Detroit, a once gleaming city that rose and declined with America’s auto-industry can no longer afford to keep all of its street lamps lit writes Chris Christoff:

• Detroit now has 60% fewer residents than it did in 1950. Yet this population of 713,000 is spread out over an area more than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined.
• The city is struggling with its finances. Almost 22% of the city’s electric bills are unpaid.
• As many as 15,000 of the city’s 88,000 street lights use 1920s technology. Upgrading the system would cost up to $200 million.
• The mayor has decided to extinguish almost 40% of the street lights. This move will save $10 million a year.
• This initiative also has the added benefit of concentrating the population in a few areas, making the city easier to manage. People are likely to migrate towards where the street lights are.

To read about how other cities have pursued similar ‘go-dark’ initiatives, what officials from the city have to say, what the people of Detroit have to say, why the city can’t force people to move and to read more statistics that demonstrate the scope of the problem, click here.

Source: Bloomberg

Via: Newmark’s Door

JC Penney tried what will probably be the last experiment in fair pricing for a while. Highlights from Bob Sullivan include:

• JC Penney started a new advertising campaign where they would no longer have confusing multiple markdowns, coupons, 99 cents at the end of price tags, and hundreds of sales a year.
• The pitch was that JC Penney was becoming honest with its pricing. The hope was to make JC Penney less of a commodity clothes vendor and more of an honest shopping centre that would attract customers who would appreciate JC Penney’s honesty and respect.
• Revenues have dropped 20% this quarters, traffic has fallen 10%, and the company went from making a profit to a loss.
• The former Apple executive who launched this system didn’t understand human psychology. People enjoy the thrill of the hunt, and the ability to find bargains amid all the disinformation and gimmicks that clothing retailers sow.
• When Intercontinental Hotels tried a similar strategy of honest, up-front pricing it also failed. Customers kept away from the chain and instead went to hotels that had deliberately misleading and low advertised rates.
• Southwest airlines with its no additional fees for checked baggage is also similar although there are signs that it will soon eliminate that policy – there is too much money to be made by advertising low rates.

To read more about the failed experiment, what it means for consumerism, why this is depressing, how printers can help us to understand the market, why Ellen DeGeneres is not at fault, what shrouding means, and why educating customers is a bad thing for retailers, click here.

Source: MSNBC

Via: Marginal Revolution

After the New York Times published an exposé that wiped $12 billion out of Wal-Mart’s book-value Felix Salmon wondered if there was a way for the New York Times to make money from this:

• The newspaper could offer a service where big-name hedge funds could pay to get early access to news stories, letting them take advantage of stories that can move the market.
• This is ethical. Other news organizations such as Reuters gives early access to well-paying customers.
• One problem is that whistle-blowers could potentially be persecuted as inside-traders if newspapers were to engage in such a practice.

To read more including the multitude of people that help write an article, why journalism is increasingly being done by people who have an interest in the stories they’re writing, and how such a process would work operationally, click here.

Source: Reuters

Via: Freakonomics

Hugh Merwin took a look at the recent history of the word ‘artisan’ to conclude that it has become meaningless. Highlights include:

• In the 16^th century the term ‘artisan’ wasn’t a compliment. It meant that you did your job and weren’t of much importance. Over time it evolved though.
• In 2001 the New York Times awarded a restaurant called Artisanal two stars. This was the beginning of the end.
• In 2006 Quizno’s and Wendy’s became the first fast-food restaurants to co-opt the term ‘artisan’ to describe their breads in an attempt to compete with Subway.
• In 2007 Starbucks became the biggest chain to use the term to describe their chocolates and then their breakfast.
• The term ‘artisan’ was formally declared dead by Merwin, in 2011, when Burger King used the term to describe its Chef’s Choice Burger. Burger King was using a term that royalty would originally scoff upon.

To read more about the timeline of the word, the role that Dominos and Panera played in its demise, what artisan tortilla chips taste like, the person who warned of the looming problem, and what Benjamin Franklin had to say about artisans, click here.

Source: New York Magazine

Via: Newmark’s Door

Michael Clemens reports on some fascinating numbers coming from sub-Saharan African countries:

• Child death across these countries are in decline.
• Not only are the numbers declining – the rate of decline has massively accelerated in the past few years.
• Senegal tops the list. The country went from 121 under-5 deaths per 1000 births in 2005 to 72 in 2010, a decline of almost 10%.
• This is a very recent trend. It only started to happen in the second half of the decade.

To read where you can find these numbers, why this is awesome news, why the numbers are so stunning, and how this relates to the Millennium Development Goals, click here.

