May is a high risk month to have a baby in Michigan and Uganda.  Why?

Ramadan.

Some parts of Michigan and parts of Uganda have a large Muslim population that fasts during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan which runs from about August to September (It is based on a lunar calendar).  Muslim women who fast during that period put their fetuses at risk during the critical first trimester.

From “Superfreakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

French researcher Bertran Auvert  discovered a way to dramatically reduce the risk of AIDS infection  in heterosexual males after trials in South Africa. The results were confirmed in studies in Kenya and Uganda.

For reasons not clearly understood circumcision reduced the rate of HIV infection 60%.

From “Superfreakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Cows are wicked polluters.  They emit methane through  belching and flatulence, which is by one common measurement 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide emitted by cars.

“Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat to and dairy to chicken, fish, eggs or a vegetable -based diet achieves more greenhouse -gas reduction than buying all locally sourced food.”

Or you can switch to kangaroos for your beef.    Kangaroo farts don’t contain methane.

From “Superfreakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Can you imagine the marketing campaign?

Boris Johnson, a classically educated journalist and previous mayor of London, responded to the catastrophic climate predictions of James Lovelock:

“Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self disgust, and that human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.”

From ‘Superfreakonomics- Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance‘ by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

HKO comments – and I would add that it is like old time religion in the way that non believers are demonized.

A repeated point in Superfreakonomics is that big expensive problems do not require big expensive solutions.

Seatbelts, for example, are one of the most costs effective lifesaving devices ever. At $25 per installation it costs about $500 million to put them in every U.S. vehicle, or about $30,000 for every life saved. The per mile auto fatality rate is so low that you can drive 24 hours a day at 30 miles an hour for 285 consecutive years before you had a fatal accident.

Air bags which cost about $4 billion to have installed in the U.S. fleet end up costing about $1.8 million dollar per life saved; 60 times as much.

From ‘Superfreakonomics- Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance’ by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner