Super Freakonomics Part 26

LIVING LONG ENOUGH TO DIE FROM CANCER: See Bo E. Honore and Adriana Lleras-Muney, "Bounds in Competing Risks Models and the War on Cancer," Econometrica 76, no. 6 (November 2006).

WAR: NOT AS DANGEROUS AS YOU THINK?: Derived from "U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths 1980 through 2008 (as of April 22, 2009)," prepared by the Defense Manpower Data Center for Department of Defense; thanks to a reader named Adam Smith (seriously) for alerting us to these data.

HOW TO CATCH A TERRORIST: This section is drawn from "Identifying Terrorists Using Banking Data," Steven D. Levitt and A. Danger Powers, working paper; and from author interviews with Ian Horsley (a pseudonym), primarily in London. / 89 Bank fraud in the U.K.: gleaned from the a.s.sociation for Payment Clearing Services (APACS). / 92 False positives in cancer screening: see Jennifer Miller Croswell et al., "c.u.mulative Incidence of False-Positive Results in Repeated, Multimodal Cancer Screening," Annals of Family Medicine 7 (2009). / 92 Mike Lowell: see Jimmy Golen, "Lowell: Baseball Held to Higher Standard," The a.s.sociated Press, January 18, 2008. / 92 Release of terror suspects: see Alan Travis, "Two-Thirds of U.K. Terror Suspects Released Without Charge," The Guardian, May 12, 2009.

CHAPTER 3: UNBELIEVABLE STORIES ABOUT APATHY AND ALTRUISM

KITTY GENOVESE AND THE "38 WITNESSES": This section, as well as the section at the end of the chapter about Kitty Genovese, benefited greatly from the time and input of Joseph De May Jr., who has created a repository of doc.u.mentary evidence about the murder at www.kewgardens.h.i.+story.com. We are also indebted to many others who contributed their knowledge of the case in interviews or correspondence, including Andrew Blauner, Mike Hoffman, Jim Rasenberger, Charles Skoller, Jim Solomon, and Harold Takoos.h.i.+an. And we drew extensively from some of the many books and articles written about the murder, including: Martin Gansberg, "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police: Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector," The New York Times, March 27, 1964; A.M. Rosenthal, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House, 2008; originally published 1964 by McGraw-Hill); Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal, 5th ed. (W.H. Freeman and Co., 1988); Joe s.e.xton, "Reviving Kitty Genovese Case, and Its Pa.s.sions," The New York Times, July 25, 1995; Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (Little, Brown, 2000); Jim Rasenberger, "Nightmare on Austin Street," American Heritage, October 2006; Charles Skoller, Twisted Confessions (Bridgeway Books, 2008); Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, "The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses," American Psychologist 62, no. 6 (2007). / 97 Weather conditions in Queens were provided by the National Weather Service. / 99 Genovese and the Holocaust: see Maureen Dowd, "20 Years After the Murder of Kitty Genovese, the Question Remains: Why?" The New York Times, March 12, 1984. Dowd cites R. Lance Shotland, a professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, who noted that "probably no single incident has caused social psychologists to pay as much attention to an aspect of social behavior as Kitty Genovese's murder." / 99 Bill Clinton's statement about the Genovese murder comes from his remarks at the AmeriCorps Public Safety Forum in New York City, March 10,1994.

CRIME AND TELEVISION IN AMERICA: This section is primarily drawn from Steven D. Levitt and Matthew Gentzkow, "Measuring the Impact of TV's Introduction on Crime," working paper. See also: Matthew Gentzkow, "Television and Voter Turnout," Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 3 (August 2006); and Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, "Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores: Historical Evidence from the Coleman Study," Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 1 (February 2008). / 101 Prison overcrowding and the ACLU "experiment": see Steven D. Levitt, "The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence from Prison Overcrowding Litigation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 11, no. 2 (May 1996).

FAMILY ALTRUISM?: See Gary Becker, "Altruism in the Family and Selfishness in the Marketplace," Economica 48, no. 189, New Series (February 1981); and B. Douglas Bernheim, Andrei Shleifer, and Lawrence H. Summers, "The Strategic Bequest Motive," Journal of Political Economy 93, no. 6 (December 1985).

AMERICANS ARE FAMOUSLY ALTRUISTIC: These figures are drawn from an Indiana University Center on Philanthropy study. From 1996 to 2006, overall American giving increased from $139 billion to $295 billion (inflation-adjusted), which represents an increase from 1.7% of GDP to 2.6% of GDP. See also David Leonhardt, "What Makes People Give," The New York Times, March 9, 2008. / 107 For more on disaster donations and TV coverage, see Philip H. Brown and Jessica H. Minty, "Media Coverage and Charitable Giving After the 2004 Tsunami," Southern Economic Journal 75, no. 1 (2008).

