Unintended Consequences: Good Intentions Gone Wrong

[00:00:04]hey there it's Steven Dubner before we get to today's episode I want to ask for your help for a special series we are just starting to make it is about mentorship and this is where you come in we are looking for some good stories it could be about a mentorship in business or Academia or in sports it could be a spiritual Mentor or someone who helped you become a better parent or spouse or maybe you are the Mentor or maybe you have a mentor who doesn't even know they are your Mentor no relationship is too small or too weird if it matters to you send us an email with some of the particulars we are at Radio freecomic we look forward to reading your stories and interviewing some of you for this series thanks in advance and now today's [Music] episode here's a phrase you have probably heard before the road to hell is paved with good intentions the sentiment goes back at least to the Bible but the way it's used today likely began with the 18th century writer Samuel Johnson since then versions of the phrase have appeared in the works of Charlotte Bronte and Lord Byron saur and kard and Carl Marx Azie Osborne and Madonna to with good intentions [Music] yeah yeah but how would an economist think about it I would say economics is fundamentally about trade-offs and there are always trade-offs today on free economics radio three stories about Good Intentions gone bad in the workplace if anything it made them worse off by reducing their employment rates I find that Junior female academics start fewer new projects but can econom S Help turn good intentions into good outcomes I can't emphasize enough that with slight adjustments you can get your cake and eat it too let's eat some [Music] cake this is Freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the Hidden Side of everything with your host Steven [Music] Dubner when you look back Josh at the body of research that you've done some of which brought you a Nobel Prize congratulations thanks how do you assess its importance or leverage in terms of influencing public policy and really what I really want to know is is that a goal I suspect you'll say not but maybe if if you're being 110% honest you might say well a little bit sometimes well I like to influence public policy and I'm happy when I influence public policy but that is not what I get up in the morning and set out to do I'm an academic and what I set out to do is high quality scholarship I like to get things published in top journals that's how I measure my influence now ultimately a lot of the work I do does affect public policy or at least it becomes part of the discussion and that's gratifying this is Josh angrist and I'm a professor in the department of Economics at MIT he did win a Nobel along with David card and hedo imbens for their quote methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships that's a fancy way of saying that these three economists have found reliable ways to measure if a given Factor let's call it X is the actual cause of a given outcome let's call it why or does something other than x cause y or does X perhaps cause Z which may be the opposite of Y if you are a policy maker hoping that X policy will cause y but it causes Z instead well good intentions but not so good outcome this gap between policy intention and policy outcome is something that Josh angrist is particularly interested in consider us tax policy we don't tax the rich at 100% but sometimes we've been taxing poor people at 100% or even more because there's what's called a cliff where when you cross a threshold you lose an entire benefit the classic example of a cliff in social policy is you lose your Medicare if you earn more than a cut off Medicare is worth tens of thousands of dollars to your family and once your earnings go $1 above something you lose Medicare well the incentives there are very poor for employment you don't want to change jobs and you don't want to move so there's all of a sudden there's a lot of tradeoffs here's the thing making good social policy is hard for a lot of reasons first it's difficult to know for sure what works whether X will actually cause y second policymaking is part of politics and politics is messy with all kinds of compromises to be made along the way but perhaps the trickiest thing is that the people who are targeted by a given policy May react in a way the policy makers had not anticipated in a way that may cause the policy to essentially backfire at least to some degree this has come to be known as the law of unintended consequences it's not really a law but it is a powerful and usually unwelcome Force Josh angrist has been thinking about unintended consequences for pretty much his entire career his first big research finding along with the economist Deron asoglu had to do with the Ada or the Americans with Disabilities Act it was signed into law in 1990 by President George Bush the first the Americans with Disabilities Act expanded civil rights protection meaning you could not fire or refuse to hire or pay less on the basis of a disability and what disabilities were included in the first version of the Ada well it's not concrete you know that was one of the things that had to get figured out and there was a lot of litigation about what could be counted It's tricky because maybe the employer doesn't know you're disabled so there's always a lot of litigation in the US when a new policy comes in the courts kind of decide and ultimately the courts gave a fairly broad interpretation so it covers a wide range of physical disabilities including some that might not be obvious to an employer like back pain the other thing is and this was relatively novel The Ada requires employers to accommodate disabled workers but it's not clear what that means the law says it has to be reasonable so for example if you're a construction worker building skyscrapers and you're in a wheelchair I don't have to accommodate that you can work on the 110th floor but if you work at MIT I do have to accommodate that you can get into your space and do your work and here is how President Bush put it at the time with today's signing of the landmark Americans for Disabilities Act every man woman and child with a disability can now pass through once closed doors into a bright New Era of equality Independence and freedom that sounds