s just a coach.
0:19:53 They’re hiring a coach, man.
0:19:55 When they hire a white coach, you mean they don’t give them anything?
0:19:58 Let’s say I hire a black coach, I get something extra.
0:20:00 I mean, stop.
0:20:02 It shouldn’t have to come to that.
0:20:04 It really shouldn’t.
0:20:07 And I get why they did it, but it’s like, really, guys?
0:20:09 Herm Edwards may not like this new policy.
0:20:15 He may see it as patronizing, but the George Floyd killing had provoked a widespread racial
0:20:21 reckoning, as it was often called, and all sorts of institutions and firms decided that
0:20:24 diversity was good for business.
0:20:30 Corporate America was particularly enthusiastic, usually in the form of a DEI hiring program
0:20:34 that stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
0:20:41 In 2020, US companies spent a reported $7.5 billion on DEI programs, a lot of money for
0:20:45 something that many people hadn’t heard of a year earlier.
0:20:51 Many billions more were pledged to organizations and projects devoted to racial justice or
0:20:52 racial equity.
0:20:59 Even so, if you lined up all the CEOs in the Fortune 500 for a team photo, it would
0:21:05 look like a team photo of all NFL head coaches a few decades ago.
0:21:10 As of this recording, fewer than 2% of Fortune 500 CEOs are black.
0:21:14 Tynisha Boye Robinson says this shouldn’t be too surprising.
0:21:19 I think people overcomplicate DEI, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, diversity must not work
0:21:21 because we poured millions of dollars into it.
0:21:22 What happened?”
0:21:24 It’s no different than saying, “Oh, you know what?
0:21:26 I want to run a marathon,” and then somebody just started running.
0:21:28 You’re like, “What the…”
0:21:33 There is a 42-week process where you train, y’all.
0:21:37 You don’t just get up and say, “I’m going to run 26.2 miles,” and that’s what people
0:21:38 did with their diversity efforts.
0:21:40 They said, “Oh, George Floyd, that’s bad.
0:21:41 We don’t want to be bad.
0:21:42 We don’t want to be racist.
0:21:46 We’re going to fix diversity,” and then they, like, having no infrastructure, having
0:21:50 no training, having no muscles built, just threw a whole bunch of money at it, and we’re
0:21:52 surprised it didn’t work.
0:21:57 Whereas if I told those same people, “You needed to launch a new product because your
0:22:00 lunch is getting eaten by your competitor,” they would do strategy and analysis.
0:22:02 They might pull in some consultants.
0:22:03 They’d start off with a pilot.
0:22:08 They know how to fix these problems, but when it came to diversity, their brains often went
0:22:13 off, and they went straight to action because they didn’t know what else to do.
0:22:17 And over the past few years, a lot of firms have been trimming their diversity programs.
0:22:25 Tesla, Metta, Lyft, Home Depot, and other companies have cut DEI teams by more than 50%.
0:22:29 And you remember those sham interviews we told you about in the NFL?
0:22:31 They seem to have happened in corporate America, too.
0:22:38 A recent class action lawsuit against Wells Fargo, the third largest bank in the US, accused
0:22:43 them of defrauding shareholders by misrepresenting their commitment to diverse hiring practices.
0:22:49 Wells Fargo had adopted a Rooney Rule-like policy, which required that half of the job
0:22:54 candidates who interviewed for positions above a certain salary come from one of several
0:22:59 minority categories– race, gender, disability, or sexual orientation.
0:23:05 The lawsuit alleges that many of those candidates got interviews only after the job was already
0:23:06 filled.
0:23:10 Wells Fargo denies the allegations, the suit is ongoing.
0:23:18 Meanwhile, in some circles, there is a fierce backlash against any sort of DEI policy, including
0:23:21 the NFL’s own Rooney Rule.
0:23:25 A conservative nonprofit called America First Legal, founded by former Trump advisor Stephen
0:23:30 Miller, filed a federal civil rights complaint against the NFL, arguing that the Rooney
0:23:35 Rule is itself discriminatory and, therefore, illegal.
0:23:39 We couldn’t get America First Legal to speak with us, but we did have a conversation with
0:23:42 someone who takes a similar position.
0:23:46 The Rooney Rule, or anything that aims at quotas, headcounts, whatever they want to
0:23:52 call them, doesn’t do the hard work, the necessary work, the important work.
0:23:57 And that’s why they so fundamentally make things worse, even when they’re good-hardly
0:23:59 trying to make things better.
0:24:00 That is Scott Shepard.
0:24:04 I’m the general counsel at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
0:24:10 I was also the director of the Free Enterprise Project, which is our center’s project
0:24:15 that for about 20 years has recognized the leftward drift of corporations and has been
0:24:20 the shareholder proponent trying to stand at thought that hollering stop.
0:24:25 In order to be that shareholder proponent, Shepard’s organization buys stock in the companies
0:24:27 it wants to monitor.
0:24:29 And how much stock do they need to buy?
0:24:34 One share if we want to try to make a comment at a shareholder meeting, but to submit a
0:24:38 shareholder proposal, the floor is very low.
0:24:45 It’s only continuously owning $2,000 worth of a company for three years without let-up.
0:24:50 And how does Shepard see his organization representing the interests of the shareholders?
0:24:55 We are fighting the breaches of fiduciary duty, and particularly the breaches of fiduciary
0:25:01 duty arising from partisanship, from directors and executives taking their eyes off the ball
0:25:07 and getting involved in completely unnecessary, completely unrelated to core business.
0:25:12 Partisan controversies that are guaranteed to upset lots of people, to have high potential
0:25:15 risk and not much upside.
0:25:19 When things are good for companies, no behaviors have to be forced.
0:25:24 If discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and orientation were good for corporations,
0:25:27 would have been figuring out a way to do it on their own.
0:25:31 So your argument is that if it were good for the business, the business would be doing
0:25:35 it, because they’re competitive people in a competitive marketplace and so on.
0:25:38 Let me port that argument over to the NFL.
0:25:40 That’s a very competitive environment.
0:25:45 It’s a league where there are really just 32 stakeholders, and they really do run and
0:25:49 own the league, even though the league acts as if it runs them.
0:25:51 And they’re all obviously competitive.
0:25:54 They want to win on the field and off the field.
0:25:57 Would you say the same is true about them, that in order to optimize their chances of
0:26:02 success, whether it’s on field victory or business, that they would inherently hire
0:26:07 the best people and that they’re not leaving any good overlooked talent behind?
0:26:12 Well, I have to preface this by saying I was a tiny little boy in the ’70s in the center
0:26:17 of Pennsylvania, so I am, I think, legally disbarred from saying anything unpleasant about
0:26:18 a running.
0:26:22 And I won’t, because I think that Dan was, we’re not on a first name basis.
0:26:28 I think that Dan was kind of heart and good of soul and recognizing something that was
0:26:33 a real, true problem and a problem of discrimination in the NFL.
0:26:37 You can’t possibly have the numbers that he recognized without there being some genuine
0:26:39 systemic internal discrimination.
0:26:42 I should think it was a careful move.
0:26:44 It was thoughtful.
0:26:48 And I think that it was the right place to try something like that.
0:26:52 It sounds like there’s a but there that you haven’t gotten to, but you’re either unconvinced
0:26:56 that it was the right move or you think it’s gone too far or what?
0:27:02 All discrimination on invidious grounds, race, sex orientation, is wrong and leads to bad
0:27:07 consequences for everybody, but particularly the people on whose behalf the discrimination
0:27:09 supposedly occurs.
0:27:16 Because once the Rooney rules in place, then every black interviewee has the question mark
0:27:18 hanging over his head.
0:27:25 Is he or maybe someday she legitimately there or are they being used as a token?
0:27:30 And once that stain arises, everybody’s tarred.
0:27:33 Justice Thomas has talked about he having been tarred.
0:27:35 So I think it runs everywhere.
0:27:38 Do you think the Rooney rule is unconstitutional?
0:27:45 Well, I think that the Rooney rule as applied by Dan Rooney, when it was and how it was
0:27:53 might be, but when there’s direct proof of past discrimination by a specific organization,
0:27:59 they can take some steps continent with the Constitution to rectify those specific deeds.
0:28:03 I just genuinely don’t know what the courts would decide about the constitutionality,
0:28:10 but once you hop outside of the NFL, it is absolutely and unequivocally unconstitutional.
0:28:15 If I were to ask you what share of let’s say the 500 biggest companies in the US are
0:28:21 engaged in what your organization would consider illegal DEI practices, what would that number
0:28:22 be?
0:28:30 If I could add a probably or it’s our best evaluation, I would say something above 75%.
0:28:34 And give me some evidence of what makes you think the number is so high.
0:28:40 Well, our first bit of evidence is the gleeful declarations of discriminatory and unconstitutional
0:28:49 behavior that so many corporations engaged in during the lockdown, the protests and riots,
0:28:52 the George Floyd summer of 2020.
0:28:56 It seems that everybody being at home, there were some miscommunications.
0:29:01 And so certain departments just announced things that an objective legal department
0:29:05 would have said, “No, no, no, no, no, let’s not admit to that out loud.”
0:29:07 Give me a for instance, sir.
0:29:13 Here is a program that I’m certain that lots of companies, A, engaged in and B, were proud
0:29:15 to announce at one point.
0:29:17 I think they’ve probably wiped all of that now.
0:29:24 A lot of thought went into fairly sophisticated efforts to actually discriminate without triggering
0:29:26 the constitutional bar.
0:29:27 It worked in three parts.
0:29:33 The first part was a diversity dashboard, executives and directors who had the authority
0:29:38 to hire, promote, make other human resources decisions knew the surface characteristics
0:29:43 or private characteristics of everybody who reported to them.
0:29:48 And then they said, and companies were very careful about the word, although not the content,
0:29:53 just goals, just goals, not quotas, for what sort of surface or private characteristics
0:29:55 were meant to be achieved.
0:30:00 And then, and this is the real clincher, those actors got bonuses if they hit those
0:30:02 goals, not quotas.
0:30:03 And that would be illegal?
0:30:04 Why exactly?
0:30:05 Why specifically?
0:30:12 It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, sex orientation, even if a company
0:30:18 has made it more difficult to discover just where in the process the actual discrimination
0:30:19 occurred.
0:30:23 And we think that these corporations using this system made their problems much, much
0:30:31 worse, because you can be harmed by illegal discrimination, even if you’re not a member
0:30:34 of the class at whom the harm is directed.
0:30:39 For instance, if you’ve got a person with hiring authority and it comes down to them
0:30:45 to both make the discriminatory decision and to black box it, well, the incentive structure
0:30:50 that’s been established creates exactly the incentive for them to discriminate on the
0:30:52 basis of race, sex orientation.
0:30:57 And so it’s a hostile work environment for them as well as everybody else.
0:31:03 I understand you were part of a lawsuit against Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and the company’s
0:31:04 officers and directors.
0:31:05 Walk me through that.
0:31:06 Would you please, Scott?
0:31:07 Sure.
0:31:13 Our claim at base was one arising from fiduciary duty as well as the codex of civil rights
0:31:14 laws.
0:31:18 And this is, I think, fairly clear black letter law.
0:31:22 Directors and executives may not take any action that violates law.
0:31:27 And in other contexts, directors and executives rely on that obligation fairly heavily.
0:31:32 But discriminating in the ways that Starbucks was discriminating and they were using that
0:31:33 tripart structure, I just…
0:31:36 So this is the hiring component of Starbucks you’re talking about, yes?
0:31:39 Or other personnel issues or compensation?
0:31:40 What did it include?
0:31:45 We had six or seven different examples and they extended beyond hiring.
0:31:48 I don’t recall right now in what directions.
0:31:52 But it seemed like, and this is, I think, a fairly telling word in this instance, it
0:31:58 seemed like fairly systemic race, sex, and orientation discrimination by Starbucks.
0:32:04 So we brought suit in district court against not the company, but the directors and executives.
0:32:07 And the luck of our draw with a district and judge…
0:32:10 Yeah, the judge didn’t like your case at all.
0:32:12 No, but it’s interesting.
0:32:18 The way I read his decision and opinion, he didn’t dismiss on the grounds of any demonstrable
0:32:19 law.
0:32:25 In fact, one of the positions he cited, one of the things he indicated backed his dismissal
0:32:31 and opportunity for Starbucks executives to try to sanction us, which was fairly unusual,
0:32:33 was that we’re shareholders.
0:32:37 If we don’t like what Starbucks is doing, we can sell and buy another company.
0:32:44 But if that’s so, then the whole edifice of fiduciary duty law collapses, right?
0:32:50 It cannot be the position of the American courts, much less a federal court interpreting
0:32:56 state law, that fiduciary duty just doesn’t really matter anymore.
0:32:57 You can just sell your shares.
0:33:01 And so we thought that was a very telling way of responding to that.
0:33:08 We think it was proof of concept and that when we get to a court more driven by obvious
0:33:15 demonstrations of fidelity to law, we’ll get different results and others will as well.
0:33:19 The judge in that case cited a number of reasons for dismissing the case, including that the
0:33:25 plaintiff, that is Scott Shepard’s National Center for Public Policy Research, was “pursuing
0:33:31 its personal interests rather than those of Starbucks and that his organization has shown
0:33:36 obvious vindictiveness toward Starbucks and lacks the support of the vast majority of
0:33:39 Starbucks shareholders.”
0:33:45 That said, if you think the Starbucks case was the last of its kind in this DEI era,
0:33:47 you are almost certainly wrong.
0:33:52 Coming up after the break, back to the NFL and one researcher’s attempt to perform what
0:33:55 he calls “equity analytics.”
0:33:58 It is more interesting than it sounds, I promise.
0:34:08 This is Freakonomics Radio, I’m Stephen Dubner, we’ll be right back.
0:34:12 This is the second episode in our mini-series about the Rooney Rule.
0:34:15 Here’s a headline we gave the series.
0:34:19 Did the NFL solve diversity hiring?
0:34:21 So did it?
0:34:26 I’m not asking if it solved the problem for Starbucks or Wells Fargo or Metta, I just
0:34:28 mean for the NFL.
0:34:33 The problem, remember, was that the NFL had few black head coaches, even though most players
0:34:37 are black and many coaches are former players.
0:34:41 So did the Rooney Rule solve that problem?
0:34:44 To answer that, we need to hear from one last guest.
0:34:49 My name is Chris Ryder, I’m a self-described expert in what I call “equity analytics.”
0:34:53 Ryder is a professor of entrepreneurial studies at the University of Michigan’s Business
0:34:56 School and what does he mean by “equity analytics”?
0:35:03 I document gaps among groups of people, gaps in pay, promotions, any kind of career outcome.
0:35:08 I then try to understand what causes those gaps and then I design interventions to close
0:35:11 those gaps that we deem to be inequitable.
0:35:16 Ryder used to study pay gaps among attorneys, but a few years ago he and some colleagues
0:35:21 realized they could get hold of data that allowed them to study a slightly more high-profile
0:35:24 labor force, NFL coaches.
0:35:29 We collected three decades worth of career history data for NFL coaches.
0:35:35 This is the kind of data that would be nearly impossible to collect in any other setting.
0:35:41 We went through NFL directories, websites, and we characterized where people started
0:35:46 their careers coaching and what position for what team, and we followed them every single
0:35:49 year until they left the NFL.
0:35:54 Then we went back and also collected the position that they had played, if not in the NFL, then
0:35:56 in college or high school.
0:36:02 Moreover, across the National Football League, teams used the same objective measures of
0:36:08 performance, points scored, yards allowed, turnovers, so we could compare people who
0:36:13 are being measured according to the same objective performance measures.
0:36:17 I couldn’t imagine doing that in legal services.
0:36:24 We collected data on over 1,300 coaches and it yielded a data set of over 10,000 coach
0:36:25 years.
0:36:30 But the data was even more robust than all that, both broader and deeper.
0:36:37 For example, if we’re just comparing quarterback’s coaches, we would hold constant passing yards,
0:36:42 passing touchdowns, interceptions, quarterback rating, et cetera, et cetera, of the players
0:36:44 that they coach.
0:36:49 For running backs, it would be rushing yards, rushing touchdowns, points scored.
0:36:56 We can do this at a team level, winning percentage, at a unit level, offensive or defensive efficiency,
0:37:02 and then we can standardize those so that they are comparable across positions.
0:37:09 That is, we can compare running backs’ coaches who are in the 90th percentile of performance
0:37:14 for running backs’ coaches to linebacker coaches who are in the 90th percentile of linebacker
0:37:16 coaches in terms of performance.
0:37:21 In addition to the objective performance metrics, we can hold constant a lot of factors in
0:37:26 the NFL that would be difficult or impossible to hold constant in another setting.
0:37:33 If a coach’s brother, father, or some other relative is coaching in the NFL, then we can
0:37:38 hold that constant and compare coaches who have kinship ties to those who don’t.
0:37:43 If a coach coached under a very established or successful coach like Bill Belichak or
0:37:46 Tony Dungey, we can hold that constant.
0:37:52 With all this data, Chris Ryder and his colleagues now tried to answer one key question.
0:37:56 Why are NFL head coaches disproportionately white men?
0:38:01 Their massive data set covered the NFL seasons from 1985 to 2015.
0:38:06 The Rooney Rule was implemented in 2003, roughly two-thirds of the way in.
0:38:12 We conduct a standard promotion analysis, which is we take all the coaches who are at
0:38:18 risk of being promoted to a higher level, and we model the likelihood that they are promoted
0:38:20 to a higher level at the end of the year.
0:38:23 We do that based on all of those factors.
0:38:29 Coaching position, coaching position, performance, kinship ties, networks, etc., etc.
0:38:31 And what do they find?
0:38:38 We find that all else equal, white coaches are approximately 60 to 70% more likely to
0:38:44 get promoted at the end of a season than coaches of color are, even when we hold constant all
0:38:46 of those factors.
0:38:49 And how about the impact of the Rooney Rule?
0:38:53 I believe that the Rooney Rule is likely effective.
0:38:58 If we search broad and wide for a candidate, we’re likely to have a diverse candidate slate,
0:39:04 and we should be more likely to hire a good candidate than if we zero in on a small segment
0:39:08 of the candidate pool and select only from that niche.
0:39:11 So intuitively, the Rooney Rule makes a lot of sense.
0:39:18 The challenge is producing evidence that makes that belief unequivocally supported.
0:39:20 So I have a proposition for an organization.
0:39:23 But there’s a leader out there that would like to settle this debate about the Rooney
0:39:24 Rule.
0:39:30 In January, when the coaching carousel comes to an end and the talking heads go on TV,
0:39:35 and we debate whether or not the Rooney Rule is effective, let’s put an end to that.
0:39:41 I just need one organization that hires many people, one leader who wants to run an A/B
0:39:47 test, a randomized controlled trial, where some jobs are subject to the Rooney Rule and
0:39:49 other jobs are not.
0:39:53 When all those positions are filled, let’s compare the representation among those that
0:39:57 were subject to the Rooney Rule and those that were not.
0:40:01 I will design the research, I will conduct the analysis for free.
0:40:03 I just need one organization.
0:40:10 And I think that if we have an organization that’s willing to do that, we can know within
0:40:15 the next year whether or not the Rooney Rule is effective, and if so, let’s adopt it broadly.
0:40:17 And if not, let’s try something else.
0:40:22 We asked Chris Ryder about an earlier research paper published in 2011, which found that
0:40:28 the Rooney Rule was not responsible for producing more minority head coaches.
0:40:33 We replicated that study, but we can only reproduce the result if we do one important thing, which
0:40:38 is we limit the analysis to coordinators only.
0:40:41 Coordinators, you will remember, are the head coaches’ lieutenants.
0:40:46 There are usually three per team overseeing the defense, offense, and special teams.
0:40:50 And when we limit the analysis to coordinators only, that is, we’ve dropped all the running
0:40:56 backs coaches and defensive backs coaches and special teams coaches from our analysis.
0:41:00 Now we find that there is no racial disparity in getting promoted from coordinator to head
0:41:01 coach.
0:41:06 This suggests that if you can make it to the coordinator level, you’ve got the same chance
0:41:09 of getting a head coaching job regardless of your race.
0:41:14 And coordinator is the prior position for about 80% of first-time head coaches.
0:41:17 So prior studies were incomplete.