THE VALUE OF LAB EXPERIMENTS: Galileo's acceleration experiment is related in Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, 1914. Richard Feynman's point about the primacy of experimentation comes from his Lectures on Physics, ed. Matthew Linzee Sands (Addison-Wesley, 1963).

ULTIMATUM AND DICTATOR: The first paper on Ultimatum as it is commonly known is Werner Guth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze, "An Experimental a.n.a.lysis of Ultimatum Bargaining," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3, no. 4 (1982). For a good background on the evolution of such games, see Steven D. Levitt and John A. List, "What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Tell Us About the Real World," Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 2 (2007). See also: Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard Thaler, "Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking: Ent.i.tlements in the Market," American Economic Review 76, no. 4 (September 1986); Robert Forsythe, Joel L. Horowitz, N. E. Savin, and Martin Sef-ton, "Fairness in Simple Bargaining Experiments," Games and Economic Behavior 6, no. 3 (May 1994); Colin F. Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory (Princeton University Press, 2003); and John A. List, "Dictator Game Giving Is an Experimental Artifact," working paper, 2005.

ORGAN TRANSPLANTS: The first successful long-term kidney transplant was performed at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston by Joseph Murray in December 1954, as related in Nicholas Tilney, Transplant: From Myth to Reality (Yale University Press, 2003). / 111 "Donorcyclists": see Stacy d.i.c.kert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Brian Moore, "Donorcycles: Do Motorcycle Helmet Laws Reduce Organ Donations?" Michigan State University working paper, 2009. / 111 "Presumed consent" laws in Europe: see Alberto Abadie and Sebastien Gay, "The Impact of Presumed Consent Legislation on Cadaveric Organ Donation: A Cross Country Study," Journal of Health Economics 25, no. 4 (July 2006). / 112 The Iranian kidney program is described in Ahad J. Ghods and Shekoufeh Savaj, "Iranian Model of Paid and Regulated Living-Unrelated Kidney Donation," Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology 1 (October 2006); and Benjamin E. Hippen, "Organ Sales and Moral Travails: Lessons from the Living Kidney Vendor Program in Iran," Cato Inst.i.tute, Policy a.n.a.lysis, no. 614, March 20, 2008. / 112 The exchange between Dr. Barry Jacobs and Rep. AI Gore took place in the Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment to consider H.R. 4080, October 17, 1983.

JOHN LIST, GAME-CHANGER: This section is drawn primarily from author interviews with John A. List as well as a number of his many, many papers, several written in collaboration with Steven D. Levitt. These papers include: List, "Does Market Experience

Eliminate Market Anomalies?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003); Glenn Harrison and List, "Field Experiments," Journal of Economic Literature 42 (December 2004); List, "Dictator Game Giving Is an Experimental Artifact," working paper, 2005; List, "The Behavioralist Meets the Market: Measuring Social Preferences and Reputation Effects in Actual Transactions," Journal of Political Economy 14, no. 1 (2006); Levitt and List, "Viewpoint: On the Generalizability of Lab Behaviour to the Field," Canadian Journal of Economics 40, no. 2 (May 2007); Levitt and List, "What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Tell Us About the Real World," Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 2 (2007); List, "On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games," Journal of Political Economy 115, no. 3 (2007); List and Todd L. Cherry, "Examining the Role of Fairness in High Stakes Allocation Decisions," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 65, no. 1 (2008); Levitt and List, "h.o.m.o Economicus Evolves," Science, February 15, 2008; Levitt, List, and David Reiley, "What Happens in the Field Stays in the Field: Professionals Do Not Play Minimax in Laboratory Experiments," Econometrica (forthcoming, 2009); Levitt and List, "Field Experiments in Economics: The Past, the Present, and the Future," European Economic Review (forthcoming, 2009). Note that other researchers have begun questioning whether altruism seen in the lab is an artifact of the experiment itself; notably, see Nicholas Bardsley, "Experimental Economics and the Artificiality of Alteration," Journal of Economic Methodology 12, no. 2 (2005). / 121 "Just those soph.o.m.ores" and "scientific do-gooders": see R. L. Rosenthal, Artifact in Behavioral Research (Academic Press, 1969). / 121 "Higher need for approval": see Richard L. Doty and Colin Silverthorne, "Influence of Menstrual Cycle on Volunteering Behavior," Nature, 1975. / 121 The boss was.h.i.+ng her hands: see Kristen Munger and Shelby J. Harris, "Effects of an Observer on Hand Was.h.i.+ng in a Public Restroom," Perceptual and Motor Skills 69 (1989). / 122 The "honesty box" experiment: see Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts, "Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting," Biology Letters, 2006. Along these same lines, consider another clever field experiment, this one conducted in thirty Dutch churches by a young economist named Adriaan R. Soetevent. In these churches, the collection was taken up in a closed bag that was pa.s.sed along from person to person, row to row. Soetevent got the churches to let him switch things up, randomly subst.i.tuting an open collection basket for the closed bags over a period of several months. He wanted to know if the added scrutiny changed the donation patterns. (An open basket lets you see how much money has already been collected as well as how much your neighbor puts in.) Indeed it did: with open baskets, the churchgoers gave more money, including fewer small-denomination coins, than with closed bags-although, interestingly, the effect petered out once the open baskets had been around for a while. See Soetevent, "Anonymity in Giving in a Natural Context-a Field Experiment in 30 Churches," Journal of Public Economics 89 (2005). / 123 A "stupid automaton": see A.H. Pierce, "The Subconscious Again," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, & Scientific Methods 5 (1908). / 123 "Forced cooperation": see Martin T. Orne, "On the Social Psychological Experiment: With Particular Reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications," American Psychologist 17, no. 10 (1962). / 123 "Why n.a.z.i officers obeyed": see Stanley Milgram, "Behavioral Study of Obedience," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963). / 123 The Stanford prison experiments: see Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, "Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison," International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973).

