Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms? (3)
However created, the conventional wisdom can be hard to budge. Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and devout critic of George W. Bush, bemoaned this fact as the President’s reelection campaign got under way in early 2004: “The approved story line about Mr. Bush is that he’s a bluff, honest, plainspoken guy, and anecdotes that fit that story get reported. But if the conventional wisdom were instead that he’s a phony, a silver-spoon baby who pretends to be a cowboy, journalists would have plenty of material to work with.”
In the months leading up to U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, dueling exper ts floated diametrically opposite forecasts about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But more often, as with Mitch Snyder’s homeless “statistics,” one side wins the war of conventional wisdom. Women’s rights advocates, for instance, have hyped the incidence of sexual assault, claiming that one in three American women will in their lifetime
be a victim of rape or attempted rape. (The actual figure is more like one in eight—but the advocates know it would take a callous person to publicly dispute their claims.) Advocates working for the cures of various tragic diseases regularly do the same. Why not? A little creative lying can draw attention, indignation, and—perhaps most important—the money and political capital to address the actual problem.
Of course an expert, whether a women’s health advocate or a political advisor or an advertising executive, tends to have different incentives than the rest of us. And an expert’s incentives may shift 180 degrees, depending on the situation. Consider the police. A recent audit discovered that the police in Atlanta were radically underreporting crime since the early 1990s. The practice apparently began when Atlanta was working to land the 1996 Olympics. The city needed to shed its violent image, and fast. So each year thousands of crime reports were either downgraded from violent to nonviolent or simply thrown away. (Despite these continuing efforts—there were more than 22,000 missing police reports in 2002 alone—Atlanta regularly ranks among the most violent American cities.)
Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
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