0:41:24 They didn’t collect enough data to identify the racial disparity, which is at a lower
0:41:27 level than coordinator.
0:41:33 Those jobs are the one in which white coaches have a nearly 2X advantage in getting promoted
0:41:35 over coaches of color.
0:41:40 So ironically, the Rooney Rule was designed to increase leadership representation at the
0:41:42 head coach level.
0:41:48 So even if it was purely effective, it was being applied at too high a level to have
0:41:52 the kind of impact that proponents would like it to have.
0:41:58 What we do document is that if you look lower down the org chart, there is a huge disparity
0:42:01 in getting promoted to that number two job.
0:42:07 Now that Chris Ryder has done equity analysis on football coaches and lawyers, how does he
0:42:12 think about the equity conversations that other big institutions are having or maybe
0:42:13 not having?
0:42:19 Recently, we’ve seen a lot of organizations backtrack on DEI and specifically on equity.
0:42:20 Why?
0:42:24 Because it is difficult to define equity.
0:42:26 It causes debate.
0:42:28 It fosters disagreement.
0:42:31 What I think is fair is different from what you think is fair.
0:42:36 And I think that many organizations in doing this are missing the point of equity.
0:42:42 We should not expect to ever arrive at a uniform definition of fairness.
0:42:48 Leaders should be trying to integrate diverse notions of fairness in a way that recognizes
0:42:51 the diversity of an organization and a way that is inclusive of the people who are part
0:42:53 of that organization.
0:42:57 And only by doing that can we truly be equitable.
0:43:02 I would suggest that organizations that are giving up on equity because it’s hard to define
0:43:05 are missing the point.
0:43:10 As for the question of how the Rooney Rule has worked out for the organization that conceived
0:43:14 of it, the NFL, we went back to Jeremy Duru.
0:43:19 What would a team photo of this year’s 32 NFL head coaches look like?
0:43:25 So head coaches were at nine head coaches of color, six of whom are black, and the general
0:43:32 manager ranks were around nine general managers of color, presidents of color were at six,
0:43:35 and there were none up until five years ago.
0:43:40 Leaders of color, defensive side of the ball, about a third of the leagues, defensive coordinators
0:43:41 are of color.
0:43:44 On the offensive side of the ball, that’s where the huge gap is.
0:43:46 That’s where we’ve got no real representation.
0:43:52 When I hear those numbers for head coaches, coordinators, and major front office personnel,
0:43:56 they’re the ones who are making the decisions to hire future coaches.
0:43:59 That sounds like success, is it?
0:44:00 I think there’s success.
0:44:05 Now, you know, we must recognize there’s a spectrum of success.
0:44:09 If we reach the point at which we don’t need to be concerned about this, no.
0:44:15 One thing that we saw from 2017 through 2020 is how quickly there can be backsliding.
0:44:17 We have seen some success.
0:44:23 I think we’re on an upward trajectory, but you cannot take your foot off the pedal.
0:44:28 You cannot abandon commitment to thinking about how we ensure equity in organizations,
0:44:29 sports, or otherwise.
0:44:35 If you do that, I think you’re priming yourself for a real loss.
0:44:39 And thus concludes our two-part series on the Rooney Rule.
0:44:43 Thanks to everyone who spoke with us, Jeremy Duru, Chris Ryder, Scott Shepard, Tynesha
0:44:47 Boye Robinson, Herm Edwards, and especially Jim Rooney.
0:44:52 Jim Rooney wrote a book about his father, Dan, called A Different Way to Win.
0:44:56 There is a forthcoming audio version of the book that includes interviews with several
0:45:01 key Pittsburgh Steelers as well as current NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and former
0:45:03 Commissioner Paul Tagliapu.
0:45:09 Also, if you run any kind of big organization that hires a lot of people every year and
0:45:14 you want to help the Michigan Business Professor Chris Ryder run that experiment he mentioned
0:45:20 to see if the Rooney Rule really works, send an email to radio@freakonomics.com.
0:45:22 We will pass it along.
0:45:27 Coming up next time on the show, did you know that 60 percent of Americans today work in
0:45:31 jobs that didn’t exist in 1940?
0:45:35 We’re constantly thinking of new things to desire, new services to offer, new goods and
0:45:36 products.
0:45:41 But what happens is our labor becomes more digital and less physical.
0:45:46 Modern efficiency has robbed most of us of that profound satisfaction that comes from
0:45:51 baking a loaf of bread, digging a hole in the garden, going fishing.
0:45:54 There are still people doing physical work.
0:45:55 That’s Bob.
0:45:57 I’ve been up on that beam with him.
0:45:58 That’s the West Side Highway.
0:46:00 But we talk about all those new jobs, too.
0:46:04 Jobs that sometimes require an explanation.
0:46:06 It’s kind of nerve-wracking, I will be honest.
0:46:11 Do you ever find yourself asking what exactly do people do all day?
0:46:12 We did.
0:46:14 That’s next time on the show.
0:46:15 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:46:18 And if you can, someone else too.
0:46:21 Science Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:46:27 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:46:29 transcripts and show notes.
0:46:31 This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs.
0:46:36 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn,
0:46:41 Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnson,
0:46:46 John Schnarrs, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
0:46:48 Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski.
0:46:51 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:46:54 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:46:56 As always, thank you for listening.
0:47:14 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:47:15 Stitcher.
0:47:17 (upbeat music)
0:47:19 you

0:00:02 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:00:04 In case you somehow didn’t notice,
0:00:07 if you aren’t one of the tens of millions of people
0:00:09 watching on TV or placing some bets
0:00:13 or keeping up with the Taylor Swift news,
0:00:16 the National Football League has begun its new season.
0:00:19 The NFL is the richest sports league in history
0:00:23 and probably the most growth-obsessed as well.
0:00:26 One reason is that many team owners made their money
0:00:30 by building their own businesses– in real estate or oil,
0:00:33 in the HVAC industry, in America’s biggest
0:00:34 chain of truck stops.
0:00:37 That kind of business success requires a strong urge
0:00:39 to expand.
0:00:42 And so, not surprisingly, the NFL
0:00:44 is also driven by expansion.
0:00:46 There are more games per season than there used to be,
0:00:48 played in more places–
0:00:51 this year in England, Germany, and Brazil.
0:00:54 NFL games are distributed on just about every network
0:00:57 and streaming platform you’ve ever heard of,
0:00:58 and some you haven’t.
0:01:01 If you look at the top 100 TV broadcasts
0:01:05 last year in the US, you will see that 93 of them
0:01:06 were NFL games.
0:01:09 Among the others were the Oscars, the Macy’s Thanksgiving
0:01:13 Day Parade, and three college football games.
0:01:17 The NFL did around $13 billion in revenues last year,
0:01:20 and each of the 32 teams are worth, on average,
0:01:22 more than $5 billion.
0:01:25 That is much more than teams in any other sport.
0:01:28 Owning an NFL team has provided a route
0:01:30 for wealthy individuals or families
0:01:32 to become very wealthy.
0:01:35 This creates its own problem.
0:01:37 There can be a lot of taxes to pay when it’s time to sell,
0:01:40 and there just aren’t that many potential buyers
0:01:42 for a $5 billion asset–
0:01:44 at least the right kind of buyers.
0:01:47 The NFL was founded and run for decades
0:01:50 by a relatively small group of families,
0:01:53 and it has remained vigilant about who should be let in.
0:01:55 In Europe, the top soccer leagues
0:01:59 allow their teams to be owned by investment cartels
0:02:01 and oligarchs in Petro States.
0:02:04 The NFL doesn’t, not yet, at least,
0:02:06 although they did recently vote to allow private equity
0:02:09 investors to buy up to 10% of a team.
0:02:13 If they allowed 100%, they would likely
0:02:14 sell out in 10 minutes.
0:02:18 So great are the NFL’s prospects.
0:02:21 There is nothing predetermined about this massive financial
0:02:22 success.
0:02:25 Professional football was, for many years,
0:02:26 barely professional at all.
0:02:29 It was a ragged and violent game,
0:02:32 playing deep in the shadow of baseball and other sports.
0:02:34 But over the past 50 years, the NFL
0:02:37 has turned itself into an entertainment juggernaut.
0:02:40 The football games are, of course, at the center,
0:02:44 but the attendant swarms of media and gambling and merchandising
0:02:48 and eating and drinking are what make the NFL and industry
0:02:50 unto itself.
0:02:54 And it is, for the most part, an extremely well-run industry.
0:02:57 There is a premium put on modern management techniques
0:03:00 when it comes to resource allocation, on-field strategy
0:03:04 and off-field strategy, and personnel decisions.
0:03:06 Most of us, when we watch a game,
0:03:09 we concentrate on the players.
0:03:13 53 per team divided into defensive, offensive, and special teams
0:03:17 and units, each with their own systems and coaches.
0:03:20 The average NFL team has 23 coaches.
0:03:24 There’s the head coach, the offensive and defensive
0:03:26 and special teams coordinators, and then
0:03:29 a lot of position coaches, assistant coaches, quality
0:03:30 control coaches.
0:03:33 And that’s not even counting the training and medical staff,
0:03:36 the logistics people, and so on.
0:03:39 The head coach who sits atop this pyramid
0:03:43 is essentially the CEO of what happens on the football field.
0:03:47 It is an important, difficult, thrilling job
0:03:50 with a hefty turnover rate and an average tenure
0:03:52 of roughly three years.
0:03:55 The most successful teams in the league
0:03:57 excel at identifying talent.
0:03:59 So we thought it might be interesting
0:04:03 to look into how these multi-billion dollar franchises
0:04:07 choose their on-field CEOs, especially because there
0:04:10 is an obvious discrepancy in the NFL.
0:04:13 The majority of the players are black.
0:04:16 The majority of the coaches are not.
0:04:19 Today on Freakonomics Radio, why is that?
0:04:22 We don’t take enough time in the interview process.
0:04:25 We don’t interview enough different candidates.
0:04:27 And if I have to make a decision,
0:04:29 I’m going to make a decision of something
0:04:31 that’s familiar to me.
0:04:33 More than two decades ago, the league
0:04:35 came up with a policy to address this situation.
0:04:37 It is called the Rooney Rule.
0:04:41 We will hear about its history, its successes and failures,
0:04:44 and how the idea has spread outside of football.
0:04:46 They said, oh, George Floyd, that’s bad.
0:04:47 We don’t want to be bad.
0:04:48 We don’t want to be racist.
0:04:50 We’re going to fix diversity.
0:04:52 And has it fixed diversity?
0:04:55 I mean, what people do in the dark, you don’t know.
0:04:57 Those are just some of the questions
0:05:00 we’ll try to answer in this episode and next weeks, too.
0:05:03 Also, questions like this one.
0:05:09 How can I only get to go out and get my bell rung on Sundays
0:05:11 and I don’t get to be on the sidelines
0:05:14 or in the executive suites organizing the game?
0:05:18 This is your welcome to the NFL moment, starting now.
0:05:32 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that
0:05:36 explores the hidden side of everything with your host,
0:05:37 Stephen Dubner.
0:05:48 Imagine that your dream is to become a head coach
0:05:50 in the National Football League.
0:05:52 How likely are you to make it?
0:05:54 Not very likely.
0:05:56 There are only 32 of these jobs.
0:05:58 And up until now, they’ve always gone
0:06:01 to men of the men who currently hold those jobs, roughly
0:06:04 a third played professional football
0:06:06 and all but one played college football.
0:06:10 And even though the majority of NFL players are black,
0:06:12 for many decades, you weren’t going
0:06:15 to get a head coaching job unless you were white.
0:06:18 For a black former player to become a head coach,
0:06:20 there really wasn’t much of a path.
0:06:22 That is Jeremy Duru.
0:06:25 He’s a law professor at American University in Washington, DC.
0:06:28 And he directs the sport and society initiative
0:06:30 at AU’s Law School.
0:06:34 One reason for that goes back further historically, Stephen,
0:06:37 which is that black players were expurgated from the league
0:06:39 in 1934.
0:06:40 Yeah, talk about that a minute.
0:06:42 What we now know is the NFL began in 1920,
0:06:43 I believe, is that right?
0:06:44 Yes.
0:06:45 And there were black players, not a ton,
0:06:49 but there were black players and coaches as well, yeah?
0:06:52 In the very early days, you had a few black players.
0:06:54 You had one black head coach.
0:06:56 Amazingly, I mean, for those of us
0:06:58 who study American history, you know
0:07:01 how savage the racial discord was at the time,
0:07:04 for there to be a black head coach.
0:07:06 And the NFL was extraordinary.
0:07:10 And the coach, Fritz Pollard, is his name, was also a player.
0:07:12 And it wasn’t rare at the time to have player coaches.
0:07:14 But what’s important to recognize
0:07:17 is these players, they literally were
0:07:19 seeking to protect themselves on the field.
0:07:23 From opposing players, from teammates at practice,
0:07:27 Fritz had this thing where when you got knocked down,
0:07:30 he would as quickly as he could flip on to his back
0:07:31 and stick his feet up in the air
0:07:34 and start swinging them like he’s riding a bicycle
0:07:36 to basically protect himself from getting
0:07:39 crushed by people who were seeking to harm him.
0:07:42 That’s what we’re dealing with at the time.
0:07:44 And so there wasn’t a big black presence.
0:07:47 As of the early 1930s, there was a quote unquote
0:07:50 “gentleman’s agreement” among all owners in the league
0:07:53 to kick out black people all together.
0:07:56 And then Rooney bought in right around that time.
0:07:58 He had, in his previous business dealings,
0:08:00 been pretty even-handed.
0:08:02 One of the more even-handed business people
0:08:03 when it comes to race,
0:08:05 certainly in Pittsburgh, part of the East Coast.
0:08:07 But he went along with this gentleman’s agreement.
0:08:15 – My grandfather followed the ban on black players.
0:08:18 And he talked about that as being
0:08:20 the biggest mistake of his life.
0:08:23 – And that is Jim Rooney, who is now in his 50s.
0:08:25 – I grew up as part of a family business,
0:08:27 which is the Pittsburgh Steelers.
0:08:31 – The Steelers are still majority owned by Rooney’s.
0:08:33 The team president is Art Rooney II.
0:08:36 Before that, it was Dan Rooney, Jim Rooney’s father.
0:08:40 And before that, the original Art Rooney, the team’s founder.
0:08:44 Art Rooney came up as a boxer and a semi-pro baseball player.
0:08:47 And then he worked as a promoter and a professional gambler.
0:08:50 Through this combination of aboveboard
0:08:53 and maybe not so aboveboard work,
0:08:56 Art Rooney became a legend in Pittsburgh,
0:08:59 roguish for sure, if not quite a rogue.
0:09:03 I happen to know all this and much more, way too much,
0:09:06 because I have been a Steelers fan since I was a child
0:09:09 and I have a couple shelves full of Steelers books.
0:09:11 I’ve written one myself.
0:09:14 I now asked Jim Rooney to explain
0:09:17 how the Pittsburgh Steelers first came to be.
0:09:20 – There is a lifelong family debate on this story.
0:09:23 So you’re gonna get Jim Rooney’s version,
0:09:26 my great uncle Jim, had the semi-pro team,
0:09:28 and they were playing all over Western Pennsylvania.
0:09:30 – And we should say this is a time when
0:09:33 every Steel Mill, every little town,
0:09:35 they all had their own football teams, right?
0:09:36 – Yep.
0:09:40 So my grandfather had a good friend named Charlie Bidwell.
0:09:42 Charlie Bidwell owns the Chicago Cardinals,
0:09:44 which are now the Arizona Cardinals.
0:09:47 And the story goes that Charlie and Art Rooney
0:09:51 were running booze across the Great Lakes during prohibition.
0:09:55 And Bidwell says, “Hey Art, we’re putting a team in Philly.
0:09:57 Do you wanna put a team in Pittsburgh?”
0:10:00 And so my grandfather goes to Uncle Jim
0:10:02 and Jim owed Art like $5,000.
0:10:05 It was a lot of money for 1933.
0:10:05 – Wait a minute.
0:10:08 How does one brother end up owing another brother that much?
0:10:12 This is a cut from some project.
0:10:13 – Something went on with Uncle Jim.
0:10:16 Uncle Jim took risks and was always in a little bit of trouble.
0:10:18 So Uncle Jim owes the chief,
0:10:20 as my grandfather was known, $5,000.
0:10:24 And so my grandfather says, “Jim, if you give me that team,
0:10:26 I’m gonna put them in this national football league
0:10:28 and we’ll call it even.”
0:10:30 And so Jim’s response was,
0:10:32 “Art, I could never do that to you.
0:10:35 That national football league is not gonna make it.”
0:10:38 So thank God my grandfather pushed him a little bit
0:10:41 and took the team and put them into the national football league.
0:10:46 – So Pittsburgh got an NFL team in 1933.
0:10:48 They were originally called the Pirates,
0:10:50 same as the city’s baseball team.
0:10:54 But in 1940, Art Rooney renamed them as the Pittsburgh Steelers.
0:10:56 In 1938, they drafted a running back
0:11:00 from the University of Colorado named Byron “Wizard” White.
0:11:03 He led the NFL in rushing yards in his rookie season,
0:11:08 but he quit the Steelers to go back to school at Oxford.
0:11:11 And he eventually became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
0:11:13 For the Pittsburgh Steelers,
0:11:16 “Wizard” White was one of the few bright spots
0:11:19 in the first 40 years of their existence.
0:11:22 They were generally a terrible team.
0:11:26 The league itself, meanwhile, was starting to evolve.
0:11:31 In 1946, the NFL lifted its ban on black players.
0:11:32 Why?
0:11:34 Here again is Jeremy Duru.
0:11:38 – You get to 1946, the Rams moved to LA
0:11:40 and in order to play in the Coliseum
0:11:43 because of a substantial grassroots movement
0:11:45 headed by the black press out there,
0:11:49 it was determined that you couldn’t have a segregated league
0:11:51 coming into play games in the Coliseum.
0:11:55 So they were forced to bring in a couple of black players
0:11:56 and they did.
0:11:58 And that’s how you had black players come into the league.
0:12:01 – Black players in the 1940s, NFL encountered
0:12:03 the same verbal and physical abuse
0:12:05 that players faced in the ’20s.
0:12:08 And even though the NFL had reintegrated
0:12:10 the best college football programs of the time,
0:12:14 like Alabama, LSU and Texas, remained segregated.
0:12:18 So the best black players often played at HBCUs,
0:12:21 historically black colleges and universities
0:12:25 and were therefore overlooked by NFL scouts.
0:12:27 Black players who did make it to the NFL
0:12:30 often found their options limited.
0:12:33 – In those early days of reintegration,
0:12:36 black players were not permitted to play positions
0:12:39 that are viewed as quote unquote thinking positions,
0:12:43 quarterback, center, middle linebacker.
0:12:46 Black players were relegated to wide receiver,
0:12:48 cornerback, running back.
0:12:51 No, I do not seek to disparage those positions.
0:12:53 But at the time, those are positions that were viewed
0:12:55 as quote unquote brawn positions
0:12:57 and not the brain position.
0:13:00 – Those thinking positions also happen to be the positions
0:13:04 that produce a lot of future NFL coaches,
0:13:06 offensive coordinators, defensive coordinators
0:13:08 and head coaches especially.
0:13:12 So by excluding black players from those positions,
0:13:14 the league was also cutting off their best route
0:13:16 to a coaching future.
0:13:18 But not every team went along
0:13:20 with these unwritten rules around race.
0:13:22 Here’s Jim Rooney again.
0:13:26 – I think my grandfather and then my father in particular,
0:13:29 you know, made decisions with an open view
0:13:33 of morals, scruples and understanding that, you know,
0:13:35 yes, there was a business component.
0:13:38 He didn’t dismiss the business component,
0:13:40 but there was also this human element.
0:13:44 It was Dan Rooney, son of art, father of Jim,
0:13:47 who set this new direction for the Steelers.
0:13:48 By the early 1960s,
0:13:51 he was running the team’s day-to-day operations.
0:13:53 – As Dan took over the team,
0:13:57 he was really intentional and serious about diversity.
0:14:01 He was intentional and serious about making sure
0:14:03 that different perspectives were articulated,
0:14:05 different perspectives were considered
0:14:07 in respect to decisions that were made.