"IMPURE ALTRUISM": Americans as top givers: see "International Comparisons of Charitable Giving," Charities Aid Foundation briefing paper, November 2006. And for the correspondingly strong tax incentives, see David Roodman and Scott Standley, "Tax Policies to Promote Private Charitable Giving in DAC Countries," Center for Global Development, working paper, January 2006. / 124 "Impure" and "warm-glow" altruism: see James Andreoni, "Giving with Impure Altruism: Applications to Charity and Ricardian Equivalence," Journal of Political Economy 97 (December 1989); and Andreoni, "Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving," Economic Journal 100 (June 1990). / 124 The economics of panhandling: see Gary S. Becker, "Spouses and Beggars: Love and Sympathy," in Accounting for Tastes (Harvard University Press, 1998). / 124 Organ transplant waiting lists: this information was gleaned from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Organ Procurement and Transplant Network website, at www.optn.org. Further material was generated by the economist Julio Jorge Elias of State University of New York, Buffalo. See also Becker and Elias, "Introducing Incentives in the Market for Live and Cadaveric Organ Donations," Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 3 (Summer 2007); and Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, "Flesh Trade," The New York Times Magazine, July 9, 2006. / 124125 No waiting list in Iran: see Benjamin E. Hippen, "Organ Sales and Moral Travails: Lessons from the Living Kidney Vendor Program in Iran," Cato Inst.i.tute, Policy a.n.a.lysis, no. 614, March 20, 2008; and Stephen J. Dubner, "Human Organs for Sale, Legally, in...Which Country?" Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, April 29, 2008.

KITTY GENOVESE REVISITED: See the notes at the top of this chapter section for a list of the sources we relied upon for the reappraisal of the case. This second section drew substantially on interviews with Joseph De May Jr. and Mike Hoffman, as well as A.M. Rosenthal's book Thirty-Eight Witnesses.... One of us (Dubner) had the opportunity to work with Rosenthal as the latter's days at the Times expired. Even toward the end of his life (he died in 2006), Rosenthal remained a forceful journalist and an exceedingly sharp-opinioned man who didn't suffer fools or, as some have argued, dissenting opinions. In 2004, Rosenthal partic.i.p.ated in a symposium at Fordham University in New York to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Genovese murder. He offered a singular explanation for his obsession with the case: "Why did the Genovese incident move me so deeply? I tell you this. I had five sisters, and I was the youngest. What loving and magnificent sisters I had. But one of my sisters was murdered. Young Bess was returning home two nights before New Year's through a path in Van Cortlandt Park, when a s.e.xual pervert jumped out of the bushes and exposed himself to her. In shock, she escaped, and ran home one mile, sweaty in the chill weather. Within two days, Bess fell ill and died. I still miss our darling Bess, and feel Bess was murdered by this criminal who took her life away, no less than the monster who killed Kitty Genovese."...The Genovese murder caused many pundits to dust off a famous remark uttered by Edmund Burke two centuries earlier: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." It seemed to perfectly sum up what happened that night. But Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, could never find anything like this line in Burke's writings. Which means that this famous quotation-along with, seemingly, half the quotes attributed to Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde-appears to be as apocryphal as the story of the thirty-eight witnesses.