Source: Center for Global Development

Via: Marginal Revolution

Ken Auletta took a comprehensive look at Stanford University, its recent history, and its management. He found that there was a slightly troubling relationship between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Highlights include:

• Notable names such as Eric Schmidt of Google often mingle with the students and make appearances in some of the classes.
• Stanford is in many ways the farm that produces the engineers that Silicon Valley harvests. 5% of Google’s employees are graduates of Stanford. Stanford proudly states that companies that can be traced to the university include: Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, Agilent Technologies, Silicon Graphics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade.
• One former dean believes that this close relationship between education and industry mirrors the history of Stanford itself. It was formed while the gold rush was still on going, and just a few decades after California had actually become a state. The university had to attract pioneers who were willing to challenge established norms, and were willing to work with business.
• Faculty at Stanford frequently invest in the start-ups of their students. Auletta reckons that there are more millionaire faculty in Stanford than at any other university in the world.
• The wealth that is generated by Silicon Valley often comes back to Stanford. In the past seven years Stanford has raised more money than any other university. After Google went public, for example, it made over 300 million dollars.
• More than half of all Stanford Graduate students are engineers. At Harvard it’s just 10%.
• The current President of Harvard sits on the board for Google. People have criticized this because it encourages university faculty to make pro-Google decisions in an effort to please the President.

To read many more details, including why Tiger Woods remained unknown at Stanford, the ways that Google has tried to influence the university, why Stanford won’t be opening a New York campus, how HP got its start, the diversity at Stanford, the threat that online learning may pose, and the innovative T-student model, click here.

Source: New Yorker

Via: Freakonomics

In an extremely well written and informative article Alexis Madrigal discussed the mathematical and statistical analysis that has revolutionized the dairy industry in the United States. Some of (many) highlights include:

• In 2009 the USDA through genetic analysis found that one bull, Freddie, had the genetic markers that were likely to produce the best milk. Since then he has had 346 daughters.
• It’s not just quantity of milk that matters when it comes to the most desirable genetic characteristics. American cows already produce impressive amounts of milk. In 1942 the average cow was good for 5,000 pounds of milk over its lifetime. Now the average number is 21,000.
• The fact that each cow can produce more is great for the environment since it means that less methane gas is produced and less land is required.
• The key statistic is the lifetime net merit. It is a complicated equation that estimates the “additive value of a bull’s genetics.”
• Freddie has a net merit of $792. Only seven bulls in the United States has a value greater than $700, and no other bull crosses the $750 mark.
• Yet Freddie is far from the perfect bull. Scientists estimate that the theoretically best bull would have a net merit of $7,515.
• Freedie’s 346 daughters are just the beginning. The second best bull of the past century had 16,000 daughters, half a million granddaughters and 2 million great granddaughters.

To read an extremely well written article, which was exceedingly difficult to summarize in a few points, and to find out about the role that economics plays, the Austrian monk who discovered genetics, why bulls these days are like iPhones, and the relationship between milk production and fertility, click here.

Source: The Atlantic

Via: Marginal Revolution

Nick Schifrin and Phoebe Natanson wrote an article describing Italy’s latest initiative to crackdown on tax evaders: pull over luxury cars and ask to see the driver’s tax ID. Highlights of the article include:

• The Italian government is trying to change a culture that prides the ability to dodge tax.
• The police have identified over 2,000 luxury car owners that have underpaid taxes.
• In one tax blitz the police investigated the owners of 133 luxury cars and found that almost a third declared incomes of less than $30,000 per year.
• The crackdown appears to be working. $12 billion in unpaid taxes have been recovered, and stationary stores are seeing rising demands for tax receipt rolls.
• There has been a backlash. Letter bombs and Molotov cocktails have targeted tax collection buildings. One man held a tax collector hostage for six hours at gun point.
• To avoid the attention many have tried to sell their Ferraris. But the surge in supply has caused prices for them to drop by 20%

To read more about the plumber who drove a Ferrari, the small business owners who have committed suicide, the size of the underground economy in Italy, and why one Ferrari owner chose to retire his luxury-car for non-tax related reasons, click here.

Source: ABC News

Anybody who watched Titanic will remember the valiant men who put women and children before themselves. Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson decided to find out if this and other expectations about behaviour during maritime disasters are accurate:

• The popular perception is that the crew are meant to help the passengers, and the men are meant to help the women.
• In reality the study suggests that the opposite is true. The crew has the highest survival rate, followed by men, and then women. Children have the lowest survival rate in ship-wrecks.
• In fact the survival rate of women is 16.7% lower than that of men.
• Contrary to the perception of the British as noble and polite, women have an even lower survival rate when they’re travelling on British ships.
• Women have a slightly better chance of living if the captain orders women and children first – although not by much, and this in itself is a rare occurrence.
• Overall it seems that it’s not so much “women and children first” as it is “every man for himself.”

To read more about the surprisingly high survival rate of ship captains, how this relates to our expectations of helping behaviour among the genders, how the study was conducted, how the speed of the disaster affects survival rates, if things have changed over time, and the implications this study has for disaster situations and leadership read the entire study here(.pdf).

Source: Institutet för Näringslivsforskning (.pdf warning)

Via: Freakonomics