pretty great doesn't it at least from the employee side it might make things more complicated and expensive from the employer side but hey there are trade-offs everywhere right for a society intent on providing good employment opportunities for everyone the Ada seemed to say that it was worthwhile to ask employers to make these accommodations Josh angrist meanwhile he got to wondering would there be some unended consequences of this law with such Obviously good intentions so he went looking for some data and he found it in What's called the current population survey which is administered every month by the Census Bureau that's where the unemployment rate comes from you know every month you hear the unemployment rate on the radio that's coming from a survey of 60,000 households and there's a bunch of questions there did you work were you looking for work but there's actually a lot more there there's employment there's earnings there's schooling and as it turns out there's a question about disability do you have a disability that limits work for people who answered that question yes angrist wanted to know whether the Ada was helping but he would need some kind of control variable a way to compare workers affected by the new law with similar workers who weren't affected luckily the Ada provided one companies with fewer than 25 employees were Exempted from most of the laws Provisions this gave angrist and Asam moglu a nice little natural experiment as economists like to call it so they measured they sorted they analyzed and they wrote up their findings for the Journal of political economy one of the top journals in their field what was the headline result the surprising unintended consequence is that the Ada does not seem to have helped disabled workers if anything it made them worse off by reducing their employment rates and their annual earnings and can you explain why their employment would have been reduced what's actually happening at a firm well employers to the extent that they can tell who's disabled they just don't want to get into it cuz they don't know what the cost of accommodation are going to be the cost of accommodation could be very mild it could just be a matter of letting somebody work on the ground floor say but they could be very high and they're sort of unknown once you go down that road and you're in the business of accommodating you potentially are on the hook for something big now mostly that's not going to happen but it is a problem now wait a minute minute wasn't part of the Americans with Disabilities Act a provision that a firm wouldn't discriminate against hiring a disabled worker and therefore by choosing not to hire a disabled worker because you didn't want to deal with the consequences you are violating the Ada but it's much harder to make a case on the hiring front than on the discharge how do you make a case that I'm not hiring you don't have any data on who I interviewed and it's much harder to prove that cuz I can always say well that guy wasn't qualified we don't know if Josh angress was our first choice for this interview for instance totally probably not so some workers you might decide even if you don't know they're disabled you can kind of predict this person is going to be trouble and they're going to sue me and that becomes much easier once they're in the workplace and the thing is you don't have to win for this to be a problem mostly you won't win it'll settle but it's a hassle and it's a cost when I first read this paper years ago so it was one of those mindblowing but obvious in retrospect findings like if you hadn't spelled it out I wouldn't have thought of it on my own but once you spell it out you see yes that's the way humans behave well it wasn't obvious at the time and it certainly was controversial you must have upset some people yeah yeah there were people that weren't happy some disabled groups that were proud of the Ada there were some economists that didn't accept the finding and went and did their own work on it but you know the finding most ly held up in my view we also did some cross state analysis some states have more litigation than others and we saw that that was a good predictor of where relative employment of disabled workers is going to fall the Ada has been amended since its original passage it also had its scope narrowed by several Supreme Court cases while some states have pass their own laws to protect workers with disabilities that said such workers are still far are less likely to be employed than workers without a disability economists meanwhile continue to study which policies are best at actually helping workers with disabilities that after all is the economist's job to analyze the costs along with the benefits I mean my job is to just point out the tradeoffs that is Zoe Cullen she too is an economist at the Harvard Business School her students are in training to create and manage organizations I like the study of organizations I think that's where my topics which would maybe traditionally be more on the labor end of Economics become managerially relevant for instance how do firms and managers set salaries for their employees do all employees with the same job title and experience get paid the same and how much do employees know about their colleagues salaries for employees this is an important question if you're looking for a job or if you're hoping for a promotion you know you find out that you're up for promotion and you're going to negotiate this new contract and the first thing you wonder is well what are they willing to pay me and if you could only just talk to the people who recently were promoted recently negotiated their contracts maybe you could hold out for a better deal most firms are not very explicit about the salaries they pay some sometimes they'll give a range and there are sites like glass door that compile data from former and current employees but this kind of data isn't complete or even all that reliable it's posted anonymously it includes a lot of lower paid and often disgruntled employees the data can also be outdated and failed to include total compensation like benefits from the other direction some companies have been found to solicit fake positive feedback on glass door so if you look at the whole picture the available data around salaries is often imperfect information most of the theories put forth