CHAPTER 4: THE FIX IS IN-AND IT'S CHEAP AND SIMPLE

MATERNAL DEATH RATES: For recent figures, see "Maternal Mortality in 2005: Estimates Developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, and the World Bank," World Health Organization, 2007. For historical rates, see Irvine Loudon, "Maternal Mortality in the Past and Its Relevance to Developing Countries Today," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 72, no. 1 (July 2000).

IGNATZ SEMMELWEIS COMES TO THE RESCUE: The story of Ignatz Semmelweis has been told variously over the years, but perhaps the most impressive telling is Sherwin B. Nuland, The Doctor's Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignatz Semmelweis (Atlas Books, 2003). This may be because Nuland is a physician himself. We have drawn substantially from his book, and we are greatly indebted. See also: Ignatz Semmelweis, "The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever," trans. K. Codell Carter (University of Wisconsin Press, 1983; originally published 1861). Note: Puerpera is Latin for a woman who has given birth.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: For an overview, see Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, "Unintended Consequence," The New York Times Magazine, January 20, 2008. / 139 For the Americans with Disabilities Act, see Daron Acemoglu and Joshua D. Angrist, "Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act," Journal of Political Economy 109, no. 5 (2001). / 139 For the Endangered Species Act, see Dean Lueck and Jeffrey A. Michael, "Preemptive Habitat Destruction Under the Endangered Species Act," Journal of Law and Economics 46 (April 2003); and John A. List, Michael Margolis, and Daniel E. Osgood, "Is the Endangered Species Act Endangering Species?" National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, December 2006. / 139 Avoiding the trash tax: for the "Seattle Stomp," the Charlottesville woods-dumping, and other tactics, see Don Fullerton and Thomas C. Kinnaman, "Household Responses to Pricing Garbage by the Bag," American Economic Review 86, no. 4 (September 1996); for German food-flus.h.i.+ng, see Roger Boyes, "Children Beware: The Rats Are Back and Hamelin Needs a New Piper," The Times (London), December 17, 2008; for backyard burning in Dublin, see S.M. Murphy, C. Davidson, A.M. Kennedy, P.A. Eadie, and C. Lawlor, "Backyard Burning," Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery 61, no. 1 (February 2008). / 140 The sabbatical backlash: see Solomon Zeitlin, "Prosbol: A Study in Tannaitic Jurisprudence," The Jewish Quarterly Review 37, no. 4 (April 1947). (Thanks to Leon Morris for the tip.)

FORCEPS h.o.a.rDING: See James Hobson Aveling, The Chamberlens and the Midwifery Forceps (J. & A. Churchill, 1882); Atul Gawande, "The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial," The New Yorker, October 2, 2006; and Stephen J. Dubner, "Medical Failures, and Successes Too: A Q&A with Atul Gawande," Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, June 25, 2007.

MORE FOOD, MORE PEOPLE: See "The World at Six Billion," United Nations, 1999; Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 15001850 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (Harvest, 1990; originally published 1979). Information from Will Masters, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue, came from an author interview. For a stunning exhibition of Masters's mastery at setting theories of agricultural economics to verse, see Stephen J. Dubner, "Why Are Kiwis So Cheap?" Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, June 4, 2009.

CONSIDER THE WHALE: The rise and fall of whale hunting is beautifully told in Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (W.W. Norton & Company, 2007). See also: Charles Melville Scammon, The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America: Together with an Account of the American Whale-Fishery, 1874; Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery From Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876, published by the author, 1878; and Paul Gilmour, "Saving the Whales, Circa 1852," Letter to the Editor, The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2008.

THE MYSTERIES OF POLIO: See David M. Os.h.i.+nsky, Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, 2005), a truly excellent book on the topic; and "The Battle Against Polio," NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, PBS, April 24, 2006. / 144 The fallacious polio/ ice-cream link was raised by David Alan Grier, a statistician at George Was.h.i.+ngton University, in Steve Lohr, "For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics," The New York Times, August 5, 2009. / 145 For estimated cost savings of the polio vaccines, see Kimberly M. Thompson and Radboud J. Duintjer Tebbens, "Retrospective Cost-Effectiveness a.n.a.lysis for Polio Vaccination in the United States," Risk a.n.a.lysis 26, no. 6 (2006); and Tebbens et al., "A Dynamic Model of Poliomyelitis Outbreaks: Learning from the Past to Help Inform the Future," American Journal of Epidemiology 162, no. 4 (July 2005). / 145146 For other cheap and simple medical fixes, see Marc W. Kirschner, Elizabeth Marincola, and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg, "The Role of Biomedical Research in Health Care Reform," Science 266 (October 7,1994); and Earl S. Ford et al., "Explaining the Decrease in U.S. Deaths from Coronary Disease, 19802000," New England Journal of Medicine 356, no. 23 (June 7, 2007).