0:14:09 He hired this guy named Bill Nunn,
0:14:12 who was a reporter for Black newspaper in Pittsburgh,
0:14:14 who essentially criticized the Steelers
0:14:17 as talking about interest in diversity,
0:14:19 but not really backing it up.
0:14:23 – My father, he was invited by a parish priest
0:14:24 to march in Selma, Alabama.
0:14:26 He didn’t go.
0:14:28 Bill Nunn, a newspaper writer, said,
0:14:30 “Dan Rooney says he’s open to integration,
0:14:33 but really hasn’t done much more than anyone else.”
0:14:35 And that became the moment that my father sat down
0:14:38 with Bill and said, “Bill, you’re right.
0:14:40 I want to do this differently.
0:14:41 What can I do?”
0:14:44 – And he hired Bill Nunn to come in and scout for the team,
0:14:47 and Bill Nunn diversified the club
0:14:50 by going to HBCUs to look for players,
0:14:52 which few other clubs were doing.
0:14:56 And one, it made the Steelers a more diverse organization
0:14:58 and an organization open to forward
0:15:00 and interesting and progressive thinking about race.
0:15:02 And two, it made them better
0:15:04 because they tapped pools of talent
0:15:06 and nobody else was tapping.
0:15:08 – What were some things that the Steelers were doing
0:15:11 that made black players and coaches at black schools
0:15:13 so comfortable with their players going there?
0:15:16 – I think so much of it was Bill
0:15:19 because Bill didn’t just go and look at tape.
0:15:21 He would spend the weekend there.
0:15:26 He always wanted to see the players’ athletic ability
0:15:30 outside of the arena where things could be managed
0:15:31 by their coaches.
0:15:33 If there was family around,
0:15:35 he would try to talk to their family,
0:15:40 really try to understand the entire persona of a player,
0:15:43 and then he could make a really strong recommendation
0:15:46 because there was less data.
0:15:48 What he did was amazing.
0:15:50 Bill helped change the NFL.
0:15:53 – What’s the Steelers’ organization doing
0:15:55 once the players get there
0:15:57 to make it a place where they wanna go?
0:15:59 – I think the biggest was hiring Bill,
0:16:02 but after Bill was naming Joe Gilliam
0:16:04 as the quarterback in 1974.
0:16:07 So this was the first time in NFL history
0:16:09 that prior to the start of the season,
0:16:11 a black man was named starting quarterback.
0:16:13 – That’s right.
0:16:15 It took 28 years from when black players
0:16:17 were allowed back into the NFL
0:16:20 until a team announced a black starting quarterback
0:16:22 at the beginning of the season.
0:16:25 But with the Steelers, it went further than that.
0:16:28 Black players on the Steelers were empowered to step up
0:16:30 under this new era of leadership.
0:16:32 There was team president Dan Rooney,
0:16:34 the influential scout Bill Nunn,
0:16:38 and a future Hall of Fame coach named Chuck Knowle.
0:16:42 Knowle did not fit any football coach stereotypes.
0:16:44 He was a deep reader, an intellectual,
0:16:46 and a lover of classical music
0:16:49 who saw himself as more teacher than drill sergeant.
0:16:51 He was always telling his players that football
0:16:54 was just one brief chapter of their existence
0:16:56 and that they had to prepare themselves
0:16:58 for what he called their life’s work.
0:17:01 Keep in mind that players made much less money then.
0:17:03 Most of them had full-time jobs in the off season
0:17:05 to support themselves.
0:17:08 – The decision that Chuck made
0:17:11 to start Joe Gilliam, several of the HBCU players,
0:17:15 told me that that moment meant so much to them
0:17:16 because it said to them,
0:17:19 okay, if they’re willing to start a quarterback,
0:17:22 then I know if I’m the best defensive back
0:17:25 or if I’m the best linebacker, I’m the best tackle,
0:17:27 I’m gonna have an opportunity here.
0:17:29 That decision was key.
0:17:31 Then I think the next big milestone
0:17:34 was Joe Green becoming captain.
0:17:37 – Joe Green, known as Mean Joe Green,
0:17:39 was a defensive lineman who had been scouted
0:17:41 by Bill Nunn out of North Texas State.
0:17:45 He was huge, very physical, and, well, mean,
0:17:47 at least on the field,
0:17:49 especially at the start of his career.
0:17:52 The Steelers had drafted Green in 1969
0:17:54 and he quickly became the foundation of a defense
0:17:57 that was known as the Steel Curtain.
0:18:00 It was clear that Joe was the leader of the team.
0:18:02 He had those two phenomenal qualities in the leader.
0:18:06 He was ferocious and he had that ability to intimidate,
0:18:07 and I’m not saying leaders should be intimidating
0:18:08 all the time, but there’s a time
0:18:12 you have to get a group of people to line up.
0:18:15 But then, once you got Joe’s stamp of approval,
0:18:18 he showed this care for them and their families
0:18:22 that was just the essence of what any locker room would want.
0:18:26 – By the mid-1970s, the Steelers looked markedly different
0:18:28 than most other NFL teams.
0:18:31 More black players, more black leadership,
0:18:34 and an unusual sense of cohesion.
0:18:37 Now, none of this would be remembered today,
0:18:39 except for the fact that this unusual team,
0:18:44 after 40 years of losing, finally began to win.
0:18:45 – It’s all over.
0:18:48 – The Steelers went on one of the most historic hot streaks
0:18:52 in sports history, winning four Super Bowls in six years.
0:18:53 – With his great victory.
0:18:56 They beat the Minnesota Vikings in 1975.
0:18:59 – The Steelers are the Super Bowl champions.
0:19:01 – The Dallas Cowboys in 1976.
0:19:03 – Our repeat champion.
0:19:05 – Cowboys again in 1979.
0:19:07 – Steelers have won it.
0:19:09 – And the Los Angeles Rams in 1980.
0:19:12 – Victoria’s in Super Bowl 14.
0:19:14 – And in the midst of this, in 1977,
0:19:17 the Steelers picked up an undrafted player
0:19:20 whose name you will know if you’re a football fan.
0:19:24 Tony Dungey comes in, is an okay football player,
0:19:27 but Chuck Noll immediately sees how brilliant he is,
0:19:31 and then hires him as an assistant coach.
0:19:35 He becomes, at a very young age, I think he was 29,
0:19:40 he becomes the first black man and youngest person
0:19:43 ever to be named defensive coordinator of an NFL team.
0:19:47 So Chuck saw how talented Dungey was,
0:19:50 and then Tony goes on to have the amazing career he’s had.
0:19:52 – By now, other teams had taken notice
0:19:55 of the Steelers’ success with black talent,
0:19:57 and they began to copy the scouting strategy
0:19:59 established by Bill Nunn.
0:20:03 In 1959, before Nunn joined the Steelers,
0:20:05 only 12% of NFL players were black.
0:20:09 By the 1990s, around two-thirds were.
0:20:11 And how about coaches?
0:20:15 Through the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s and most of the ’80s,
0:20:18 Fritz Pollard remained the only black head coach
0:20:19 in NFL history.
0:20:22 But that finally changed in 1989,
0:20:24 when Oakland Raiders owner, Al Davis,
0:20:26 named his former lineman, Art Shell,
0:20:28 as the team’s head coach.
0:20:32 Dan Rooney, who came from a long line of Irish Catholics,
0:20:35 was a soft-spoken consensus builder.
0:20:38 Al Davis, from a Brooklyn Jewish family,
0:20:42 was more aggressive and more willing to go off on his own.
0:20:45 – You know, Al Davis was very different than my father,
0:20:49 but both Al and Dan had this fundamental respect
0:20:52 for people and were interested
0:20:55 in overcoming these barriers.
0:20:57 – To Jim Rooney, the late ’80s were a time
0:20:59 when a lot of barriers were coming down.
0:21:02 – In 1989, you had Art Shell hired,
0:21:05 you had what was going on in the world,
0:21:08 where the Berlin Wall was coming down,
0:21:10 Russia was starting to fall apart.
0:21:12 You had this sense of great change,
0:21:16 and the NFL was in a massive change era as well.
0:21:18 You got a new commissioner.
0:21:21 Paul Tagliaboo was a young, up-and-coming person
0:21:24 who had a very open world view.
0:21:27 You had the sense then that things were moving
0:21:29 and were going to only move in that direction.
0:21:34 – So did things keep moving in that direction in the NFL?
0:21:36 That would be a no.
0:21:37 – This is outrageous.
0:21:39 How can a guy like Dungey get fired?
0:21:40 – That’s After the Break.
0:21:42 I’m Stephen Dovner, and you are listening
0:21:43 to Freakonomics Radio.
0:21:45 I hope you will spread the word about this show,
0:21:49 maybe give it a review or rating in your podcast app.
0:21:52 Those are great ways to support the shows you love.
0:21:53 We will be right back.
0:21:59 (dramatic music)
0:22:05 In 1997, National Football League commissioner Paul Tagliaboo
0:22:07 appointed Harold Henderson as the league’s
0:22:10 executive vice president for labor relations.
0:22:12 This made Henderson one of the highest ranking
0:22:16 black executives in professional sports.
0:22:18 Given all the momentum we were hearing about
0:22:20 before the break, you might think that a lot
0:22:24 of NFL teams by now would have hired a black head coach.
0:22:27 After all, across the league’s 32 teams,
0:22:29 more than half the players were black
0:22:32 and many head coaches are former players.
0:22:35 But the decision to hire a coach is a team decision,
0:22:39 not a decision made by some executive in the league office.
0:22:42 And the team owners were white.
0:22:45 Here again is the legal scholar Jeremy Duru.
0:22:47 – The easiest way to think about it
0:22:51 is that the NFL is like an umbrella organization.
0:22:55 And under that umbrella, you have 32 different clubs
0:22:57 that are their own businesses.
0:23:00 They’ve got their own owners, they’ve got their own presidents,
0:23:03 they’ve got their own culture, they’ve got their own policies.
0:23:07 The umbrella seeks to organize them in a way
0:23:09 such that they can have competitive games
0:23:13 against each other and a league in which to play.
0:23:17 I think that the casual observer would view the commissioner
0:23:19 as in charge of this whole thing.
0:23:22 And the commissioner is the head of the league.
0:23:26 But who hires the commissioner, the owners.
0:23:27 The owners hire the commissioner.
0:23:30 The owners have the power to not renew
0:23:32 the contract of the commissioner.
0:23:35 At the end of the day, these are individual businesses
0:23:37 and it’s very important to understand that.
0:23:41 And so each team, specifically the owner of each team,
0:23:43 someone who is accustomed to operating
0:23:46 as the master of his personal universe,
0:23:50 he is free to adopt whatever hiring policy he wants.
0:23:53 But by the end of the 2000 NFL season,
0:23:57 there had only been five black head coaches in league history.
0:23:59 If nothing else, the optics were not good.
0:24:02 – Football, it is a collision sport.
0:24:04 There is violence in the sport.
0:24:09 And the idea of a team is predominantly black
0:24:14 being sent out into essentially sport related combat
0:24:18 by a group of people who are entirely white,
0:24:22 who are standing outside on the sidelines looking on.
0:24:23 It’s a painful picture.
0:24:27 It harkens back to the days of battle royales
0:24:29 and other exploitation of black athletes.
0:24:32 And so I think inside those org–
0:24:34 – I mean, to say nothing of slavery, let’s be honest.
0:24:35 – Yeah, right.
0:24:39 It was painful for athletes in those organizations.
0:24:40 I don’t think they’re saying,
0:24:43 hey, listen, we need all of the coaching staff to be black.
0:24:45 But there’s gotta be a thought,
0:24:48 well, how can I only get to go out
0:24:51 and get my bell rung on Sundays
0:24:53 and I don’t get to be on the sidelines
0:24:57 or in the executive suites organizing the game?
0:24:58 – Whether it’s wins and losses
0:25:03 or the spirit and camaraderie
0:25:06 or friction, et cetera, of a team,
0:25:08 talk about the ways in which a team
0:25:12 that may be 60 or 70% black players,
0:25:16 how it’s different under a black head coach or coordinators
0:25:18 or a white head coach or coordinators.
0:25:20 – For those who don’t follow football,
0:25:22 I mean, one way to look at it is the head coach
0:25:24 is like the CEO of this team.
0:25:26 They are making the decisions.
0:25:27 They are running things.
0:25:29 They are the model at the top.
0:25:33 They’re the one who gives a last word before a game.
0:25:34 They’re the one who decides
0:25:36 what sort of schedule we’re gonna have.
0:25:39 It’s all in the head coach’s purview.
0:25:42 The black head coaches and their white head coaches
0:25:44 who have been deeply successful
0:25:49 on the interpersonal level with black players.
0:25:52 But I think there’s something important
0:25:54 for a black player to recognize
0:25:57 that there’s at least some black representation
0:25:58 on the coaching staff.
0:26:02 I’m responsible for that player’s wellbeing.
0:26:03 Head coach, or otherwise.
0:26:06 – Frustration around the absence of black coaches
0:26:10 seemed to hit a peak around the 2001 NFL season
0:26:13 when two black head coaches, two of only five in history,
0:26:14 were fired.
0:26:16 They both had winning records
0:26:18 and had both taken their teams to the playoffs
0:26:20 multiple times.
0:26:21 Those are the kind of accomplishments
0:26:25 that tend to not get you fired as an NFL head coach.
0:26:27 One of the fired coaches was Dennis Green
0:26:29 of the Minnesota Vikings.
0:26:32 The other was Tony Dungey of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
0:26:35 Dungey, you will remember, got his start with the Steelers
0:26:38 as a player and then as a very young coach
0:26:41 handpicked by Chuck Knoll.
0:26:44 The firing of Tony Dungey now caught the attention
0:26:47 of Dan Rooney, the Steelers’ owner and president.
0:26:50 Here again is his son Jim Rooney.
0:26:52 – So Dungey comes into the Steelers in ’77.
0:26:56 He and my father build a really close partnership.
0:26:58 And my father sees throughout the ’80s
0:27:03 and then the ’90s, he sees and has this ongoing conversation
0:27:07 with Tony about job interviews.
0:27:11 And my father sees the dehumanization.
0:27:13 They both talked to me about this
0:27:17 and the impact that had on my father to see someone
0:27:19 that he knew was better than so many folks
0:27:22 who were getting interviews and getting jobs
0:27:26 and saying, you know, this is just completely wrong.
0:27:28 – But Tony Dungey finally did get his chance
0:27:30 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
0:27:33 only to lose his job after six seasons.
0:27:36 Jim Rooney remembers his father’s reaction.
0:27:39 – I remember him just being really disillusioned.
0:27:40 You know, this is outrageous.
0:27:43 How can a guy like Dungey get fired?
0:27:44 There’s these different moments in life
0:27:46 where bad things happen
0:27:48 and they become the catalyst to change.
0:27:52 – Let me say two things here.
0:27:56 The first is that Tony Dungey did get another chance
0:27:58 with the Indianapolis Colts
0:28:01 and Dungey led the Colts to a Super Bowl victory.
0:28:04 So happy ending there.
0:28:05 The other thing to say is this.
0:28:10 Jim Rooney is an unabashed fan of his late father, Dan.
0:28:11 He wrote a book about his father
0:28:14 called A Different Way to Win.
0:28:17 Most books written by an offspring, he writes,
0:28:19 fall into one of two categories,
0:28:22 a tell-all or a beatification.
0:28:25 This book falls into the latter.
0:28:27 Jim Rooney argues that his father
0:28:29 was successful with the Steelers
0:28:32 because of the kind of person he was.
0:28:35 Honest, humble, compassionate.
0:28:38 He wasn’t colorful like his father, the chief,
0:28:41 but Dan Rooney cared about building things well,
0:28:43 running things well,
0:28:45 and he didn’t need to get the credit.
0:28:47 These traits also made him valuable
0:28:52 to his fellow NFL owners and to the league itself.
0:28:55 Rooney was heavily involved in labor relations,
0:28:58 league strategy, broadcast negotiations, and more.
0:29:01 He had the ear of other owners when he needed it
0:29:05 and when other owners needed to be broad in line,
0:29:07 it was often Rooney who did that.
0:29:12 And now in 2001, we know that Rooney was steamed
0:29:14 about what had happened to Tony Dungey.
0:29:16 Here’s Jeremy Duru again.
0:29:19 – Tony Dungey got fired by the Buccaneers.
0:29:21 Not only had he been successful,
0:29:25 but he took the organization from pure doormat status
0:29:28 and made them a contender every year
0:29:30 after he was fired and Dennis Green was fired.
0:29:33 This is after the 2001 season.
0:29:38 We now had one coach of color in this league of 32 clubs,
0:29:41 one head coach of color, league of 32 clubs,
0:29:42 and it was just crazy.
0:29:44 – Around this time, Duru was working
0:29:47 for a Washington law firm called Mary and Scallop.
0:29:51 They specialize in employment discrimination cases.
0:29:54 Cyrus Mary is an Iranian-American attorney
0:29:56 who had successfully brought racial discrimination cases
0:29:58 against Coca-Cola and Texaco
0:30:01 and was now suing Johnson & Johnson.
0:30:03 His co-counsel on the Johnson & Johnson case
0:30:06 was the superstar black attorney, Johnny Cochran,
0:30:10 who had successfully defended OJ Simpson on murder charges.
0:30:12 – And so Cyrus and Johnny,
0:30:15 I think during a break from a deposition,
0:30:18 they were working on that case just after Tony Dungey
0:30:20 got fired by the Buccaneers
0:30:23 and Dennis Green got fired by the Vikings.
0:30:25 We’re just talking in the break room.
0:30:28 You guys see what happened and I felt it was ridiculous.
0:30:29 And they were like, you know what?
0:30:31 What we’re seeing there is reflective of the work
0:30:33 that we do in employment discrimination
0:30:35 or civil rights work.
0:30:37 We need to dig into this a little bit.
0:30:39 – And what was the next step?
0:30:43 – They figured, okay, all the anecdotes in the world
0:30:46 may have some impact, but let’s get some stats on this.
0:30:48 So they commissioned a study.
0:30:50 They got someone named Janice Madden,
0:30:53 a labor economist at University of Pennsylvania.
0:30:55 They asked her if she would study
0:30:58 the previous 15 years of the NFL
0:31:00 and see how blackhead coaches
0:31:03 were stacking up to whitehead coaches.
0:31:07 Cyrus and Johnny, they get this report from Janice Madden.
0:31:11 The report indicated that in the first year,
0:31:16 a blackhead coach won 2.7 more games in the whitehead coach.
0:31:18 – Which is a lot in the league of only…
0:31:19 – That’s exactly right.
0:31:20 16 game season, right?
0:31:23 I mean, that is through the roof high.
0:31:27 And in the season of termination, they won 1.3 more.
0:31:28 Overall, they won more.
0:31:30 They went to the playoffs more often
0:31:31 as a percentage matter.
0:31:34 They were, according to the numbers, better.
0:31:37 And the conclusion from the report
0:31:38 was not that black coaches
0:31:41 are somehow inherently better coaches.
0:31:43 The conclusion was that black coaches
0:31:46 had been made to apprentice so long
0:31:49 in assistant positions that when they became head coaches
0:31:51 they were just better as a matter, you know?
0:31:54 And so Cyrus and Johnny had a press conference
0:31:57 releasing the report and they also sent it to the league.
0:31:59 And during the press conference,
0:32:03 Johnny said, “If they don’t negotiate, we will litigate.”
0:32:06 And so essentially in sending it to the NFL,
0:32:08 it was sent with the litigation threat.
0:32:11 – So what would it be like to be an owner in 2002
0:32:13 and hear Johnny Cochran say,
0:32:17 hey, if you don’t negotiate, we’re happy to litigate.
0:32:19 What’s the perspective of the owner there?
0:32:22 – I think a lot of the owners are saying, okay, go get it.
0:32:24 Let’s see what happens if you litigate.
0:32:25 To be quite frank,
0:32:27 I think that is what a lot of folks were saying,
0:32:28 but not everybody.
0:32:30 And here’s where the rubber met the road
0:32:32 in a very interesting way.
0:32:35 The NFL at the time, the league office now,
0:32:38 there is a recognition that they’ve got a problem.
0:32:42 The NFL recognized that the numbers were bad
0:32:44 and the media was telling them about it as well.
0:32:45 So they felt like they had to do something.