by labor economists meanwhile assume something closer to perfect information yeah so for example if an employer has perfect information about market prices they're going to indeed know everything they need to know about market prices to make their decision when we we introduce incomplete information that's typically a model where we have to be more explicit about exactly what's outside the information set so in the case of Market wages the employer might have private information about exactly what they think a candidate is worth and what they would be willing to pay but they only have either a signal or know the distribution of pay that their competitors are drawing from an employer does have the obvious advantage of at least knowing what they pay all of their employees employees meanwhile have much less information this gives the employer some real leverage and some firms exploit that leverage when they can it happened to Josh angrist when he landed his current job at MIT I came to MIT as a full-time faculty member in 1996 I was happy as a clam to be at MIT thinking I've really done well and my former thesis advis orley ashap futter who's a very famous labor Economist came to my office to chat and orley said so what do you make and I said I make $85,000 I can't believe I make $85,000 a year and he said oh my God he said you can't work for that that's not what tenur labor economists make if that gets out that's going to be very bad so you need to go and get a race orley was teaching at Princeton at the this time yes yeah he's inciting you to Riot against MIT basically exactly I didn't know what my peers make as somebody has written you're more likely to know about your colleagues sex lives than their salary and I now know having served on some committees that the variance within departments can be huge so I was absolutely on the low end so what' you do I went and I said I'm going to leave and I had to generate you know what academics have to do is generate offers if you want to threaten to leave it's like baseball you have to say I'm going to get myself traded to the Yankees could you get an offer from Princeton for instance for instance and then you have to be you know you have has to be credible so you have to be prepared to take it if they you know don't Pony up so you did that I did that and eventually I got a raise what'd you get a raise to well I I got a ra I got a very large raise I think I got up to around 150 which shows you how I was very underpaid what cut of that raise did you give to orley I still owe him the thing is I owe Orly for so many things that wouldn't begin to pay it what does that say to you the very fact that that Gap exists between the 85 and the 150 and all you had to do was basically make it transparent what does that tell you about the way firms operate MIT is just another firm well some labor markets are more efficient than others so we live in a labor market where meaning professors there's a lot of variance in pay and there's also a lot of VAR expence and productivity we're much closer to people in the Performing Arts or Sports every actor or Entertainer every MLB NBA NFL you name it they're all their own market right they all have their own package of attributes and it is kind of hard to know what should they be paid so what would happen if firms decided to be more transparent about what all their employees were paid wouldn't that be a net benefit for employees that's what I think people think after the break the law of unintended consequences strikes again I'm Steven Dubner this is free economics radio we'll be right [Music] back you may have noticed that there is a growing Trend in what are called pay transparency laws which require firms to give more complete information about what employees should expect to earn a number of countries have passed such laws recently and it's catching on in the US to in places including California and New York the Harvard Business School Economist Zoe Cullen has been studying the impact of these laws what are the desired outcomes of such policies and are those outcomes achieved are these policies Fair Cullen says that pay transparency policies come in three categories the first establishes what she calls horizontal transparency it's just a simple way of saying I have a peer what is the pay transparency between these two peers the second category is called cross firm transparency this is where the visibility is now between firms so you'd be learning about what you'd get if you moved this is let's say the Yale School of Management comes after Zoe cullin from Harvard Business School correct correct has that happened by the way just for the record I'm not allowed to publicly talk about that am I it's not only transparency that a worker might have about different firm salaries but it's also actually what a firm might perceive their competitors to be paying the third category is what Cullen calls vertical transparency vertical is this understudied very important midpoint there are very few instances where public policy is really focused on vertical transparency but this is happening to some extent by accident which is finding out not just what your peers are earning but what your Senior Management is earning what you would earn if you were to go up the corporate lad H why would you say public policy hasn't yet cared much about vertical because I would think given all the conversation about pay inequality and income inequality over the past many years now that that would be actually a focus even more than horizontal perhaps my sense is that most of us think firms are taking care of this in the way that they are doing in the economic textbooks in an economic textbook you might say well the firm has to internalize the career incentives of the employee and they should incentivize them to both stay with the firm and see that they are growing into bigger positions in order to keep them loyal to the firm so the idea would be that it's the onus of the firm to essentially be very clear about the Steep salary progression do younger employees tend to talk about pay transparency and want to have more pay transparency than older workers well I've heard Millennials do chat more about pay but let me just say this we also see a strong pattern of secrecy as you become richer and age and wealth are highly cinear Tom nichas and I my colleague at HBS