THE KILLER CAR: For number of cars in the 1950s, see "Topics and Sidelights of the Day in Wall Street: Fuel Consumption," The New York Times, May 25, 1951. For industry fears over safety concerns, see "Fear Seen Cutting Car Traffic, Sales," The New York Times, January 29,1952.

THE STRANGE STORY OF ROBERT MCNAMARA'S SEAT BELT: This section is based on a number of sources, including author interviews with McNamara shortly before his death. See also: "A Life in Public Service: Conversation with Robert McNamara," April 16, 1996, by Harry Kreisler, part of the Conversations with History series, Inst.i.tute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley; The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, directed by Errol Morris, 2003, Sony Pictures Cla.s.sics; Richard Alan Johnson, Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry (MotorBooks/MBI Publis.h.i.+ng Company, 2005); and Johnson, "The Outsider: How Robert McNamara Changed the Automobile Industry," American Heritage, Summer 2007. / 149 Seat belt usage over time: see Steven D. Levitt and Jack Porter, "Sample Selection in the Estimation of Air Bag and Seat Belt Effectiveness," The Review of Economics and Statistics 83, no. 4 (November 2001). / 149 For lives saved by seat belts, see Donna Gla.s.sbrenner, "Estimating the Lives Saved by Safety Belts and Air Bags," National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, paper no. 500; and "Lives Saved in 2008 by Restraint Use and Minimum Drinking Age Laws," NHTSA, June 2009. / 149 3 trillion miles driven per year: gleaned from U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.../ 149 Dangerous roads on other continents: see "Road Safety: A Public Health Issue," World Health Organization, March 29, 2004. / 149150 The cost of a life saved by a seat belt versus an air bag: see Levitt and Porter, "Sample Selection in the Estimation of Air Bag and Seat Belt Effectiveness," The Review of Economics and Statistics 83, no. 4 (November 2001).

HOW MUCH GOOD DO CAR SEATS DO? This section is primarily based on Steven D. Levitt, "Evidence That Seat Belts Are as Effective as Child Safety Seats in Preventing Death for Children," The Review of Economics and Statistics 90, no. 1 (February 2008); Levitt and Joseph J. Doyle, "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Child Safety Seats and Seat Belts in Protecting Children from Injury," Economic Inquiry, forthcoming; and Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, "The Seat-Belt Solution," The New York Times Magazine, July 10, 2005. For a brief history of child safety seats, see: Charles J. Kahane, "An Evaluation of Child Pa.s.senger Safety: The Effectiveness and Benefits of Safety Seats," National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, February 1986. / 155156 "A group of prominent child-safety researchers": see Flaura K. Winston, Dennis R. Durbin, Michael J. Kallan, and Elisa K. Moll, "The Danger of Premature Graduation to Seat Belts for Young Children," Pediatrics 105 (2000); and Dennis R. Durbin, Michael R. Elliott, and Flaura K. Winston, "Belt-Positioning Booster Seats and Reduction in Risk of Injury Among Children in Vehicle Crashes," Journal of the American Medical a.s.sociation 289, no. 21 (June 4, 2003).

HURRICANE STATISTICS: Data on worldwide hurricane deaths were provided by the Emergency Events Database, hosted by the Universite catholique de Louvain; the U.S. death count was obtained from the National Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric a.s.sociation. The economic cost in the United States alone: see Roger Pielke Jr. et al., "Normalized Hurricane Damage in the United States: 19002005," Natural Hazards Review, February 2008. For more on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, see Stephen Gray, Lisa Graumlich, Julio Betancourt, and Gregory Pederson, "A Tree-Ring Based Reconstruction of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation Since 1567 A.D.," Geophysical Research Letters 21 (June 17, 2004); Mihai Dima, "A Hemispheric Mechanism for the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation," Journal of Climate 20 (October 2006); David Enfield, Alberto Mestas-Nunez, and Paul Trimble, "The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Its Relation to Rainfall and River Flows in the Continental U.S.," Geophysical Research Letters 28 (May 15, 2001); and Clive Thompson, "The Five-Year Forecast," New York, November 27, 2006.