0:32:49 And so when this threat came in,
0:32:51 there was a decision made.
0:32:53 Paul Tagliabu was the commissioner.
0:32:54 I’ll give him credit.
0:32:57 Jeff Pash was the general counsel of the league at the time
0:33:00 and still is, I’ll give him credit.
0:33:03 These folks were saying, we’ve got to do something
0:33:06 rather than just bleeding them
0:33:08 with a thousand cuts and litigation,
0:33:09 which they could have done.
0:33:11 The NFL is so highly capitalized.
0:33:14 They could have fought them and probably wouldn’t have won.
0:33:17 They said, why don’t you come in and let’s talk about this.
0:33:20 There were some other key figures getting involved
0:33:21 like John Wooten.
0:33:24 He was a black former NFL player
0:33:27 who had also worked as an executive at a few NFL teams
0:33:29 and came to chair an advocacy group
0:33:31 called the Fritz Pollard Alliance,
0:33:35 named for that first black head coach way back in 1920.
0:33:38 So the NFL was ready to talk.
0:33:40 The advocates were ready to talk.
0:33:42 And how about the team owners,
0:33:46 the ones who actually hire the football coaches?
0:33:48 Among the owners,
0:33:51 you would have found considerably less enthusiasm.
0:33:55 But Dan Rooney of the Steelers was an exception.
0:33:58 Dan Rooney recognized that what these lawyers
0:34:00 were talking about was something
0:34:03 that the league had to engage and embrace.
0:34:06 And Dan Rooney was trying to get other owners in the league
0:34:09 to do something to try to increase equity.
0:34:13 And what was the something then that was decided upon?
0:34:18 So the report that I mentioned was in late September of 2002.
0:34:21 And over the course of the following three months,
0:34:23 the lawyers were brought in to meet.
0:34:27 The owners had their own internal meetings.
0:34:29 They talked to their outside counsel.
0:34:32 There was a great deal of resistance.
0:34:34 But there seemed to be some sort of galvanization
0:34:36 around this idea,
0:34:40 which the lawyers called the Fair Competition Resolution,
0:34:41 which was a requirement
0:34:44 that every club interview at least one person of color
0:34:46 before making a head coach hire.
0:34:50 – So this new idea is to have one minority candidate
0:34:52 be among the interviewees.
0:34:55 Was there also any kind of rule or requirement
0:34:58 about the number of interviewees for an open position?
0:35:01 – No, at the time there was no rule about that.
0:35:04 The idea was just, hey, have one person of color.
0:35:06 And there was a great deal of resistance.
0:35:08 There’s one really interesting meeting
0:35:11 where the NFL brought their outside counsel,
0:35:13 a guy named Tom Williamson,
0:35:16 to talk to the owners at the owners meeting
0:35:18 about why this might be a good idea.
0:35:19 And the owners are saying,
0:35:23 well, you can’t tell me who to hire and this and that.
0:35:27 And Tom says, look, we’re getting crushed in the press.
0:35:29 We have ridiculous disproportionality
0:35:32 between our head coaches and our players.
0:35:34 What better idea do you have?
0:35:39 And all these billionaire owners had nothing to say.
0:35:42 And so out of that meeting came this idea
0:35:44 that you know what, maybe we should try this.
0:35:46 And Dan Rooney worked to get support
0:35:47 from all the other owners.
0:35:52 – My father felt that it was important
0:35:55 that you get a complete consensus.
0:35:57 That again is Jim Rooney.
0:35:59 You had a couple of folks hold out
0:36:00 and you had Al Davis,
0:36:02 who really has been a leader in diversity
0:36:05 holding out for a while saying, I already do this.
0:36:08 I think he was scolding the league a little bit.
0:36:10 But eventually my father said to Al,
0:36:12 well, if you’re doing it, then you’re already in agreement.
0:36:14 And Al kind of nodded to my father and said,
0:36:16 okay, Dan, you win this one.
0:36:19 And then Mike Brown of the Bengals,
0:36:21 my father had a conversation with Mike,
0:36:24 whose father, Paul Brown, really invented modern football.
0:36:28 And Paul Brown’s history with black players is mixed.
0:36:32 So it was getting not just enough consensus
0:36:33 where you had majority,
0:36:35 but really getting to the point
0:36:37 where you had a unanimous vote.
0:36:38 – There were holdouts,
0:36:42 but ultimately Dan Rooney was able to wrangle everybody.
0:36:46 And out of this came this idea,
0:36:50 well, Dan Rooney was the strongest proponent inside for this.
0:36:52 Let’s call it the Rooney Rule.
0:36:58 – And so the Rooney Rule became reality in the NFL.
0:36:59 How did it work out?
0:37:00 After the break,
0:37:03 we speak with one former black head coach.
0:37:06 – In the beginning it was a good rule to put in.
0:37:08 – But it soon got complicated.
0:37:09 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:37:11 This is Freakin’omics Radio.
0:37:12 We’ll be right back.
0:37:23 (dramatic music)
0:37:25 – Before the break,
0:37:28 we heard the history that led the NFL to adopt
0:37:31 a novel hiring policy called the Rooney Rule,
0:37:34 which mandated that when a team was hiring a head coach,
0:37:37 they had to interview at least one minority candidate.
0:37:38 The goal was to ensure
0:37:42 that qualified minority candidates didn’t get overlooked.
0:37:46 Or as the legal scholar Jeremy Duru puts it,
0:37:49 you know, “Fish the whole pond, fish the whole pond.”
0:37:52 One idea behind fishing the whole pond
0:37:55 in any hiring process, not just the NFL,
0:37:57 is to make sure that your own cognitive biases
0:38:00 don’t overwhelm your search for the best candidate,
0:38:03 that you don’t give in to familiarity
0:38:06 and hire someone who feels right for the part
0:38:11 or someone who, in this case, looks like a football coach.
0:38:13 – One of the things that the Rooney Rule does
0:38:15 is it slows down processes, right?
0:38:18 It forces you to slow down.
0:38:22 We talk a lot about how important it is to slow down
0:38:25 your decision-making process and be more intentional
0:38:27 and deliberate.
0:38:31 When you are grinding in a short period of time
0:38:35 to make a decision, you generally retreat
0:38:37 to what’s comfortable.
0:38:41 And if you are running an organization
0:38:46 and you are white, you generally retreat to whiteness.
0:38:48 You retreat to hiring someone who is like you,
0:38:51 and not even on a conscious level.
0:38:54 But if you take time and you release some of that pressure
0:38:56 and you’re a little more open and intentional
0:38:59 about thinking broadly, then you don’t retreat
0:39:02 into that safety space as much.
0:39:04 And I think you have a better opportunity
0:39:06 to make a decision that’s ultimately better
0:39:08 for you and your organization.
0:39:14 – So what happened in the early days of the Rooney Rule?
0:39:18 – We have one head coach of color after 2001.
0:39:21 The following year, there were three head coaches of color.
0:39:22 The following year was up to five
0:39:24 and in a few years, it was up to eight.
0:39:28 So there really did seem to be progress being made.
0:39:31 – One of those black coaches, Marvin Lewis,
0:39:34 had been hired by Mike Brown of the Cincinnati Bengals.
0:39:37 As we mentioned earlier, Brown had been one of the holdouts
0:39:39 on the Rooney Rule vote.
0:39:43 And yet, Mike Brown, he put together a textbook
0:39:46 interview process in light of the Rooney Rule.
0:39:50 It’s important to note that the time the Bengals were terrible
0:39:55 and there was a sense that, you know, we need discipline here.
0:39:58 Mike Brown went out and one person who was available
0:39:59 was Tom Coughlin.
0:40:02 So Tom Coughlin is a coach who’s had a lot of success
0:40:05 in the league and was known as a disciplinarian.
0:40:07 Seemed like he’d be the perfect solution
0:40:08 to the Bengals problem.
0:40:10 And so Mike Brown interviewed him
0:40:14 but also interviewed Marvin Lewis,
0:40:18 who was defensive coordinator with the Ravens long time.
0:40:20 Even though he didn’t fit what appeared
0:40:22 to be the mold the Bengals wanted,
0:40:26 they went through the process, they interviewed him,
0:40:28 they brought him back for a second one.
0:40:31 They were impressed by him and they hired him.
0:40:34 He turned around the club the next year,
0:40:36 went to eight and eight after I think the club
0:40:38 won two games a year before.
0:40:40 – And he ended up being there forever, yeah?
0:40:42 – Forever, ended up being there forever.
0:40:44 – So when you look back at that incident
0:40:47 with an owner who was not enthusiastic
0:40:48 but went through the process
0:40:50 and ended up hiring a black coach
0:40:51 who proved to be very successful.
0:40:54 I mean, that sounds like the poster boy situation
0:40:55 for your argument, yes?
0:40:57 – Yeah, that was the poster for the argument.
0:41:01 – In the beginning, it was a good rule to put in.
0:41:03 – That is Herm Edwards.
0:41:06 He played in the NFL, coached in the NFL.
0:41:10 And today he is an NFL analyst for ESPN.
0:41:12 I mean pro football, I’ve been in this league
0:41:14 for over 30 years.
0:41:16 – Edwards’ father was a black man
0:41:17 with a long career in the US Army.
0:41:20 He met his wife while stationed in Germany
0:41:21 after World War II.
0:41:24 Herm Edwards has said that being in an interracial marriage
0:41:26 was hard on his parents,
0:41:29 but that there was no bitterness from my mom or dad.
0:41:31 We just marched on.
0:41:35 For Herm Edwards, football was part of that march.
0:41:37 – I’m indebted to the game of football.
0:41:39 And it started for me in high school.
0:41:41 And then obviously from there to college
0:41:43 and professional football as a player
0:41:46 and then as a coach, assistant coach, a scout.
0:41:48 – Edwards had a 10-year career playing cornerback
0:41:51 in the NFL before he moved into coaching.
0:41:54 Tony Dungey is a part of this story too.
0:41:58 – Tony gets hired in Tampa and I go with Tony and become–
0:42:00 – Your defensive backs or DC and Tampa?
0:42:03 – I was a defensive backs, but I was the assistant head coach.
0:42:04 And that was the key.
0:42:06 Tony said, when he brought me down there, he said,
0:42:08 “Look, you can go a lot of places in college
0:42:09 and go be a coordinator.”
0:42:10 He said, “You don’t need to do that.
0:42:12 I’m gonna teach you how to be a head coach.”
0:42:15 And he gave me a lot of responsibility as a head coach.
0:42:17 – You’re the same age, roughly, yes?
0:42:20 – Yes, came into league at the same time, exactly right.
0:42:21 – So what did he do?
0:42:22 What did he show you?
0:42:23 What did he teach you?
0:42:25 – So all the meetings that he would be in
0:42:28 with the general managers, with the owners, the draft,
0:42:30 all those things behind closed doors
0:42:32 where the head coach is involved in it,
0:42:34 I would sit in there.
0:42:36 He would make decisions like training camp.
0:42:37 He’d go down to training camp, schedule in.
0:42:40 And I would ask him, I said, “Now, Tony, why did you do this?”
0:42:42 And he would say, “Well, I did it ’cause this reason.”
0:42:43 – Give me an example.
0:42:44 What’s something he would do?
0:42:45 – You know, something simple.
0:42:47 Why are you giving him an off day here?
0:42:50 And he’d go, “Well, because we’re gonna do this,
0:42:51 this and this.”
0:42:53 And then he looked at me, would tell me this.
0:42:56 He said, “Herm, you might do it different,
0:42:58 but I’m gonna give you knowledge.
0:42:59 You don’t have to follow everything I do
0:43:02 because you gotta look at it out of your eyes
0:43:04 and it’s okay.”
0:43:07 And so I sat there for, I don’t know how long,
0:43:10 for about five years, and this was kind of interesting.
0:43:13 I had chances after my second year there
0:43:15 to go to places to be a coordinator.
0:43:18 And he goes, “You don’t wanna do that.”
0:43:19 And I said, “Because why?”
0:43:21 – Well, because you get stuck.
0:43:23 – Because you weren’t ready or?
0:43:24 – No, Tony said, “No, just stay here.”
0:43:26 He said, “You’re gonna be a head coach.”
0:43:27 – Interesting.
0:43:30 So he was grooming you from the beginning to be a head coach.
0:43:31 – He was grooming me from the beginning.
0:43:34 And it was interesting because I could have went to college.
0:43:36 And he goes, “You don’t wanna do that.”
0:43:38 He said, “You need to be an NFL head coach.”
0:43:39 And he was right.
0:43:41 (upbeat music)
0:43:44 – In 2001, before the Rooney Rule was adopted,
0:43:47 Herm Edwards became the sixth black head coach
0:43:48 in NFL history.
0:43:51 He spent several seasons coaching the New York Jets,
0:43:53 another few with the Kansas City Chiefs,
0:43:55 and eventually he did take a college head coaching job
0:43:57 at Arizona State University.
0:44:00 Edwards did not have a great coaching record.
0:44:02 That’s why he’s a broadcaster now.
0:44:05 But he did get the opportunity.
0:44:08 He recognizes that his path was easier than most,
0:44:12 thanks to the mentorship of Tony Dungey.
0:44:15 So why does Edwards think that the Rooney Rule was,
0:44:17 as he put it, good in the beginning?
0:44:19 – Well, because it slowed guys down
0:44:21 from hiring their buddies.
0:44:22 This is a big job.
0:44:23 When you get ready to hire somebody,
0:44:25 you wanna know some information.
0:44:27 Owners talk, they say, “You interviewed this guy,
0:44:29 “you interviewed that guy, what did it look like?”
0:44:31 Well, he did okay, he didn’t do okay, whatever.
0:44:32 They all speak.
0:44:35 So in the beginning, it forced you to slow down.
0:44:37 Because what used to happen,
0:44:39 the teams had gotten to playoffs,
0:44:40 those are the guys you went after.
0:44:41 When they lost, like some of these dudes
0:44:43 couldn’t even interview when they were in the playoffs.
0:44:45 Really, I had to lose a game to get an interview.
0:44:48 And then sometimes the job would be gone.
0:44:49 Because the time you got out of the playoffs,
0:44:52 it was too late, they wanted to hire somebody.
0:44:54 So I tried to be an optimist about this
0:44:56 because I’ve been in the league for so long
0:44:58 and I’ve watched it grow.
0:45:01 And wherever I’ve been, I’ve been the first black head coach.
0:45:05 The Jets, Kansas City, Arizona State.
0:45:07 So I chuckled because I know that eventually
0:45:10 someone was gonna ask me the question.
0:45:11 When I went to Kansas City, “Hey, you know,”
0:45:13 and I said, “I already know.”
0:45:15 And then when I went to Arizona State, they went,
0:45:17 “I said, I already know, don’t ask the question.”
0:45:22 And so you think in 2024, this shouldn’t be a question.
0:45:26 This should no longer be a question, but it still is.
0:45:29 As it gotten better, it’s gotten a lot better,
0:45:31 but there’s still a lot of work to do.
0:45:34 – What kind of work still needs to be done?
0:45:37 Well, consider those interviews that were required
0:45:38 by the Rooney Rule.
0:45:41 – So in the beginning, it was a good way
0:45:44 of slowing it down and getting interviews,
0:45:48 but then it became almost like, no.
0:45:50 Because the interviews was like,
0:45:52 “Okay, I’m gonna interview some guys,
0:45:53 “but I already know who I’m gonna hire.”
0:45:55 – So were those sham interviews?
0:45:58 – Yeah, I mean, some of them were phone calls.
0:45:59 I interviewed with a guy.
0:46:00 He didn’t even bring in.
0:46:04 – Coming up next time in part two,
0:46:07 the underbelly of the Rooney Rule.
0:46:10 – It wasn’t two weeks after everybody had agreed to the rule
0:46:14 that it was totally flouted by an owner
0:46:15 who just agreed to it.
0:46:17 And then the Rooney Rule started drifting
0:46:20 into corporate America.
0:46:22 This too had its problems.
0:46:23 – It’s no different than saying,
0:46:24 “Oh, you know what?
0:46:25 “I want to run a marathon.”
0:46:30 There is a 42 week process where you like train, y’all.
0:46:32 You don’t just get up and say,
0:46:34 “I’m gonna run 26.2 miles.”
0:46:36 And that’s what people do with their diversity efforts.
0:46:38 – That’s next time on the show.
0:46:40 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:46:43 And if you can, someone else too.
0:46:46 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:46:49 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app
0:46:51 or at freakonomics.com,
0:46:53 where we also publish transcripts and show notes.
0:46:56 This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs.
0:46:58 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman,
0:47:00 Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouwaji,
0:47:03 Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez,
0:47:06 Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston,
0:47:08 John Schnarrs, Julie Kanfer, Lerick Bowditch,
0:47:11 Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
0:47:13 Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski.
0:47:16 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers.
0:47:18 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:47:21 As always, I thank you for listening.
0:47:24 – Okay, and then what about Special Teams Coordinators?
0:47:26 – Special Teams Coordinators,
0:47:28 I’m not exactly sure what Special Teams Coordinators are.
0:47:30 – No one pays attention to Special Teams.
0:47:31 (laughs)
0:47:32 We’re just being honest here.
0:47:34 Sorry, Special Teams folks.
0:47:41 – The Freakonomics Radio Network,
0:47:43 the hidden side of everything.
0:47:47 Stitcher.
0:47:49 (upbeat music)
0:47:52 you

0:00:06 Hey there, it’s Steven Dubner.
0:00:11 We’re always hearing about innovation and disruption and the new, new thing.
0:00:14 And a lot of that stuff is wonderful.
0:00:18 But I’ve been thinking lately that we tend to overlook something equally important, maybe
0:00:22 more important, maintaining what we’ve already built.
0:00:28 And then I remembered that we made an episode about this idea back in 2016 called “In Praise
0:00:29 of Maintenance.”
0:00:35 So we went back into the archive, dusted off that episode, updated facts and figures as
0:00:38 necessary, and today we are playing it for you as a bonus episode.
0:00:40 I’d love to know what you think.
0:00:43 Our email is radio@freakonomics.com.
0:00:49 As always, thanks for listening.
0:00:54 A while back, I got obsessed with the notion of maintenance, or really the notion of how
0:00:56 much time maintenance takes.
0:01:01 You go to the gym to maintain your body, so it can do what you need it to do.
0:01:05 Maybe you go to a doctor, and a dentist, and a therapist too.
0:01:10 You spend a third of your life sleepings, your brain can do what it needs to do.
0:01:14 And think about all the time and resources that go into maintaining your work life.
0:01:18 The meetings, the memos, the productivity apps.
0:01:22 Of course, there’s also your personal life to maintain.
0:01:27 I got so obsessed with the burden of all this maintenance that I decided to precisely track
0:01:32 how many minutes I was spending of each day on different forms of maintenance versus all
0:01:34 the other things I was trying to accomplish.
0:01:39 But after just a couple days, I quit this ridiculous exercise because it had become
0:01:43 just another maintenance task that kept me from doing the stuff I really wanted to be
0:01:44 doing.
0:01:49 I decided that maintenance was simply a curse that had to be accommodated, that the less
0:01:52 I thought about it, the happier I’d be.
0:01:55 And then I read something that changed my mind completely.
0:02:01 Our thesis basically is that our culture’s obsession with innovation and hype has led
0:02:05 us to neglect maintenance and maintainers.
0:02:10 Today on Freakonomics Radio, in praise of maintenance.
0:02:15 Because there’s not only a need, but a certain nobility in taking care of what you’ve already
0:02:20 created, and maybe we shouldn’t look at maintenance as the enemy of innovation.
0:02:23 I think a great nation can walk and chew gum at the same time.
0:02:36 Or can we?
0:02:41 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:02:54 your host, Steven Dubner.
0:03:00 There is a digital magazine called Aeon, A-E-O-N, that publishes essays about ideas and culture.
0:03:05 Just as I was having my personal crisis about the burden of maintenance, I came across a
0:03:09 fascinating piece in Aeon called “Hail the Maintainers.”
0:03:16 The subtitle, “Capitalism excels at innovation, but is failing at maintenance.
0:03:19 And for most lives, it is maintenance that matters more.”
0:03:23 Okay, I’m Lee Vinsel, and my name is Andy Russell.
0:03:27 They are the co-authors of the Aeon essay, “Vinsel First.”