looked at who withholds their information about income from the US Census and there the patterns seem pretty strong that it is about the money now you must have some psychology friends put on your psychologist hat for a moment and try to explain why that would be the term that comes up most often when you just have an open text box for why don't you want to share this information is around fear of resentment so that word resentment I take quite seriously you might also think there's some strategic element to this that is harder to articulate so you know in the context of a workplace you might have a sense that if it got out that you just got a big raise perhaps other people would be vying for the same pie vying for the same pie meaning if your salary goes up there may not be as much pie left for me so what happens once salaries are made public that's the question Cullen set out to answer she recently published a paper that surveyed all the relevant research on pay transparency policies including her own research this was for the Journal of economic perspectives most economics journals want their contributors to describe the research but remain agnostic about policy recommendations but the Jep is different they like us to take a stance hence the title is pay transparency good so less of a literature review and much more about where I stand on this topic and the implication there would seem to be that more information is good full stop is that the case that's what I think people think and you're here to tell us just that it's you know the typical Economist not so simple view Cullen's own research used data from a variety of sources some came from task rabbit the online platform where gig workers submit public bids for different jobs some data came from ADP the huge payroll company that manages worker paychecks and benefits across the country she also relied on census data that tracked wages and employment histories from for more than 5 million people this allowed Cullen to compare workers in states that have paid transparency regulations with those that don't here's what she found at companies in states that have pay transparency laws wages became as she puts it linked together when one person negotiates for their salary typically it will be in an environment that's highly private once you start to introduce transparency as a way of pinning the employer to pay people the same one person's negotiation affects someone else's okay so that makes sense when salary information is private there might be a lot of variance once it's public wages tend to converge and that's exactly what these laws are trying to accomplish to prevent firms from rewarding or punishing individual employees based on some kind of bias or favoritism but that wasn't the only way these laws affected firms you can just see how it increases their incentives to bargain aggressively because if they save a dollar with one worker they save that dollar with everybody ultimately you start to see what I called compressed pay in one paper Cullen finds that in states with transparency laws that protect workers rights to discuss their compensation there was overall a 2% decline in wages essentially the set of pay transparency policies that have been most popular are also having this intended consequence of linking bargaining practices across workers and lowering average wages so does your finding Zoe that pay transparency can lead to overall lower pay does it strike you as an unintended consequence of the policies I don't think policy makers talked about that component of it so that's a yes yeah I think I didn't know it myself and I found it very surprising can you give us a sense of the impact of pay transparency on any observable pay gap between women and men I assume that is a major goal of pay transparency I think it's pretty uniformly great at achieving this goal in all these evaluations of countrywide policies we've seen positive effects on gender gaps pay transparency leads to more equal pay is it too reductive to say then that pay transpar is on average significantly better for women than men no I think that it's a challenging statement to make in part because well I think the presumption that you have in the back of your mind is that women are at the lower end of the pay scale and so this is a question of do the people at the bottom necessarily do better under pay transparency when we talk about societal level transparency I don't think it's clear so it sounds like you might consider this a sort of growing pain of pay Equity would that be accurate yes and I can't emphasize enough that with slight adjustments to what these policies are doing in fact you can get pay growth and upward pressure on pay through transparencies it's as though you can get your cake and eat it too with just thinking a little more broadly about the intended goal can I have those slight adjustments please yes like you know don't Focus so I say don't I'm using the imperative with you that's okay that means you're comfortable I'm happy about that okay thank you Stephen I think that's an invitation it is an invitation I hereby formally invite you to use the imperative so don't Focus so much on trying to get one employee to compare themselves to another employee we want the comparisons to be one firm realizing that in order to compete for talent they need to raise wages firms have to understand what the competing wages look like and employees have to figure out where to send those applications the idea here is really important you have a setting where employers don't typically have full information about Market pay workers don't have full information about Market pay with simple information tools you can see that employees respond by submitting applications not only outside of their own occupation but to hire paying firms within their occupation when you start to increase what they know about the rest of the market it's exact the people who are being underpaid that are positively surprised there will likely be more pay transparency laws in the coming years the Biden Administration just announced it plans to require Federal contractors to provide job applicants with expected salary ranges I know there are quite a few fre economics radio listeners in the white house if you want to give Zoe Cullen a call to help design that policy we'd happily pass on her number I do wonder if she will use imperative with you coming up after the break one more instance of Good Intentions and an unintended consequence it's definitely a frustrating finding because it shouldn't be a tradeoff I'm Steven Dubner this is free economics radio we'll be right back over the past few decades a lot of policies been designed to make workplaces more Equitable for women but as we've been hearing not all policies achieve their desired result consider the research done by the economists Peter Blair and Ben pasmanik they found that Family Leave policies which give employees time off for childbirth and other family issues have had the unintended consequence of increasing the average pay gap between men and women why because women are more likely to take take advantage of these policies and men end up earning more on average so as we've been hearing throughout this episode Good Intentions do not guarantee good outcomes consider the recent work of Marina gertsburg she was born in Ukraine grew up in Germany got her PhD in the Netherlands worked for a time in New York and now teaches in Australia I'm an assistant professor at the University of Melbourne in the finance department before getting her PhD gertsburg had a variety of internships and jobs in a variety of Industries banking management consulting the art industry I've worked my whole life in industries that are male dominated and I have to say that I felt fairly comfortable as a woman I didn't notice that much discrimination or anything like that more recently gertsburg got to wondering about discrimination in Academia specifically in academic research she decided to focus on Research collaborations this is an especially important area for younger academics working with a senior person that has a lot of advantages the senior person has a network promoting the payer is easier potentially the name of the senior academic also help conference submissions also in the publication process the name of the senior person will help of course the knowledge of the senior person is also very helpful they usually have more experience with how to frame the PayPal what is a convincing methodology what is an interesting question collaborations are really important for productivity in Academia but collaborations in Academia are different from collaborations in many professional settings in most places a junior person is assigned to a senior person or gets attached to a project that a senior person is Running part of our profession is that our collaborations emerge organically we decide ourselves who we work with so if you don't want to work with a person you just won't work on a project with them no one can force you what is also a really important aspect is that the lines between the professional and the personal often times blur so we create ideas outside of the office we work outside of the office we discuss ideas in informal settings such as in cafes over dinner and these are contexts where ambiguous situations could arise ambiguous situations like is this collaboration purely professional or is there perhaps a romantic or sexual component given the realities and history of the male female Dynamic gerburg thought about cases in which a junior female academic collaborated with a senior male academic and she started to put together a research project much like the Josh angrist research we heard about earlier that had a fulcrum event in that case a passage of the Ada the Americans with Disabilities Act gertsburg research would also have a fulcrum a before and an after in this case the before and after was the me too movement so people view the event date of the meu movement as October 15 2017 when Alysa Milano tweeted that she was sexually harassed and encouraged other women to come forward as well the me to movement was meant to expose men who had sexually harass women and to prevent future harassment those were the intended consequences gertsburg wondered if there might be an unintended consequence as well women and man equally started to express the perception that yeah man may be taking now precautionary action in interacting with women starting to be more careful because they are concerned they would be accused of sexual harassment and yeah this is the time when the idea was actually born the idea being a research paper which she would eventually call the unintended consequences of me tooo evidence from research collaborations at a time I also pitched it to a senior academic to just get a sense whether this was a good idea the senior academic told me that I should rather not work on this at this stage in my career why not well because potentially it would be too controversial was this a male or female academic it was a male academic and yet you ignored this person's advice plainly no I didn't ignore it I didn't work on it for some time because that was during my PhD and I had other things on my plate as well so I decided to not work on it but gertsburg couldn't get the idea out of her head once she got settled into her first academic job in Australia she put together a hypothesis the interesting thing about the MU movement is that its purpose is to increase protection for women from sexual harassment so technically women should feel very comfortable or more comfortable to work with men after the movement on the other hand there's a lot of anecdotal evidence and also survey evidence that men are concerned about sexual harassment accusations after the Mew movement so it is unclear what effect the movement would have on collaborations between wom and men so it is a two-sided hypothesis to test her hypothesis gertsburg began collecting data on Junior female economists women who had recently gotten their phds and were hired into University economics departments on a tenure track shortly before the Apex of me too there were not all that many women in her sample fewer than a hundred she gathered data on the research papers they were publishing and who they were collaborating with you wanted to know what happened to collaborations between those Junior female academics and their male colleagues and what' she find I find that Junior female academic start few new projects after me too and that is mainly due to fewer collaborations with male co-authors before the meu movement on average Junior women would start 1.6 new projects per year and after the me movement women