0:03:32 I’m trained as a historian, and most of my work looks at the relationship between government
0:03:35 policy and science and technology.
0:03:40 Back when we first aired this episode, Lee Vinsel taught at the Stevens Institute of
0:03:41 Technology.
0:03:45 He is now an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech.
0:03:50 Andy Russell is also an historian who studies technology and governance.
0:03:55 When we spoke with him, he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic
0:03:56 Institute.
0:03:58 He is now the provost of that university.
0:04:03 He and Vinsel had already come to believe that the American embrace of innovation had
0:04:10 led to, here, I’ll quote them, “a mountain of dubious scholarship and magical thinking.”
0:04:16 And then Walter Isaacson published a book called “The Innovators,” how a group of hackers,
0:04:20 geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution.
0:04:25 Basically Andy wrote me and a friend, a kind of joke email saying we should answer with
0:04:31 a book called “The Maintainers,” how bureaucrats, standards engineers, and introverts create
0:04:34 technologies that kind of work most of the time.
0:04:39 Yeah, and then we just decided to lay it out really clearly in an essay, so examining
0:04:45 where innovation rhetoric came from, what we call innovation speak, and then laying
0:04:50 out a more grounded vision of human life with technology.
0:04:53 I’ll ask you an impossibly broad question to start with.
0:05:01 How much are we, I guess, hurting ourselves or missing out on society-wise globally?
0:05:08 It gets more impossible to answer by the moment by failing to appreciate the value of maintenance
0:05:10 at the expense of innovation.
0:05:11 It’s a good question.
0:05:12 It’s a broad question.
0:05:17 One thing that we insist that’s important isn’t that we need to do only maintenance and get
0:05:18 rid of innovation.
0:05:21 We both appreciate innovation and creativity and new stuff.
0:05:23 So there’s no argument there.
0:05:29 I think in paying more attention to maintenance and maintainers, it’s really signaling a shift
0:05:35 in values away from glittery new things, consumer culture and those sorts of things, and toward
0:05:43 work, towards labor, towards maybe even sacrifice in the form of taxes or effort to sustain society,
0:05:46 and to pay a little bit more respect to the people whose jobs do that.
0:05:47 They’re not superstars.
0:05:49 They’re just grinding it out day to day.
0:05:53 But I guess one of my counters to that argument, and maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by the
0:06:01 innovation crowd, is that, well, one of the promises of technology is that it would eliminate
0:06:07 the need for much or, in some cases, all of that kind of handmade maintenance.
0:06:12 So if you’re talking about something literally like a cleaning person, a janitor, someone
0:06:18 who comes along to a public restroom in an airport eight, 12, 15 times a day to clean
0:06:19 it up.
0:06:25 I think, well, don’t I want the much-vaunted self-cleaning bathroom that was supposed to
0:06:26 be here by now?
0:06:30 Wouldn’t that technology, if it worked well, be better?
0:06:37 Because it would, A, do a good job, and, B, not require people to do that kind of work.
0:06:41 So why are you making the argument that that kind of work is so important?
0:06:42 Is it really a moral argument?
0:06:44 It is a moral argument.
0:06:45 That’s true.
0:06:48 But I think we also need to just take stock of where we’re at.
0:06:55 We live in a moment where lots of people are writing and talking about robots and artificial
0:07:03 intelligence, and all these machines and technologies, they’re going to come along and replace drudgery.
0:07:06 We’re not going to have to worry about that stuff anymore.
0:07:12 But I can show you movies put out by General Motors from 1955 that show the kitchen of
0:07:17 the future that’s not going to involve any labor for women.
0:07:19 And that didn’t come true.
0:07:23 And we have to be sober and say, yes, these things might come.
0:07:24 And that wouldn’t be bad.
0:07:25 That would be great.
0:07:29 But we can’t pretend that we can just forget about all the labor that’s going on right
0:07:36 now and is probably going to continue going on for the foreseeable future.
0:07:38 People always think about what’s new.
0:07:42 People always think about what can be named.
0:07:46 That is the Harvard economist Larry Summers, who has served as the president of Harvard,
0:07:51 as the U.S. Treasury Secretary, chief economist of the World Bank, and as President Obama’s
0:07:53 top economic advisor.
0:08:00 People always think more about how new ground can be broken than they think about how existing
0:08:07 institutions can be sustained or existing facilities can be maintained.
0:08:16 It leads to a constant trap where we underinvest in old things, then old things disappoint
0:08:23 us, then we feel a need for new things, then to satisfy that need for new things, we underinvest
0:08:27 more in old things, and the cycle goes on.
0:08:33 You see it in the fact that we pay the equivalent of 40 cents a gallon in gasoline taxes for
0:08:39 extra repairs due to the fact that we’re not maintaining our highways right.
0:08:45 You see it in an air traffic control system in the United States that still uses obsolete
0:08:49 technologies and doesn’t use GPS.
0:08:53 As a consequence, we all spend more time with air traffic delays.
0:08:57 We burn huge amounts, more energy.
0:09:00 We take greater safety risks than we need to.
0:09:07 You see it in developing countries where they’re always building new facilities, but then a
0:09:15 few years later those facilities sit in a sense of disrepair.
0:09:23 I think the fetish of novelty and the lack of glamour of maintaining and sustaining things
0:09:27 is a besetting problem.
0:09:32 One very important area where you see this is in the area of philanthropy where everybody
0:09:39 always wants to start a new institution or to do something new and then be a catalyst
0:09:41 and then have others fund their institution.
0:09:46 Well, not everybody can be the one who levers other money.
0:09:54 Some have to be levered, so I think it does lead to a fragmentation.
0:09:59 It does lead to returns that are lower than they need to be.
0:10:04 In cases like the U.S. public sector, it can lead to tragic underinvestment.
0:10:10 Okay, so let’s do a brief history of maintenance.
0:10:16 We’ll talk about our cities, our homes, our infrastructure, even how modern investors think
0:10:19 about maintenance versus innovation.
0:10:21 Let’s start way back here.
0:10:27 Certainly, Rome understood that engineering and infrastructure was a huge part of making
0:10:34 its city function, and it not only invested in that in Rome, but exported it elsewhere.
0:10:36 That’s Ed Glazer, another Harvard economist.
0:10:43 So the sewage starts with the Cloca Maxima in the sixth century before the Common Era,
0:10:47 and that’s associated with the last of the Tarquin kings, the Etruscans.
0:10:51 The Cloca Maxima was one of the world’s first sewage systems.
0:10:52 It was maintained.
0:10:58 There were people like Cato the Elder, who is particularly famed for uttering that Carthage
0:11:01 must be destroyed, Dylinda Carthagau asked at the end of every speech.
0:11:09 He was also heavily involved in water and sewerage, so this single-minded passion for the good
0:11:14 of the Republic translated into caring about infrastructure, and he made it one of his
0:11:15 pet themes.
0:11:18 It was also an Augustan theme as well.
0:11:23 Glazer wanted to be remembered for taking a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble,
0:11:27 but he was also attentive to the water and sewerage maintenance side of things.
0:11:32 Of course, Rome also was interesting in that they weren’t rich by modern standards, maybe
0:11:37 per capita income of modern dollars around 1500, but they had remarkable government capacity.
0:11:42 Glazer, we should say, is an expert on cities, and he also thinks that cities are one of
0:11:44 the best things that humans have ever come up with.
0:11:49 He’s the author of a book called Triumph of the City, How Our Greatest Invention Makes
0:11:52 Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.
0:11:56 In fact, all of these old imperial cities had remarkable government capacity because
0:11:57 that’s how you got to be an imperial city.
0:12:01 You had to have a government that was able to subdue all your neighbors.
0:12:05 So Julius Caesar was actually able to help the roads function by stopping wheeled traffic
0:12:09 from entering the city for the first 10 hours of every day, which helps in the maintenance
0:12:12 side as well, although it’s not a substitute for repaving the roads.
0:12:19 So cities are inherently dense, which means that a problem, whether it’s trash or crime
0:12:23 or bad streets or sidewalks, can affect a lot of people in a hurry.
0:12:27 So talk to me about the importance of maintenance, especially physical infrastructure maintenance,
0:12:29 especially in a city.
0:12:30 Oh, absolutely.
0:12:34 It’s both the fact that any problem can be magnified, and it’s the fact that just proximity
0:12:36 itself creates downsides, right?
0:12:41 Proximity means that someone’s bacteria are more likely to affect you.
0:12:44 Proximity means that we’re all sharing the same amount of road space and consequently
0:12:48 trying to gobble up the same real estate and facing the downside of congestion.
0:12:52 And of course, density also makes it easier for one person to steal from one another.
0:12:56 And on top of, of course, creating congestion, all those drivers and city streets wear down
0:13:01 the infrastructure, which is why we so often think of city streets as being places that
0:13:04 are full of potholes or full of other problems.
0:13:10 So cities need infrastructure of a variety of different forms, and that infrastructure
0:13:12 needs to be maintained.
0:13:17 And making sure that you have the institutions in place that can provide at least a modicum
0:13:24 of maintenance is really crucial to making city lives work.
0:13:28 Glazers spent some time in the Philippines learning how Manila deals with sewage.
0:13:33 Short answer, not nearly as well as ancient Rome.
0:13:39 These are septic tanks that flow right through pipes, right into sort of main corridors that
0:13:42 course through the city and often end up in the bay.
0:13:46 And the septic tanks are typically in the house, beneath the kitchen perhaps, outside
0:13:49 maybe on the driveway.
0:13:54 And the big project that the water companies, which take care of the sewage and the septic
0:13:58 tanks we’re involved in doing is trying to get people to clean out their septic tanks.
0:14:02 And it wasn’t that the water companies weren’t willing to provide it.
0:14:04 The people often didn’t even want it, right?
0:14:09 Whether they’d let it go 30 or 40 years without any form of cleaning of the septic tank, without
0:14:11 any desludging.
0:14:16 And the people were pushing against having it cleaned up because to get to it, you needed
0:14:20 to tear up someone’s kitchen and they didn’t see the upside of moving it.
0:14:23 And consequently, there’s a whole public health issue related to the fact that more
0:14:27 filth is spewing out through these pipes into the common areas.
0:14:30 So the problem of maintenance is really huge in this area.
0:14:37 So in a case like that, what’s a solution other than building infrastructure like a
0:14:43 septic tank in a way originally that it doesn’t require disrupting your life later on?
0:14:49 Certainly designing infrastructure from the beginning so that it is maintenance friendly
0:14:55 is surely the right way to go as the lower the cost can possibly be both for the large
0:14:58 scale entity that has to do the maintenance, but also for the individual that has to put
0:15:00 up with the inconvenience.
0:15:02 That’s clearly important.
0:15:07 But on top of that, when you’re looking at maintenance that’s required to keep a city
0:15:11 healthy, I’m a big fan of having some form of regulation and fine in place.
0:15:14 Look, I mean, as you know, I’m a Chicago PhD.
0:15:17 I think lots of areas of our lives are over-regulated.
0:15:19 I think entrepreneurship is over-regulated.
0:15:23 But there are areas like maintaining public health where I think it’s just fine to have
0:15:29 regulations and small fines that are put in place if people actually don’t do basic tasks
0:15:32 like desludging that are required for the public good.
0:15:37 I asked Glazer to name a modern city that gets maintenance right.
0:15:41 The meritocracy that is Singapore is quite impressive on the maintenance side.
0:15:45 This is no longer a new city and yet it still feels clean.
0:15:47 It still feels well taken care of.
0:15:51 And I think part of it is just they have enough smart people in government for whom this is
0:15:54 their job that they continue to focus on this.
0:15:57 I think it’s an open question as to whether or not all the shiny things that are being
0:16:00 built in China will wear all that well or will be protected.
0:16:02 I think we still have to see on that.
0:16:07 So when it happens well, whether in modern Singapore or ancient Rome, is it more a function
0:16:15 of design that was able to be maintained relatively easily or cost-effectively or is it a kind
0:16:24 of conscious devotion to maintenance that many individuals or nations just fail to factor
0:16:25 in or budget?
0:16:29 Well, I think in both the Singapore and Rome case, there are leaders who make it their
0:16:35 job and some in the case of Cato presumably thought that there was popularity be gained
0:16:41 by sticking up for the old Rome and for maintaining Roman virtues including decent infrastructure.
0:16:44 Most of the Roman infrastructure looks pretty simple from a modern perspective and consequently
0:16:48 it would have been easier to maintain than a more complicated infrastructure.
0:16:53 But that raises sort of larger technological changes, which is that as the world becomes
0:16:56 more complicated, as infrastructure becomes more complicated, there are more ways that
0:17:01 it can potentially go wrong and maintenance, if anything, becomes even more important.
0:17:05 So in a simpler world, maintenance was easier to get at than it is in the more complex world
0:17:07 of today.
0:17:11 I think we should be talking about what is the value of engineering.
0:17:14 That again is Lee Vinsel from Virginia Tech.
0:17:20 The value of engineering is much more than just innovation and new things, focusing on
0:17:24 taking care of the world rather than just creating the new nifty thing that’s going
0:17:26 to solve all our problems.
0:17:32 If you look at what engineers do out in the world, like 70 to 80 percent of them spend
0:17:35 most of their time just keeping things going, right?
0:17:40 And so this comes down to engineering education too when we’re forcing entrepreneurship and
0:17:48 innovation as the message is that we’re just kind of skewing reality for young people.
0:17:53 And we’re not giving them a real picture and we’re also not valuing the work that they’re
0:17:55 probably going to do in their life.
0:17:59 That seems to me just to be kind of a bad idea.
0:18:06 So all you guys need to do is make maintenance sexy for the American public and for politicians
0:18:07 and policy makers.
0:18:08 Do you have any plans?
0:18:09 How are you going to pull that off?
0:18:13 Yeah, we’re going to come up with some slogans like main-toe-vation.
0:18:18 We’re going to have professional wrestlers dance in front of bridges, you know, their
0:18:21 shirts off.
0:18:26 Coming up after the break, how well are we maintaining our infrastructure here at home?
0:18:29 I cannot imagine that that’s the right solution.
0:18:30 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:18:32 This is Free Economics Radio.
0:18:41 We’ll be right back.
0:18:46 Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers puts out a report card on
0:18:49 physical infrastructure in the United States.
0:18:55 On the most recent report card from 2021, our overall grade was a C minus.
0:19:01 Of the 17 categories that got a letter grade, only rail and ports scored higher than a C.
0:19:05 Rail got a B and ports a B minus.
0:19:13 Transit, meanwhile, got a D, roads, D minus, drinking water, C minus, bridges a C.
0:19:17 When I spoke with Ed Glazer for this episode a few years back, things were even worse.
0:19:22 The most recent overall grade then was a D plus.
0:19:26 This is the United States of America, an economic superpower.
0:19:28 So what the what?
0:19:30 How has this happened?
0:19:34 Well, I think the first thing we should do is we should be a little bit wary about infrastructure
0:19:39 groups that issue report cards whose ultimate bottom line is that trillions must be spent
0:19:41 in their industry.
0:19:45 That being said, there are obviously real issues around American infrastructure.
0:19:51 And what I worry about is that the answer to this will be just big checks cut in Washington.
0:19:54 And I cannot imagine that that’s the right solution.
0:19:58 I can certainly point to a bridge that crosses the Charles River near me, which has been
0:20:02 going on was initiated in part because of the promise of federal dollars that it’s awfully
0:20:06 hard to see the value that we got from four years of disruption for allegedly maintaining
0:20:08 this bridge and improving it.
0:20:11 It’s a remarkable and not a very happy tale.
0:20:12 That’s Larry Summers again.
0:20:17 The Anderson Bridge connects Harvard Square with the city of Boston.
0:20:20 It connects different parts of the Harvard campus.
0:20:23 It’s 75 yards from my office.
0:20:26 The bridge is 232 feet long.
0:20:30 It has been under repair now for a four and a half years.
0:20:35 To put that in some kind of perspective, Julius Caesar built a bridge over a span of the
0:20:43 Rhine that wasn’t 232 feet, it was over a thousand feet, and he did it in nine days.
0:20:47 And that was with the technologies that were available before Christ.
0:20:51 Today, we surely should be able to do much better.
0:20:54 In fact, a hundred years ago, the bridge we’re trying to repair and have been repairing for
0:21:03 four and a half years was built in less than one year from nothing with much earlier technologies.
0:21:06 So what accounts for this delay?
0:21:13 The delay was a combination of environmental requirements, historical commission requirements,
0:21:15 and just plain incompetence.
0:21:20 There were permitting issues, multiple redesigns, and in addition to the time overrun, there
0:21:25 were big cost overruns, which Larry Summers points out doesn’t even factor in all the costs.
0:21:31 Look, you do calculations, you add up all the thousands of cars that go across it.
0:21:38 You value the time that people suffer in delay because the bridge is in disrepair or because
0:21:41 the process of repairing it takes forever.
0:21:47 You figure out what people’s time’s worth, you know, even if you value it at $15 an hour.
0:21:53 I’d certainly pay much more than $15 an hour to avoid being stuck in traffic jams.
0:22:00 Often it ends up that big infrastructure investments will pay for themselves right out just in terms
0:22:04 of avoiding the delays that people suffer.
0:22:08 The Anderson bridge repair finally was completed.
0:22:12 There are, meanwhile, thousands of other bridges in the U.S. that need repair.
0:22:17 Summers argues that forestalling such maintenance has a larger drag on the economy than you
0:22:18 might think.
0:22:22 I think infrastructure is the right thing in the short run for the United States because
0:22:24 it puts people to work in a substantial scale.
0:22:29 It’s the right thing in the medium term because it expands the capacity of our economy and
0:22:35 it’s the right thing in the long run because it takes a burden off of our children.
0:22:38 We will eventually, as a country, fix Kennedy Airport.
0:22:43 It’ll just be much more expensive if we delay and the cost of fixing Kennedy Airport will
0:22:50 compound at a far greater rate than the one and a half percent in bonds we print ourselves
0:22:55 that represents the yield today on long-term U.S. government bonds.
0:23:01 The New York airports are often used as being the textbook examples of declining American
0:23:02 infrastructure.
0:23:04 It’s Ed Glazer again.
0:23:09 Everyone has an awful experience at one of them that they can recount about the chaos
0:23:11 that JFK can often be.
0:23:13 These airports are complicated.
0:23:15 They sit on city land.
0:23:19 They are run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which answers to two
0:23:24 different governors and is responsible for a lot of other things.
0:23:29 It is a very big and sprawling agency and it has structural problems that almost surely
0:23:31 need reform.
0:23:36 Probably the airports actually should be split up and made into completely separate agencies.
0:23:41 None of that reform will occur if the authority simply gets more cash infusions from Washington.
0:23:45 That is a recipe for non-reform, not for reform.
0:23:50 There’s absolutely no reason why the well-heeled travelers who go in and out of JFK Airport
0:23:52 can’t pay for that infrastructure themselves.
0:23:57 There’s absolutely no reason why that infrastructure needs to be subsidized by ordinary taxpayers
0:23:59 in any way.
0:24:04 I’m 100% on board the need for a massive infrastructure overhaul in the U.S.
0:24:07 I think though that if we go down the route of saying that that just means big items in
0:24:10 the budget, we go completely in the wrong direction.
0:24:14 We need to take a hard look at institutional reform, we need to figure out how federal
0:24:19 nudges and federal money can be used in a way that’s productive, rather than simply
0:24:21 a recipe for maintaining the status quo.
0:24:25 Since we made the original version of this episode, New York City’s airports have been
0:24:28 an infrastructure bright spot.
0:24:33 Last year, we made a series about airline travel called Freakonomics Radio Takes to the Skies.
0:24:38 In one of those episodes, we toured the new and much improved LaGuardia Airport, which
0:24:43 has benefited from fast-track funding put forth by former Governor Andrew Cuomo, along
0:24:47 with a multi-billion-dollar investment by Delta Airlines.
0:24:52 Construction has also begun on a $19 billion overhaul of John F. Kennedy Airport.
0:24:58 All that new spending and construction sounds great, but Ed Glazer says we need to be careful
0:25:01 about how these massive projects are funded.
0:25:06 So my favorite way of paying for infrastructure, other than user fees, is with local property
0:25:09 taxes or with property development, even.
0:25:15 So Hong Kong’s mass transit system funds itself by developing skyscrapers on top of
0:25:19 new subway lines, and it manages to keep the fees low because it can do well enough by
0:25:24 extracting the value that commuters are willing to pay to be right there.
0:25:28 So linking up, I think, in the space of public transit, linking up the payments that developers
0:25:32 are willing to pay, let’s say, to build very high-res buildings near subway stops with
0:25:34 funding for the infrastructure.
0:25:37 I mean, I don’t actually want America’s transit system to be building skyscrapers
0:25:40 on their own, but I’m happy for them to get some flow of tax revenues in exchange for
0:25:43 the ability to build higher buildings next to the subway stops.
0:25:45 That would seem like a desirable thing.
0:25:51 In the case of roads, I think the key is embracing things like congestion pricing whenever it’s
0:25:52 at all feasible.
0:25:56 Any time you build a new highway, you really want to slap a fee on it from the beginning
0:26:00 because it’s just a sort of political endowment effect that seems to be very strong, which
0:26:06 is that if I take a road that’s free and then slap a toll on it, you have riots in the
0:26:07 street.
0:26:08 People are incredibly angry.
0:26:09 It’s a political nightmare.
0:26:14 If you introduce a new road that has a toll from the beginning, people nod.
0:26:17 They may not be pleased about it entirely, but they think that they never saw that road
0:26:18 before.
0:26:19 That road comes with a toll.
0:26:20 They can accept that.
0:26:22 So what role does Glaser see in this for the federal government?
0:26:27 I think actually the best role for the federal government in infrastructure is to actually
0:26:33 be in the business of inspecting, rating, local infrastructure projects, to check whether
0:26:37 or not the maintenance is good, to publicize when the roads or the bridges are unsafe,
0:26:42 and then perhaps to have federal money that’s targeted not to new projects, but specifically
0:26:47 to maintenance, perhaps structured as a matching fund for local monies.
0:26:51 So it’s a structure in which we think actually having a bit more local buy-in at the beginning
0:26:53 is probably helpful.
0:26:56 But you inevitably come up against a fundamental budgeting question.
0:27:01 How to balance the cost of maintenance with the cost of making new things, the cost of
0:27:02 innovating?
0:27:03 I’m all for maintenance.
0:27:09 I’m all for infrastructure, but I don’t think they should be framed as the enemy of innovation.
0:27:10 Larry Summers again.
0:27:13 I think we want to be able to produce in new ways.
0:27:14 We want new products.
0:27:18 We want businesses to organize themselves in new ways.
0:27:22 We want to be the place in the world that has the most cutting-edge science.
0:27:28 We want when new uses of software, new uses of artificial intelligence are developed,
0:27:30 we want them to happen here.
0:27:38 So I do believe in a very strong case for infrastructure investment, but I want to be careful about
0:27:41 saying that I’m somehow against innovation.
0:27:46 I think a great nation can walk and chew gum at the same time.
0:27:52 In 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan effort
0:27:57 to fund infrastructure, including roads, bridges, trains, airports, and more.
0:28:01 The price tag, $1 trillion.
0:28:06 This has helped launch 40,000 infrastructure projects across the country.
0:28:12 Coming up on Freakinomics Radio, how innovation and maintenance compete for our money.
0:28:19 Large public companies in mature markets tend to invest primarily on maintenance, and often
0:28:23 they don’t have the additional capital you need to do large innovation.
0:28:26 How innovation and maintenance compete for our time.
0:28:32 I started out with the assumption that technological change had reduced women’s labor so much
0:28:37 that they could enter the workforce, and it took me about three years to discover that
0:28:39 I was wrong.
0:28:43 And I finally get serious about some personal maintenance.
0:28:46 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:28:59 Ruth Schwartz Cowan is an historian of science, technology, and medicine.
0:29:03 I’m a retired faculty member from the University of Pennsylvania.
0:29:09 Like Lee Vincel and Andy Russell, Cowan thinks we put too much emphasis on innovation.
0:29:12 There are basically very few innovators.
0:29:14 There are a huge number of maintainers.
0:29:20 And when you start paying attention to it, you begin to understand how essential it is.
0:29:24 My late husband used to say, and I used to think it was a joke, but I think now that
0:29:31 he’s absolutely right, plumbers are on the world, and we may kind of resent our dependence
0:29:32 on them.
0:29:37 In fact, that may be a larger part of why we don’t pay attention because we really would
0:29:40 like to think of ourselves as independent of all of that, but we’re not.
0:29:46 We are very dependent on a lot of people who don’t have PhDs.
0:29:50 We’re very dependent on a lot of people who don’t have high school diplomas.
0:29:55 Cowan has done a lot of research on one particular form of maintenance, housework.
0:30:01 The name of my book is More Work for Mother, the ironies of household technology from the
0:30:03 open hearth to the microwave.
0:30:04 That’s right.
0:30:08 She found that home inventions that were supposed to free up women from labor often
0:30:09 led to more labor.
0:30:16 I started out with the assumption that technological change in the household, mainly the electrification
0:30:22 of households, had reduced women’s labor so much that they could enter the workforce,
0:30:25 married women’s labor, and enter the workforce.
0:30:29 It took me about three years to discover that I was wrong.
0:30:30 Wrong how?
0:30:34 There are two components of work, and one is time, but the other is what we might call
0:30:41 metabolic labor, and most of the new technologies saved metabolic labor.
0:30:46 It was much harder to wash clothing.
0:30:51 When you were doing it by scrubbing the clothing on a scrubbing board and hauling the water
0:30:58 from the stove to whatever vessel you were using to wash the laundry, then it was to
0:31:02 do it when you had a washing machine and running water.
0:31:04 There’s no question about that.
0:31:07 But with more and more machines to help with chores…
0:31:13 Housewives began to spend more time doing their chores.
0:31:17 In rural America, the standard routine for underwear was that you slept in it and you
0:31:21 changed it maybe a couple of times a year.
0:31:29 So in the modern, let’s say post-World War II, standard household, vastly more wash gets
0:31:32 done than in any previous time in history.
0:31:37 And even for the modern woman or man who does work outside the home…
0:31:43 There are women who are, and men too in some cases, who are doing what sociologists have
0:31:46 come to call a double day.
0:31:51 They’re doing almost as much maintenance work as their grandmothers might have done
0:31:56 or grandfathers might have done if their grandfathers were living on farms.
0:32:03 They’re doing almost as much unpaid maintenance work as they are paid work by hours.
0:32:10 So that’s an interesting and perhaps humbling lesson from the past, that innovation doesn’t
0:32:14 necessarily decrease the time we spend on maintenance.
0:32:19 Which brings us back to how we’re supposed to pay, not only in dollars but in time, for
0:32:22 the maintenance we need to do even if we don’t want to do it.
0:32:28 I think that there can be a false dichotomy when it comes to maintenance, which is maintenance
0:32:31 is required clearly.
0:32:36 But in order to effectively do maintenance, I think you need to innovate.
0:32:37 That’s Martin Casado.
0:32:41 He’s a general partner with the venture capital firm Andresen Horowitz.
0:32:46 As a venture capitalist, you’re looking for opportunities to invest in that you believe
0:32:48 will be large opportunities.
0:32:53 I wanted to hear from someone like Casado because it struck me that if some startup
0:32:57 goes to a venture capitalist with some terrible but innovative idea, it would probably still
0:33:01 generate a lot more interest than a startup with an excellent idea that deals with just
0:33:03 maintenance.
0:33:08 So with crumbling bridges and outdated airports and all the rest and a federal government that
0:33:14 often can’t get out of its own way, are the private equity markets really askewed toward
0:33:15 innovation as I imagined?
0:33:16 Yeah.
0:33:17 Yeah.
0:33:18 I think it’s a super interesting question.
0:33:25 And in fact, I think the public markets have done a really good job of factoring in maintenance
0:33:28 into its expectations on values of companies.
0:33:33 In other words, there’s one pool of money, including the stock markets that values maintenance,
0:33:38 whether it’s for physical infrastructure or increasingly digital infrastructure.
0:33:43 And there’s another pool of money, including that from venture capital firms that seeks
0:33:44 out innovation.
0:33:52 Large public companies in mature markets tend to invest primarily on maintenance, and often
0:33:56 they don’t have the additional capital you need to do large innovation.
0:34:04 So for example, between say 2011 and 2015, growth companies, companies that are in fast
0:34:10 growing areas, spent two times more than legacy companies on research and development.
0:34:16 So as companies mature, the majority of their investment in their spend is in kind of maintaining
0:34:18 existing technologies and so forth.
0:34:21 And this is largely because of the pressure from the public markets.
0:34:27 And so then the way that these kind of legacy enterprises innovate is through inorganic
0:34:30 growth where they buy often startups.
0:34:33 So if you look at the same group over the same period, you’re saying, okay, they say we
0:34:36 have a legacy enterprise and kind of a newer growth enterprise.
0:34:43 Over the last between say 2011 and 2015, legacy enterprises spent something like 10 times
0:34:49 more, it’s about nine times more than the growth enterprises to acquire innovation.
0:34:52 So if you tease apart what’s happening here, what’s happening is the public markets say,
0:34:56 listen, if you are in a mature company, we know that that will keep the lights on.
0:35:01 We know that that’s what you need to do to get predictable returns and public markets
0:35:03 like predictable returns, correct?
0:35:08 However, there’s going to be another pool of money and another ecosystem that can take
0:35:10 the risks, right?
0:35:11 And these are startups.
0:35:12 These are like venture capitalists.
0:35:17 So we make these very risky investments on these companies that may be wildly successful
0:35:18 or not.
0:35:21 And then it’s up to the growth enterprises on whether they want to buy them after this
0:35:22 has proven out or not.
0:35:26 And so I think the public market has created this bifurcation nicely in an economic fashion
0:35:29 where they’re saying, yes, we don’t want you to innovate.
0:35:33 And in fact, we’re going to keep your margins fixed so you can’t innovate.
0:35:39 And so they do invest in what they’re currently doing versus the more private startup side.
0:35:44 Casado also points out that behind all those sexy high tech firms that attract billions
0:35:49 of investment dollars, there’s a lot of unsexy infrastructure that makes it all possible.
0:35:54 Think about like the brick and mortar of computing, the core IT infrastructure.
0:35:58 You know, IT infrastructure, it’s a $4 trillion market.
0:35:59 It’s massive.
0:36:04 Every time you go to Amazon, you’re connecting to this massive building, think like football
0:36:08 stadium size massive building and inside that building, you’ve got tons of storage arrays
0:36:09 that store the data.
0:36:11 You’ve got tons of computing power.
0:36:14 You’ve got tons of networking equipment that connects it all together.
0:36:18 You’ve got a whole bunch of software that just provides kind of the underpinnings for
0:36:19 the application itself.
0:36:20 You’ve got databases.
0:36:22 You’ve got security equipment.
0:36:28 I mean, all of that is infrastructure.
0:36:33 Not often, but once in a while, I take the time to marvel at the fact that so many people
0:36:38 do so much work behind the scenes to keep the world humming.
0:36:42 Whether it’s the internet, the roads, the electricity grid, you name it.
0:36:45 Of course, it’s easy to point out the failures.
0:36:49 They’re visible, whereas the bulk of maintenance is practically invisible.
0:36:57 In praise of maintenance, let me just say this, it’s necessary work, it’s hard work,
0:37:01 and for people like me, who are always in a hurry to make the next new thing, it can
0:37:07 be really unappealing work, which means that sometimes you need help.
0:37:10 So I went out and got some help.
0:37:15 I like to think that I’m a fairly orderly person, but my office has become increasingly
0:37:20 crowded with a small mountain of files and notebooks and photos and audio tape and other
0:37:23 byproduct from years of writing, making music and so on.
0:37:28 I didn’t want to throw it out, but I also didn’t want it to become increasingly inaccessible
0:37:32 in an ever larger mountain, so I sought professional help.
0:37:34 Well, tell us more about that.
0:37:38 Chris Licinic runs a company in Brooklyn called AV Preserve.
0:37:41 They help all sorts of institutions manage their archives.
0:37:46 They worked with Yale University, Museum of Boundary Art, United Nations, and the New
0:37:47 York Public Library.
0:37:52 Well, first, we did a big inventory to inventory their audio, video, and film holdings, which
0:37:54 were over 800,000 items.
0:37:55 How big?
0:37:56 How many?
0:37:57 Over 800,000 items.
0:38:02 I’m not quite in the same league as the New York Public Library, but my desire is similar
0:38:08 to maintain a history, to make it more organized, more accessible, hopefully more useful.
0:38:12 What is the ideal outcome of this project that you envision?
0:38:19 I want everything that I’ve ever documented or created, I kind of want it preserved with
0:38:23 differing degrees of accessibility.
0:38:29 Memory is just so narrow and incomplete and bad that when I think about things that I’ve
0:38:34 done or written about or reported on in the past and not written about, I remember them
0:38:39 so incompletely and so poorly that I think it would be really nice to have that preserved
0:38:42 for who knows whatever reasons.
0:38:50 I want all of that easily and instantly accessible, but I want that point of accessibility to
0:38:56 be so easy that everything going forward from today I can put in the appropriate basket
0:39:05 without acquiring mountains, whether physical or virtual, that have to be sorted later.
0:39:08 The ultimate vision to be able to find everything easily and accessible, but if we think about
0:39:13 that as the ultimate outcome and we realize that there’s a lot of steps in between there
0:39:20 and here, we look at this project as phase one, the first steps, do you have any thoughts
0:39:24 on what the outcome of this phase, what to find success for you?
0:39:28 It would be we finish this meeting like 20 minutes and you say, “I’ll be back tomorrow
0:39:33 and I’ll take care of everything,” and then next Monday you’ll have a hard drive where
0:39:34 everything is there.
0:39:38 That’s my … I mean, you asked.
0:39:39 I’m trying to give you a realistic.
0:39:40 No, I know that’s not real.
0:39:42 You asked what I want.
0:39:43 Right, right, right.
0:39:48 Okay, so Chris Licinic persuaded me it wasn’t going to be so easy, but he started helping
0:39:49 me draw up a plan.
0:39:50 This is about maintenance.
0:39:53 It’s losing the 200 pounds and then staying that way.
0:39:56 But he said it wasn’t as scary as I thought.
0:39:57 I’m sure it feels that way.
0:39:58 But it’s not.
0:40:03 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:40:06 And so we’ve begun.
0:40:10 Licinic and his colleagues are doing most of the hard work, enumerating and measuring the
0:40:16 amounts of different media, then categorizing by media, paper, audio tape, digital audio,
0:40:17 et cetera.
0:40:22 And then eventually I sit down with them, file box by file box, and figure out whether
0:40:28 and how to preserve a particular thing and how to make it live in a place where I can
0:40:30 visit it whenever I want.
0:40:34 The key for me is one thing Licinic said.
0:40:38 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:40:46 Okay, I hope you enjoyed this bonus episode, but I have to tell you, I failed miserably
0:40:52 in my attempt to consolidate and downsize my work product from the last many years.
0:40:55 In fact, the mountain has gotten a bit higher.
0:40:58 Marie Kondo would be horrified.
0:41:03 On some days I do think about attacking this mountain, but I have decided for the time
0:41:06 being that the right thing to do here is nothing.
0:41:11 A lot of psychologists talk about decision making that leads to action, but I have read
0:41:17 some psychological research, which says that deciding to not make a decision can sometimes
0:41:18 be a good move.
0:41:21 And that’s what I’m going with, at least for now.
0:41:24 Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio.
0:41:27 We will be back very soon with a new episode.
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0:41:48 This episode was originally produced by Irva Gunja and has been updated by Dalvin Abouaji.
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0:42:14 As always, thank you for listening.
0:42:16 Does AOL still exist and buy things?
0:42:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do.
0:42:20 I missed out on that.
0:42:32 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:42:32 Stitcher.
0:42:35 (upbeat music)
0:42:37 you

0:00:02 (dramatic music)
0:00:08 I am going to say a dirty word, screen time.
0:00:13 That simple and suddenly terrifying word
0:00:15 includes all the hours that you spend streaming movies,
0:00:18 playing video games, especially the hours you spend
0:00:21 caught in the vortex of social media and news
0:00:25 and communication that gushes from your phone.
0:00:28 Everyone seems to have something to say about screen time
0:00:30 from the American Academy of Pediatrics
0:00:33 to religious and educational leaders
0:00:35 to the New York Times opinion section,
0:00:38 especially the New York Times opinion section.
0:00:42 Our own devices scold us with reminders to get off Instagram,
0:00:46 to hold the phone further away, to avoid eye strain.
0:00:48 If you have an iPhone, you know that it tracks
0:00:50 the hours you spend on it every day
0:00:53 and then makes a point to tell you that number,
0:00:57 that always surprisingly large number.
0:00:58 The people we are most worried about
0:01:02 when it comes to screen time are children and teenagers.
0:01:05 Parents around the world are in a full-on panic
0:01:07 about the relationship between screen time
0:01:10 and mental health, in part because there is
0:01:13 new scientific evidence on this relationship.
0:01:18 What we’ve observed from around 2014 was high school kids,
0:01:20 we were seeing a rise in their use of internet
0:01:23 and smartphones and so on, and a big rise
0:01:25 in their anxiety levels, depression levels,
0:01:26 all kinds of things.
0:01:30 That sounds terrible, but is the case
0:01:33 against screen time really that clear cut?
0:01:37 Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will hear the evidence
0:01:40 and some challenges to the evidence.
0:01:43 It’s very easy to fool yourself as an analyst.
0:01:46 We’ll also discuss the incentives at play.
0:01:49 That’s how op-eds work, like people are desperate
0:01:51 for one weird trick to save your life.
0:01:54 Still, you’d have to be a cold-hearted person
0:01:56 to think that nothing should change.
0:01:59 The question is, well, here’s the question.
0:02:02 – What the hell are we gonna do about it?
0:02:04 (upbeat music)
0:02:15 – This is Freakonomics Radio,
0:02:19 the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
0:02:21 with your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:02:24 (upbeat music)
0:02:27 (upbeat music)
0:02:32 – David Blanchflower, his friends call him Danny
0:02:34 after the much-loved British footballer,
0:02:37 is himself British, but he has spent the past few decades
0:02:39 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
0:02:42 He is an economics professor and researcher
0:02:45 who has also been involved in economic policy making.
0:02:47 – The way I would describe it is I’m a data guy,
0:02:49 and I look at patterns in the data, and I say,
0:02:52 let’s kick and poke and punch the data as hard as we can,
0:02:53 and let’s see if we get an answer.
0:02:55 – Blanchflower is a pioneer of what some people
0:02:57 call happiness economics.
0:03:01 He is particularly well-known for one key finding.
0:03:03 – In any well-being equation I ever looked at,
0:03:05 there was a midlife crisis.
0:03:08 There was a U-shape in age in the data.
0:03:12 – This U-shape is known as the happiness curve.
0:03:14 It is derived from many studies over the years
0:03:17 using survey data from thousands of people
0:03:19 of all ages from around the world.
0:03:22 Now, you may know how we feel about survey data
0:03:26 around here that it’s not the most reliable form of data.
0:03:28 On the other hand, it’s hard to find a better way
0:03:32 to measure something as intangible as happiness.
0:03:35 Anyway, here’s what Danny Blanchflower has found.
0:03:38 – Basically, the happiest people of the young,
0:03:40 it takes a U-shape, it diminishes down
0:03:43 to around 50 years of age, and then it rises again.
0:03:45 – There are a number of stories you could tell
0:03:47 about why happiness has a U-shape
0:03:49 over the course of a lifetime.
0:03:54 – For many young people, life is fun and relatively easy.
0:03:57 Adulthood, meanwhile, brings challenges,
0:03:59 obligations, quite possibly offspring,
0:04:02 and those offspring in turn bring more challenges
0:04:04 and obligations.
0:04:09 But then, happiness begins to rise again at around age 50,
0:04:12 an age at which many parents are no longer
0:04:14 so obligated to their children.
0:04:17 Is that a coincidence?
0:04:19 Maybe, maybe not.
0:04:21 There are other possible drivers of that upswing
0:04:23 and happiness in middle age.
0:04:27 You might just become more mature over time, more satisfied.
0:04:30 You might become more comfortable with who you are,
0:04:33 or at least better at managing your expectations.