start on average 0.9 new projects per year so the magnitude is 0.7 projects fewer after the me to movement which is about 44% oh my goodness and 60% of the decline are due to fewer collaborations with male cers I mean that is a massive drop how do you think about the size of the harm to the career of a junior female academic based on that number we already know that women have less output than man and that partially explains where is career outcomes for women in Academia such as lower tenure rates so having this productive output is crucial and if that declines that could widen the gender gap between women and men in Academia of course it is also important to then look at the outcomes for example 10e rates of women after me to or publication outcomes and that that is also something that I'm tracking One Challenge is that the publication process is very very long and for a lot of the projects that started after me too there are no outcomes yet what can you tell us about the degree to which Junior women sought out senior women to collaborate with after me too women do not increase collaborations with any types of women and why do you think that is it could be for example that women women may need more time to adjust and find new collaborators among women it could also be the case that there is simply not enough women for women to substitute with so if we think about the numbers even among Junior FAL academics there are about 30% female so even substituting with new Junior women is fairly difficult with those numbers so you're saying that among senior female researchers there's only like 16% exactly so you're saying those 16% are probably oversubscribed with Junior collaboratives already and there just isn't enough availability for junior women to make new collaborations with them yes yeah that could be one explanation for what it's worth Marina gertsburg had no collaborators on her paper about this unintended consequence of the me to movement it's worth noting that her sample size was small and her time frame relatively tight so we should be cautious in giving her findings too much weight but a group of researchers at the University of Cambridge seem to have corroborated gertsburg results using different methods and if you go outside the academic world you see a similar effect a recent Pew poll shows that nearly 50% of men say it's harder for them to know how to interact with women at work and here is how a headline from Bloomberg News put it Wall Street rule for the me to era avoid women at all costs here's Marina gertsburg again talking about her own research it's definitely a frustrating finding because it shouldn't be a tradeoff women shouldn't have to choose between a safe workplace not being sexually harassed and their career outcomes of productivity on the other hand I think my finding suggest that we can do something about that as some time passes there will be new equilibrium and and men and women know how to interact with each other but it is also important to Define what the expectations are for Behavior so that men don't think oh I just have to say the right thing and I'm going to get fired and so it justifies my behavior by not working with women and what kind of feedback has gertsburg gotten since publishing these controversial findings I psted the first version of the paper in August 2022 on Twitter and I received a lot of reaction CS from Twitter I believe this is also when Josh angress became aware of the paper and I received an email from him saying that the paper was interesting and that it would create a lot of controversy that was really a high point of my career at the time and here again is Josh angrist from MIT I mean it has a little bit of an ADA like Flavor so you tried to protect a group in this case women mostly young women and maybe what you did is you made people think you know what's in this for me I might just get in trouble so better for me to stay away so it's a lot like the employer who's worried about being sued by you know not accommodating or discharging a disabled worker and then having to uh deal with litigation I have to say it's so fascinating to hear you talk about these constructs in a way that is you know quite rational and compelling and so on it's also however Josh if you don't mind me saying so a little bit depressing because there are all these well-intended policies and people writing policies trying to help other people and we find that not in a anywhere near majority of cases or at least I gather not but in not a tiny fraction there is a backfire effected this unintended consequence so how does one as a right- thinking human who wants the best for people and wants you know employers and employees to be happy and well compensated and so on how do you think your way around the big issue of all these unintended consequences that promote worse outcomes instead of better outcomes well first and foremost I want to draw your attention to the tradeoffs personally I guess that's why I'm an economist you know I don't find the possibility of trade-offs depressing I find the possibility of trade-offs interesting that's what I study you know I recognize that it's not a perfect world and that policy design is always about tradeoffs yeah yeah and there's still things that are worth doing in spite of the trade-offs but I I want you to look at that in a clear way and be aware of [Music] that consider us aware thanks to Josh angrist Marina gertsburg and Zoe Cullen for their excellent teaching today I learned a lot I hope you did too we will be back next week with a new episode of freec Economics radio until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too free conomics radio is produced by Stitcher and renb radio you can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at fre economics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced by Zach Linsky our staff also includes Elina cman Augusta Chapman Elanor Osborne Elsa Hernandez Gabriel Roth Greg rippen Jasmine Clinger Jeremy Johnston Julie canfer LC Bic Morgan Levy Neil kth Rebecca Lee Douglas and Sarah Lily our theme song is Mr Fortune by The Hitchhikers most of the other music was composed by Luis Gara as always thank you for [Music] listening okay well maybe you're going to shift my perspective on this don't tell my employer the Freakonomics radio network the Hidden Side of Everything Stitcher