0:04:37 Danny Blanchflower has written more than 30 papers
0:04:38 about this happiness curve,
0:04:42 and his findings have been replicated over 600 times,
0:04:43 an impressive record when you’re trying
0:04:46 to measure an emotional state.
0:04:49 The scientific consensus was so strong
0:04:51 that many researchers had come to see the happiness curve
0:04:56 as a natural part of human life, at least Blanchflower had.
0:05:00 But then, one day, he came across the work of Jean Twenge,
0:05:03 a psychology professor at San Diego State University.
0:05:05 – She was interviewed in the New York Times,
0:05:09 and read that interview, and I started to read the papers,
0:05:12 and the papers were about things that I had written about.
0:05:15 She’d used some of the data that I’d used.
0:05:18 But Twenge’s work didn’t fit the happiness curve
0:05:20 that Blanchflower had made famous.
0:05:23 Her work showed that happiness starts to decline
0:05:25 before adulthood.
0:05:27 She showed that teenagers in particular
0:05:30 were reporting much higher rates of unhappiness
0:05:31 than in the past.
0:05:33 – I started to look at the data,
0:05:35 and I realized that I had missed something.
0:05:38 I mean, I wrote 30 papers saying
0:05:40 there was a hump shape in age, or a U shape.
0:05:43 I literally said this is one of the most phenomenal facts
0:05:46 in social science, and then I wrote until it wasn’t.
0:05:48 – So what did Blanchflower miss?
0:05:51 – So now, instead of the hump shape, we have a decline.
0:05:54 – Meaning more people reported being unhappy
0:05:56 at an earlier age than he had seen before.
0:05:59 – That’s only really started since 2015,
0:06:01 and I missed it, and the world missed it.
0:06:03 Do you know why we missed it?
0:06:05 Because a bit of data took a while to come in,
0:06:08 so we didn’t really get data until about 2018, 2019,
0:06:10 and then COVID came.
0:06:12 And everybody said, “Oh, look at the effects of COVID.”
0:06:15 Well, it turns out now we have to rethink it,
0:06:17 because a lot of it was actually occurring prior to COVID,
0:06:21 and COVID merely extended pre-existing trends,
0:06:22 and we didn’t know it.
0:06:24 – Blanchflower, to his credit,
0:06:28 became convinced that his famous old happiness curve
0:06:30 no longer fit the current reality.
0:06:33 So now he began to, as he would say,
0:06:35 kick and poke and punch the data.
0:06:39 – The data that I like is from the CDC.
0:06:41 People are asked the following question.
0:06:43 Over the last 30 days,
0:06:46 how many of those 30 were bad mental health days?
0:06:48 Most people just say no days.
0:06:49 – But that’s most people.
0:06:52 One group of people gave the opposite answer.
0:06:55 They said that every day of the previous 30
0:06:57 was a bad mental health day.
0:06:59 – So what we’ve seen over time in America
0:07:01 is that that has increased by quite a lot.
0:07:05 The group that has increased the most are young women.
0:07:09 So today, 10% of young women report,
0:07:12 and 7% of young men report that every day of their lives
0:07:14 is a bad mental health day.
0:07:16 We basically see this problem of a collapse
0:07:18 in the well-being of the young in America,
0:07:19 and then we see it in the UK.
0:07:21 So the UN says to me, Danny, we gotta look at the world.
0:07:23 Let’s go look at the world.
0:07:23 – That’s right.
0:07:25 Blanchflower’s happiness research
0:07:28 had caught the attention of the United Nations.
0:07:31 He and other researchers were asked to find out more.
0:07:34 – So off we go, and now basically we find
0:07:36 it’s true everywhere.
0:07:38 And so we’re talking about what I think
0:07:40 is a huge global crisis.
0:07:42 But the genie has been released from the bottle,
0:07:44 and it was released from the bottle a decade ago
0:07:46 before we realized what was going on.
0:07:49 – So what happened a decade ago
0:07:53 that caused this decline in mental health among young people?
0:07:56 For Gene Twenge, the San Diego state psychologist,
0:07:58 there is an obvious and easy answer.
0:07:59 The smartphone.
0:08:02 Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007
0:08:06 and sold around 1.4 million units that year.
0:08:10 These days, Apple sells more than 200 million iPhones a year,
0:08:12 and that’s just Apple.
0:08:15 For every iPhone, four or five non-Apple smartphones
0:08:19 are sold around the world a billion a year.
0:08:24 In 2017, Twenge published a book called “Deep Breath” here.
0:08:26 I, Gen, why today’s super connected kids
0:08:30 are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy,
0:08:34 and completely unprepared for adulthood,
0:08:37 and what that means for the rest of us.
0:08:39 Twenge also published some related pieces
0:08:41 in “The Atlantic” and “The New York Times,”
0:08:43 which amplified her argument.
0:08:47 In early 2024, the influential social psychologist
0:08:50 Jonathan Haidt, who teaches at New York University,
0:08:54 joined this argument with a book called “The Anxious Generation,”
0:08:56 how the great rewiring of childhood
0:08:59 is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
0:09:03 Here is Haidt on MSNBC discussing this epidemic.
0:09:06 Everyone has a theory about what causes it.
0:09:07 There is only one explanation.
0:09:09 There is no other theory that can make sense
0:09:11 of a synchronized global collapse in mental health,
0:09:14 other than the fact that in 2010,
0:09:16 the great majority of kids had a flip phone,
0:09:20 no high-speed internet, no unlimited data, no Instagram.
0:09:23 And by 2015, we all have a smartphone,
0:09:26 high-speed internet, unlimited data,
0:09:28 Instagram, front-facing camera.
0:09:31 Haidt makes a compelling argument, as does Gene Twenge,
0:09:34 and their argument has resonated with many people,
0:09:36 parents especially.
0:09:38 There have been suggestions that social media
0:09:42 and photo-sharing apps can be particularly damaging
0:09:43 to adolescent girls and young women
0:09:48 by amplifying pressure and anxiety around their appearance.
0:09:52 But is the smartphone really the one explanation,
0:09:54 as Haidt puts it?
0:09:56 As we often preach around here,
0:09:59 correlation does not equal causation.
0:10:02 Maybe there are some other factors contributing
0:10:04 to the anxiety and unhappiness
0:10:07 that young people say they are feeling.
0:10:09 For instance, the last couple decades have brought
0:10:13 wave after wave of political and economic turmoil,
0:10:16 sometimes tipping into chaos.
0:10:18 If you have parents or grandparents
0:10:20 who grew up during the Great Depression,
0:10:23 you know how much they were shaped by that experience.
0:10:25 So have young people today maybe been shaped
0:10:27 by all that chaos?
0:10:30 And let’s not forget the widespread anxiety
0:10:31 over climate change.
0:10:35 And for kids who grew up in the US, especially New York,
0:10:40 the 9/11 attacks set a tone of fear and anger.
0:10:41 There’s also this.
0:10:45 What about the benefits of the smartphone?
0:10:47 Anti-phone advocates have done a good job
0:10:50 pointing out the costs, but let’s not forget the benefits.
0:10:52 The smartphone provides connection,
0:10:55 it facilitates the sharing of interests,
0:10:58 helps you navigate to pretty much anywhere,
0:11:02 and gives access to just about any piece of information
0:11:05 or music or whatever else you might want.
0:11:07 Of course, this can be overwhelming
0:11:10 and if you consume too much of it, you may get sick,
0:11:12 just as you’ll get sick consuming too much of anything
0:11:15 that humans consume, like food.
0:11:19 But just as food is pretty important for humans,
0:11:21 so is connectivity.
0:11:24 And to discount the benefits, especially for young people,
0:11:26 may be short-sighted.
0:11:30 So I went back to the economist Danny Blanchflower
0:11:33 to talk through the causality piece of this.
0:11:36 If I asked you to give the strongest piece of evidence
0:11:39 that you’re convinced that this is a causal relationship
0:11:41 between the rise of, let’s call it digital tech use,
0:11:44 and the rise of anxiety or depression,
0:11:47 how do you know that that instrumental variable
0:11:50 is the one that’s driving the bulk of that problem?
0:11:52 Because I could posit a variety of other things.
0:11:52 – Yeah, of course.
0:11:55 If we throw one at you just off the top of my head,
0:11:58 your Dartmouth colleague, Bruce Sassardot,
0:12:01 has done research on the rise of negativity in media,
0:12:03 especially in the U.S.
0:12:07 And we know the effect of media on the psyche.
0:12:10 So could it be that what we’re thinking of
0:12:14 as, quote, “digital tech” being the driver is in fact,
0:12:17 digital tech is in this case more of a delivery system
0:12:20 for a massive wave of negativity,
0:12:24 also a massive wave of information about mental health
0:12:27 that may cause more people to self-diagnose and so on?
0:12:28 – What a great question.
0:12:30 Actually, Bruce and I were working on this together.
0:12:32 I was just talking to him 20 minutes ago.
0:12:35 So obviously there’s a set of questions, what is it?
0:12:39 And I sort of posit as a policymaker,
0:12:41 well, maybe it is something else,
0:12:44 but this thing appears to disproportionately impact the young
0:12:47 and above that disproportionately,
0:12:49 it impacts young women.
0:12:52 This trend started prior to COVID.
0:12:55 Every piece of evidence we have is that it doesn’t appear
0:12:57 to have been caused by the Great Recession.
0:13:00 So all the things that you’ve talked about, that is true,
0:13:03 but why would it especially be true of women?
0:13:04 And you have to get the timing right.
0:13:07 So the timing fits, the rise we observe
0:13:11 in the ill-being of the young starts around 2014.
0:13:14 At exactly that time, you see the explosion of digital usage,
0:13:17 internet usage, smartphone usage, and so on.
0:13:21 And I think in the end, the causal question is sort of irrelevant
0:13:24 in the sense that here we have a problem, right?
0:13:26 The worry is what do you do about it, right?
0:13:28 I mean, I’m obviously concerned
0:13:30 that this declining wellbeing of the young
0:13:33 will translate itself into something bad.
0:13:35 We’ve seen things like rising self-harm,
0:13:38 evidence of rising thoughts of suicide,
0:13:40 but to this point, thank God,
0:13:43 we haven’t yet seen lots of bad outcomes.
0:13:45 The people who have the least incidence of deaths
0:13:47 by a drug overdose are the young.
0:13:49 I don’t see much evidence of an increase there.
0:13:52 And the evidence around the world is that in the US,
0:13:54 suicides have risen slightly for young men,
0:13:55 not in other places.
0:13:58 – Wait a minute, this seems like a pretty big deal here.
0:14:00 You’re saying this engagement with smartphones
0:14:02 is leading to, let’s just call it generally,
0:14:05 declining mental health among the young.
0:14:07 Could it be that this is a kind of gantlet
0:14:09 that young people now go through
0:14:13 and emerge relatively undamaged?
0:14:15 And who knows, maybe even stronger?
0:14:17 – Supposing the answer to that is no,
0:14:18 and we don’t do anything.
0:14:21 We have to err on the side of caution, right?
0:14:23 I mean, I agree with you, it may well be that.
0:14:24 You intervene and you say,
0:14:27 “Well, we were mistakenly intervening
0:14:29 to make sure your child wasn’t in deep trouble.
0:14:31 Who’s your ever rejected that?”
0:14:34 We were wrong, okay, but it’s much better to be wrong
0:14:36 trying to protect them than to do nothing.
0:14:38 And then suddenly we’re overtaken
0:14:41 by a huge splurge in deaths from overdoses.
0:14:43 In a way, the experience that I had
0:14:46 at the Bank of England was interesting.
0:14:47 – Blanche Flower is talking here
0:14:50 about when he served as an external member
0:14:53 on a Bank of England committee that sets interest rates.
0:14:56 In October of 2007, the global economy
0:14:58 suddenly appeared fragile,
0:15:00 perhaps on the brink of a deep recession.
0:15:02 – So I sit there and I make a decision
0:15:04 on interest rates every month.
0:15:07 – Blanche Flower was the first and, at the time,
0:15:09 only person on the committee
0:15:11 to vote in favor of cutting interest rates.
0:15:12 – The hardest thing in the world
0:15:14 is to know where you are,
0:15:15 because you’ve got no clothes dead,
0:15:16 it doesn’t come in for a year.
0:15:18 So you sit and you try and make a decision
0:15:19 on limited information.
0:15:21 – Being out front on interest rates,
0:15:23 Blanche Flower would later say,
0:15:26 was, quote, “not a comfortable place to be,
0:15:28 they called me bunkers.”
0:15:29 – And always you care about,
0:15:31 have I made the right decision?
0:15:35 I’m used to being in a world of incomplete information,
0:15:36 where you have to make a decision.
0:15:38 You’ve got to do something.
0:15:41 – A year later, the Bank of England
0:15:43 finally did cut interest rates.
0:15:46 And in some circles, Danny Blanche Flower
0:15:49 was praised for his early call.
0:15:51 So you could say that Blanche Flower
0:15:53 has a proactive disposition,
0:15:57 which, in the case of interest rates, served him well.
0:15:59 How about in the case of what he calls
0:16:04 the huge global crisis caused by the smartphone?
0:16:05 I’m sure you’ve read about the growing number
0:16:08 of smartphone bans or other restrictions
0:16:11 in schools and elsewhere.
0:16:14 But some people think we shouldn’t rush to judgment.
0:16:18 They argue that the research behind the smartphone panic
0:16:19 isn’t very solid.
0:16:22 After the break, we will hear from one such critic.
0:16:25 – If you can’t properly diagnose the problem,
0:16:26 you can’t possibly solve it.
0:16:27 – I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:16:29 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:16:30 We’ll be right back.
0:16:33 (gentle music)
0:16:39 (dramatic music)
0:16:43 – The smartphone is a technology
0:16:45 that has changed our society dramatically.
0:16:49 And many people, including the economist Danny Blanche Flower
0:16:52 and the psychologist Jean Twenge,
0:16:54 argue that the smartphone is causing harm,
0:16:56 especially to young people.
0:16:57 This puts the smartphone in the company
0:17:00 of earlier inventions like the telephone,
0:17:03 the television, the bicycle, even electricity.
0:17:05 – It’s really important to acknowledge
0:17:07 that new things are scary.
0:17:09 – That is Andrew Shibilsky,
0:17:13 a professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford.
0:17:15 – New things should cause anxiety.
0:17:17 If someone or something turns up in your tribe,
0:17:19 they try to feed you a novel food.
0:17:21 They wanna take care of your kids.
0:17:23 It makes a lot of sense for your first reaction
0:17:25 to be aversion and to be skeptical.
0:17:27 So it’s absolutely all right to be skeptical
0:17:28 about new technologies.
0:17:31 But what will often happen is that some people will come along
0:17:34 and they’ll kind of give the panic its skeleton.
0:17:37 There’s a class of person called a moral entrepreneur.
0:17:39 What a moral entrepreneur will do
0:17:43 is they’ll identify a at-risk group for a novel technology.
0:17:44 And then you need a mechanism.
0:17:47 You need a reason to say this time it’s different.
0:17:49 Let’s say it’s Dungeons and Dragons
0:17:51 and Teenagers and Satanism.
0:17:55 Then you have a mechanism and that would be role-playing
0:17:59 or the fact that it’s animated or that in radio serials,
0:18:02 there’s actually somebody talking through a crime.
0:18:04 And so when you combine those three things,
0:18:06 moral entrepreneurship thrives.
0:18:08 There’s congressional inquiries,
0:18:09 Senate inquiries about comic books
0:18:12 or Lieberman holds up a Nintendo blaster
0:18:15 and everyone pats themselves on the back.
0:18:16 – Shabilsky is talking about the time
0:18:19 in the early 1990s when US Senator Joe Lieberman
0:18:22 went on a crusade against violent video games.
0:18:25 That may seem like a distant era.
0:18:27 – People get older, they forget.
0:18:29 New technology comes along
0:18:33 and you have the person who is whipping up today’s panic
0:18:35 recalling the good old days
0:18:37 when people would play video games in their basement.
0:18:39 – In one paper that you’ve co-authored,
0:18:41 this is called global wellbeing and mental health
0:18:42 in the internet age.
0:18:45 The abstract reads, in the last two decades,
0:18:47 the widespread adoption of internet technologies
0:18:50 has inspired concern that they have negatively affected
0:18:52 mental health and psychological wellbeing.
0:18:56 However, research on the topic is contested and hampered
0:18:58 by methodological shortcomings
0:18:59 leaving the broader consequences
0:19:02 of internet adoption unknown.
0:19:04 We show that the past two decades
0:19:07 have seen only small and inconsistent changes
0:19:10 in global wellbeing and mental health
0:19:11 that are not suggestive of the idea
0:19:14 that the adoption of internet and mobile broadband
0:19:18 is consistently linked to negative psychological outcomes.
0:19:20 Anyone reading that who’s also been paying attention
0:19:24 to the news would say, wait a minute, Andy,
0:19:27 this is exactly backwards.
0:19:29 This is the opposite of everything I’ve been told.
0:19:33 So tell me why you think you’re right
0:19:35 and what the argument that has gotten
0:19:38 so much heat lately has gotten wrong.
0:19:40 – I think the reason why your listeners
0:19:43 would be confused and say, wait, why?
0:19:44 Is a factor of two things.
0:19:47 The first being, like me, they’re intensely skeptical
0:19:49 about the role of technology in our lives
0:19:51 and in our children’s lives.
0:19:54 That’s natural and that needs to be listened to very closely.
0:19:57 And then two, that academic paper that you just talked about,
0:20:00 that wasn’t accompanied by a massive press campaign,
0:20:02 two massive popular press book campaigns.
0:20:06 And so it doesn’t get you in the opinion section of the times.
0:20:08 And so I think that part of that double take
0:20:10 is in part manufactured.
0:20:12 But I think that actually we’re at a local maximum
0:20:15 in terms of what many people call the tech lash
0:20:17 or the backlash against technology.
0:20:20 There was kind of a high watermark in the other direction
0:20:23 in 2011 with Terrier Square and the Arab Spring.
0:20:25 And then through this node-in period,
0:20:26 through Cambridge Analytica,
0:20:28 there was a fairly rapid swing
0:20:31 that brings us all the way to the kind of scholarship
0:20:32 that you were asking about.
0:20:35 But to get to the why I think that we’re quote, unquote,
0:20:38 right here is that the work that I do and others,
0:20:40 it is work that is not as glamorous.
0:20:43 And I would argue that there’s an inverse relationship
0:20:45 between how well a study is done in this field
0:20:49 and how shocking the results might seem
0:20:51 when you cross your T’s and dot your I’s,
0:20:54 when you share your code and you share your data,
0:20:56 you don’t find the kinds of things
0:20:57 that you or I would have
0:21:00 as kind of a preexisting bias about tech.
0:21:01 – Can you give me an example
0:21:03 that a lay person could understand
0:21:05 of the methodological shortcomings
0:21:08 or failures of the research you’re talking about?
0:21:11 – Phones, screen time, social media,
0:21:13 these are all catch all categories.
0:21:16 And so unless you’re epistemically humble
0:21:19 about what you’re measuring and what you’re not measuring,
0:21:22 it can be very tempting to claim
0:21:27 that when a parent or a kid is filling out a questionnaire
0:21:30 that asks, think back on the last year of your life,
0:21:32 on average, how many hours a day do you spend
0:21:36 with a computer, a smartphone, a game console,
0:21:40 and a cell phone, and then call that screen time
0:21:42 in the method section of your paper,
0:21:45 and then call the title of your paper,
0:21:49 “Social Media and Its Impact on Teenage Girls.”
0:21:51 And then you also have the measurement problem,
0:21:54 and this pains me very deeply as a psychologist,
0:21:57 of what the heck is mental health or wellbeing,
0:21:59 because saying you’re sad,
0:22:01 or saying you’re satisfied with your life,
0:22:03 is very, very different than turning up
0:22:06 in a therapist’s office and being diagnosed
0:22:09 as having major depressive disorder or anxiety disorder.
0:22:11 And all of those little decisions
0:22:13 of how you deal with measurement,
0:22:16 those actually can be quite consequential
0:22:18 if all of these arbitrary choices
0:22:20 that are made by a research analyst,
0:22:22 if they’re consistent with the researchers’
0:22:25 preexisting biases or they’re consistent
0:22:27 with the topic of their popular book,
0:22:30 it’s a bit of a red flag or at least a yellow flag.
0:22:32 When you think of everyday behaviors
0:22:35 as being potentially pathological or potentially addictive,
0:22:40 it’s a fairly slippery slope to pathologize everything.
0:22:43 I mean, video gaming is as damaging to mental health
0:22:45 as beds are to mental health.
0:22:48 You could create a disorder called bed addiction disorder,
0:22:52 where people have low affect and low mobility
0:22:54 and get bed sores.
0:22:56 And you could try to regulate the sale of beds
0:22:59 and haul bed companies in front of Congress.
0:23:00 A lot of the evidence you’d have
0:23:02 that something’s bad for you.
0:23:03 It’s not built on a basis of chemistry
0:23:06 or biochemistry or biology.
0:23:08 – You’ve made a similar argument in the past
0:23:12 saying that the effects of digital technology on teenagers
0:23:15 are about as big as the effects of eating potatoes.
0:23:18 – Well, yeah, social scientists will often try to draw
0:23:21 inferences about the population level effects
0:23:24 or associations that might link any given activity
0:23:25 to a health outcome.
0:23:28 And the problem with that is that if you
0:23:30 aren’t crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s,
0:23:33 you can interpret the noise in a data set
0:23:35 in a way that’s consistent with your preexisting
0:23:36 beliefs or biases.
0:23:38 And that’s what happens with technology.
0:23:40 We were trying to make a very simple point,
0:23:42 which is that if you don’t have your hypotheses
0:23:44 before you look at your data,
0:23:47 you can be led astray by very small effects,
0:23:50 whether it’s left-handedness, wearing glasses,
0:23:52 enjoying bicycling.
0:23:55 These are all things that have the same quote-unquote effect,
0:23:58 which is really just a correlation in a large data set.
0:24:00 – I think one interesting thing about this topic,
0:24:03 which is why it’s got so many people riled up,
0:24:05 is that this is a technology
0:24:08 that just about everybody has experience with.
0:24:10 So they can sort of fill in the blank
0:24:12 for the causal mechanisms, right?
0:24:16 They can say, oh, I’ve had the experience on my phone
0:24:19 where rather than going to that event tonight
0:24:20 at my place of worship,
0:24:23 or rather than going to play soccer with my friends,
0:24:27 I get caught up in my silo of anxiety and depression
0:24:28 on the phone.
0:24:32 And this lets people layer their own experiences
0:24:34 onto the moral panic argument.
0:24:37 But aren’t personal experiences in general
0:24:41 a good starting point for a lot of social science research?
0:24:43 – I think that they’re a really important starting point,
0:24:46 but I think they’re a highly invalid ending point,
0:24:49 and they shouldn’t be where people’s thinking stops.
0:24:50 It’s very easy to think
0:24:53 that there’s a digital world and an analog world,
0:24:55 and these worlds don’t connect.
0:24:58 But the problem isn’t necessarily that one is good or bad.
0:25:01 The problem is that we’re putting this wedge between them.
0:25:02 And when we put that wedge between them,
0:25:05 what we do is we cut ourselves off from
0:25:07 being able to investigate really interesting questions
0:25:09 about actually what is happening to someone
0:25:11 if they’re depressed and they’re using social media.
0:25:14 There’s a gigantic difference between feeling unhappy
0:25:16 with how you spent your evening
0:25:18 and suffering from agoraphobia,
0:25:20 having major depressive disorder,
0:25:22 or some form of crippling social anxiety.
0:25:24 I’m sure you know people who have suffered,
0:25:26 and many people who are listening,
0:25:29 know people who suffered with opioid addiction
0:25:30 or depression or anxiety.
0:25:32 And claiming that the thing that happens
0:25:35 when you play a video game is like what happens
0:25:37 when you can’t stop taking opioids,
0:25:40 or saying, I don’t feel like going outside,
0:25:43 I have had a bad Twitter argument, I feel so anxious.
0:25:46 Saying that’s the same thing as crippling agoraphobia,
0:25:48 where people won’t leave their home for years.
0:25:50 Frankly, that’s insulting,
0:25:53 because there’s no reason to think that’s the same mechanism.
0:25:59 – Over the last seven or eight years,
0:26:02 I have struggled with what I am quite comfortable
0:26:05 calling an internet addiction.
0:26:07 – That is Lauren Euler,
0:26:10 a novelist and cultural critic in her early 30s.
0:26:14 She grew up in West Virginia and now lives in Berlin.
0:26:17 Euler has spent a lot of time thinking and writing
0:26:19 about life online and off.
0:26:22 – I have met great friends on social media,
0:26:23 I’ve gotten boyfriends on social media,
0:26:26 but at the same time, I do strongly feel
0:26:28 that it can produce an actual addiction,
0:26:30 like a straightforward addiction, like a drug addiction.
0:26:33 And I know that because since I divested
0:26:35 from social media, I’ve picked up smoking
0:26:38 and it’s the same sort of thought process
0:26:41 about like compulsively wanting to either look at Twitter
0:26:43 or like smoke a cigarette.
0:26:45 Like you train yourself to think,
0:26:46 something could be happening on my phone.
0:26:47 Someone could have written me,
0:26:50 some news could have broken and I need to see it.
0:26:52 – Euler recently published a collection of essays
0:26:54 called “No Judgment”.
0:26:57 One of the pieces is titled “My Anxiety”.
0:26:59 – I think anxiety does create a barrier
0:27:02 around actually doing things that you’re sitting
0:27:04 and worrying about and sitting and looking at your phone
0:27:09 is just kind of externalizing this worrying feeling, right?
0:27:11 Like your phone is doing the worrying for you
0:27:14 because it has this short attention span.
0:27:15 My thoughts are like bouncing around
0:27:16 and I might be thinking about taxes
0:27:17 and then I’m thinking about some guy
0:27:19 and then I’m thinking about my late article
0:27:21 that I need to turn in and I’m thinking about,
0:27:22 I embarrass myself at a party
0:27:25 and all this happens in the span of two minutes,
0:27:27 which if you’ve been on social media,
0:27:29 that is exactly what it’s like, right?
0:27:32 – So Lauren Euler does see a deep connection
0:27:33 between her smartphone
0:27:35 and what researchers like Danny Blanchflower
0:27:37 call mental ill-being.
0:27:42 But again, is the one necessarily causing the other?
0:27:44 – I get anxious that I’ll become depressed
0:27:46 and depressed that I’m so anxious.
0:27:49 And if the phone is a kind of conduit for feeling
0:27:52 or if it’s an extension of your brain,
0:27:54 then of course like the things on your phone
0:27:55 might make you depressed
0:27:57 just as they might make you anxious.
0:28:00 So I think on one hand, of course it’s causal
0:28:03 but I do think it’s sort of self-defeating
0:28:07 and short-sighted to suggest that the phone
0:28:12 is the only cause of this mental health crisis
0:28:14 among teenagers or among anyone.
0:28:17 Because that’s just not how the world works.
0:28:19 That’s how op-eds work.
0:28:20 Like people who are desperate
0:28:22 for one weird trick to save your life,
0:28:23 it’s like I just needed to throw my phone in the river
0:28:25 and then everything would end up fine.
0:28:27 It’s just not how the world works.
0:28:32 – Okay, so if there is rising anxiety among young people
0:28:37 and if throwing your phone in the river isn’t a solution,
0:28:38 what is?
0:28:40 That’s coming up after the break.
0:28:43 I’m Steven Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.
0:28:52 Andy Shibilsky at Oxford
0:28:57 argues that the panic over smartphones is overblown.
0:29:01 But that doesn’t mean he thinks everything is fine.
0:29:04 In the U.S., there are some really worrying trend lines
0:29:06 for people across the population.
0:29:08 And with the most worrying trends,
0:29:11 things like self-harm and death by suicide,
0:29:16 I would be much more worried as a middle-aged man
0:29:18 in Appalachia with access to a gun
0:29:21 and with access to West Virginia’s social safety nut
0:29:25 than I would be as a white teenage girl anywhere in the U.S.
0:29:27 And so I would say that there probably
0:29:29 is something broken in America.
0:29:31 Here’s something I also wonder about.
0:29:35 There is so much more awareness around mental health now
0:29:37 than there was 20, 30 years ago
0:29:39 and so much less stigma.
0:29:41 Some people have argued that at least.
0:29:44 Do you think that that acceptance might be showing up
0:29:47 in the data as more young people today saying,
0:29:50 yes, I’ve experienced mental health problems
0:29:51 than they used to?
0:29:53 – There’s a concept called measurement variance.
0:29:56 This is the basic idea that if I asked you
0:29:58 how I’m feeling today and then I compare
0:30:01 how I’m feeling today to how I said I felt 10 years ago,
0:30:02 the way that people answer that question
0:30:04 actually changes over time.
0:30:07 And so there’s a bit of that, absolutely.
0:30:09 And then the way that we actually track
0:30:10 things like mental health problems
0:30:12 in the U.S. in particular,
0:30:14 it’s very, very susceptible to change
0:30:18 as a function of changes in insurance
0:30:21 and changes in way that diseases can be classified.
0:30:25 – On this note, Shabilsky points to a study
0:30:27 by two health economists,
0:30:30 Adriana Cortador Waldron and Janet Curry.
0:30:31 Their paper is called,
0:30:34 to what extent are trends in teen mental health
0:30:37 driven by changes in reporting?
0:30:39 – It’s a study of clinical intakes
0:30:43 of young women in New Jersey across the last 10 years.
0:30:45 There’s a series of spikes and hospital admissions
0:30:47 for different types of serious disorders
0:30:49 when a young person shows up in crisis.
0:30:52 And one way that you could have interpreted the data
0:30:54 is to say that there is a mental health epidemic
0:30:56 in New Jersey for teenage girls in particular,
0:30:59 but the researchers went back and looked at changes
0:31:02 to the best practices for clinical intake.
0:31:05 And the peaks occurred in response to two changes.
0:31:09 The first is a special awareness campaign for clinicians,
0:31:11 for focusing on young women
0:31:13 as a target area for intervention.
0:31:15 And then the second was allowing there
0:31:18 to be a second reason for clinical intake.
0:31:19 So it used to be when you came in,
0:31:23 you would just say the person is schizotypal or depressed,
0:31:26 but then you could say schizotypal and depressed.
0:31:29 And so when that change went through, the amounts went up.
0:31:30 But, and here’s the rub,
0:31:35 it only went up for young people who were on insurance
0:31:38 because it created a new billable category.
0:31:40 It didn’t go up for those who didn’t.
0:31:42 So I would say when you’re a hammer,
0:31:44 the problems of the world are nails.
0:31:47 I think it’s very tempting to think that the atomization
0:31:50 of certain Western cultures is a result of technology
0:31:53 and not other things like a decline in religiosity
0:31:55 or these other kinds of things.
0:31:57 There aren’t gonna be quick fix solutions.
0:31:58 – Like throw away your phones.
0:32:01 – Throwing away your phones or putting them a locker.
0:32:03 What you’re going to have to do
0:32:05 is actually rebuild communities.
0:32:08 You’re gonna have to hire psychotherapists.
0:32:11 You’re gonna have to build civil and economic infrastructure
0:32:12 to support those in your society
0:32:14 who are falling through the cracks.
0:32:16 – What if I say to you, I agree with you
0:32:19 and that sounds smart and sane,
0:32:22 but it also is going to take a long time
0:32:24 and a lot of money, a lot of resources.
0:32:27 And in the meantime, I believe there are millions,
0:32:28 maybe billions of people suffering
0:32:30 and so I wanna do something quick and dirty.
0:32:32 What would you say to that?
0:32:34 – Law of unintended consequences.
0:32:37 I would say that if you can’t properly diagnose the problem,
0:32:39 you can’t possibly solve it.
0:32:42 I would say that if you take this topic seriously,
0:32:45 you would take slow and incremental steps
0:32:48 to ascertain exactly what problem you’re trying to solve.
0:32:51 And so yeah, I would say that you should not waste energy
0:32:52 on patting yourself on the back.
0:32:55 – What if I ask you to make an argument
0:32:58 for the benefits of digital tech that are overlooked
0:33:02 in the rush to proclaim all of digital technology
0:33:03 damaging to young people especially?
0:33:06 – One of the things that I think everyone can agree
0:33:08 is really worrying is content online
0:33:11 around self-harm or anorexia.
0:33:15 And it might seem like a very obvious thing
0:33:18 that platforms should be doing absolutely all they can do
0:33:22 to take down this content and to scuttle these communities
0:33:25 and make sure that it’s not on any of the big platforms.
0:33:27 That might seem like common sense.
0:33:30 That might feel like the right thing to do.
0:33:33 But you can wind up causing so much more harm than good.
0:33:35 If you don’t pay attention to actually how people
0:33:39 who struggle with these disorders use social media platforms,
0:33:41 there are really good support groups
0:33:45 for things like self-harm, suicidal thoughts,
0:33:47 and things like anorexia and bulimia.
0:33:48 One of the things that social media platforms
0:33:51 can be really good for is connecting communities
0:33:53 in a positive way that self-moderates
0:33:56 and they provide resources for people in crisis.
0:34:00 And what happens if you think that it’s the responsibility
0:34:02 of these companies to just crush it
0:34:04 so that it’s not there anymore?
0:34:05 Two things will always happen
0:34:07 and they’re both very worrying.
0:34:09 The first is people who are already struggling,
0:34:12 they will begin to stop disclosing.
0:34:13 They’ll button themselves up.
0:34:16 They won’t reach out and they’ll lose access
0:34:18 to the online social environments
0:34:20 that have been supported for them.
0:34:22 And then the second thing is the community moves
0:34:24 to other parts of the internet
0:34:27 that are more poorly moderated and are far less safe.
0:34:29 And so you wind up in a telegram group
0:34:31 where there’s no accountability
0:34:34 instead of being in a Facebook or Instagram group.
0:34:36 And so I think thinking about tools
0:34:38 to meet young people where they are
0:34:39 is a much smarter idea
0:34:42 than just burning everything down and salting the earth.
0:34:47 – As you just heard, Andy Shibilsky is more positive
0:34:49 toward the big social platforms
0:34:51 than many people in this arena.
0:34:54 In fact, he recently announced a research collaboration
0:34:58 with the Facebook and Instagram parent company, Meta.
0:35:00 – We’re going to solicit proposals
0:35:01 from researchers all around the globe.
0:35:03 They can get data on young people
0:35:05 in 40 different countries
0:35:06 and combine that with information
0:35:09 about their mental health and their wellbeing.
0:35:12 But at no point will they have a direct relationship
0:35:14 in terms of the selection of their projects
0:35:16 or the decision for the projects to go forward
0:35:18 with the researchers at Meta.
0:35:20 We’ve put in a series of firewalls
0:35:23 between the data scientists at Meta
0:35:25 and researchers who would be very interested
0:35:28 in investigating the idea that Instagram
0:35:31 relates to the mental health and the wellbeing of teenagers.
0:35:34 Myself and my co-editors will be selecting projects
0:35:37 on the basis of their scientific merit
0:35:39 and their proposals will be peer reviewed
0:35:41 in advance of data collection
0:35:43 by researchers who are specialists
0:35:44 in topics like mental health,
0:35:47 topics like online engagement,
0:35:50 but also generalists who have a sense
0:35:52 of what is good methodology.
0:35:55 And only when that peer review process finishes,
0:35:57 the data request goes directly to Meta.
0:36:00 The idea here is you have these firewalls in place.
0:36:04 You don’t have big tech negatively affecting the process
0:36:05 and you don’t have researchers
0:36:07 potentially moving the goalposts
0:36:10 because they think they’ve found something interesting
0:36:12 after having a rummage through the data.
0:36:15 – It might surprise you
0:36:17 that the rigorous analysis Shabilsky is talking about
0:36:20 hasn’t already been done on Instagram and Facebook
0:36:22 and other social media platforms,
0:36:27 but it’s worth remembering how new this ecosystem is.
0:36:30 Here again is the writer Lauren Euler.
0:36:33 – The social media era has been really short, right?
0:36:35 Like when was MySpace founded?
0:36:38 When was Facebook founded in the early 2000s, right?
0:36:39 That’s not very long.
0:36:41 And already Facebook, nobody uses that.
0:36:43 They had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp
0:36:44 and we’re gonna say relevant.
0:36:47 And Instagram is actually quite young, right?
0:36:49 I think it’s like 20, what?
0:36:51 2010, yeah, that’s really young.
0:36:54 So I look forward to a day when Instagram doesn’t exist,
0:36:57 but I’m sure everything will take its place.
0:36:58 – I’m guessing Euler is right,
0:37:01 that the platforms will change
0:37:04 and the way we interact with our phones will change.
0:37:07 Some people, like Andy Shabilsky,
0:37:10 believe that if you can’t properly diagnose the problem,
0:37:12 you can’t possibly solve it
0:37:16 and therefore to rush into a hard anti-phone position
0:37:18 isn’t the right move.
0:37:22 Other people, like Danny Blanchflower,
0:37:23 say that we can’t afford to wait
0:37:26 because if the rise in anxiety and unhappiness
0:37:30 among young people is as significant as he thinks,
0:37:33 the consequences will be significant too,
0:37:34 especially the kind of consequences
0:37:37 that economists like to consider.
0:37:40 – I worry about what will happen to these young people
0:37:41 as they come to the labor market.
0:37:44 And then later on, we’re gonna worry about their mortality
0:37:45 and we’re gonna worry about their ability
0:37:48 to generate savings and investment
0:37:51 and buy a house and buy themselves a retirement package.
0:37:55 So down the road, these are issues that we care about.
0:37:57 – You are never going to run out of problems
0:37:58 to address, are you?
0:38:00 – In a way, that’s what I’ve tried to do.
0:38:02 Think about how we address the problems
0:38:04 and try and find solutions.
0:38:05 I don’t know what works.
0:38:07 I’ve been asked that question, we go,
0:38:09 “We don’t know, but we’re gonna try and find out for you.”
0:38:10 That’s what we do.
0:38:14 Do me a favor, when you find something, call me
0:38:16 and we’ll talk about it again, okay?
0:38:18 – Love to, love to.
0:38:22 – Thanks to Danny Blanchflower, Andy Shibilski
0:38:25 and Lauren Euler for their insights today.
0:38:27 And I’m curious to know what you think.
0:38:31 Our email is radio@freakonomics.com.
0:38:33 Coming up next time on the show,
0:38:37 do you ever watch an NFL game and wonder why
0:38:39 when so many of the players are black,
0:38:42 so many of the coaches are white?
0:38:44 The NFL itself wondered that,
0:38:47 and two decades ago, they put in a rule to help.
0:38:49 – The Rooney Rule is really about making sure
0:38:51 that you have a diverse slate
0:38:54 when you’re selecting and hiring people.
0:38:55 – Did it help?
0:38:57 We tell the history of the Rooney Rule
0:39:00 with the help of an actual Rooney.
0:39:02 – You know, if he was in the Senate,
0:39:04 we’d call him Majority Whip.
0:39:06 – We look at the successes and failures,
0:39:08 the lawsuits and the sham interviews,
0:39:12 and we ask how the Rooney Rule works outside of football.
0:39:13 That’s next time on the show.
0:39:15 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:39:18 And if you can, someone else too.
0:39:21 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:39:24 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app
0:39:26 also at freakonomics.com
0:39:29 where we publish transcripts and show notes.
0:39:31 This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs.
0:39:34 Our staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman,
0:39:38 Delvin Appalachie, Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman,
0:39:40 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin,
0:39:43 Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrers,
0:39:45 Julie Canfer, Lyork Bowditch, Morgan Levy,
0:39:48 Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly,
0:39:49 and Zach Lipinski.
0:39:52 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers.
0:39:55 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:39:57 As always, thanks for listening.
0:40:01 – I’m Dr. Andy Shibilski.
0:40:04 I’m the University of Oxford’s professor of,
0:40:06 oh my God, what am I the professor of?
0:40:08 – Human behavior and technology?
0:40:10 – Yeah, exactly, but I was so hung up
0:40:12 on if I’m Andy or Andrew.
0:40:18 – The Freakonomics Radio Network.
0:40:20 The hidden side of everything.
0:40:24 Stitcher.
0:40:27 (gentle music)
0:40:29 you