When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner Read Free Book Online

a payment greater than five dollars. By paying fifty dollars to demonstrate their hatred, and relaying that information to the hated person, it could really send the message. Perhaps, though, haters prefer to send ten separate five-dollar messages to create the impression that everyone hates you a little, rather than one person hates you a lot.
    What saddens me about the website is that where it could really have some bite is for some innocent teenager who is singled out for hatred by his or her peers. For a personwho only gets a few e-mails a day to begin with, receiving ten or twelve e-mails saying that anonymous people hate you might be pretty discouraging.
    The good news is that apparently not many people feel enough hatred to want to spend five dollars to make that hatred known. The current list of the ten most hated people includes some well-known names (I’ve omitted the people I have never heard of, out of fear they are the innocent teens I mentioned). Here is the list, with their number of hatreds:
George Bush
(7)
Hillary Clinton
(3)
Oprah Winfrey
(3)
Gloria Steinem
(3)
Barbara Boxer
(2)
    So even with all the people who hate George Bush, only seven people have been willing to pony up the five dollars! To make the top-ten list, you only need two people to hate you. That shouldn’t be hard for me. I’m already halfway there.
If Crack Dealers Took Lessons from Walgreens, They Really Would Be Rich
(SJD)
    Not long ago, I was chatting with a physician in Houston, the sort of older gentleman family doctor you don’t see much of anymore. His name is Cyril Wolf. He’s originally from SouthAfrica, but other than that, he struck me as the quintessential American general practitioner of decades past.
    I’d asked him a variety of questions—what’s changed in recent years in his practice, how managed care has affected him, etc.—when suddenly his eyes fired up, his jaw set tight, and his voice took on a tone of great exasperation. He began to describe a simple but huge problem in his practice: a lot of generic medications are still too expensive for his patients to afford. Many of his patients, he explained, must pay for their drugs out of pocket, and yet even the generic drugs at pharmacy chains like Walgreens, Eckerd, and CVS could cost them dearly.
    So Wolf began snooping around and found that two chains, Costco and Sam’s Club, sold generics at prices far, far below the other chains. Even once you factor in the cost of buying a membership at Costco and Sam’s Club, the price differences were astounding. (Nor, apparently, do you need to be a member of either store to use their pharmacy, although membership does bring a further discount.) Here are the prices Wolf found at Houston stores for ninety tablets of generic Prozac:
    Walgreens: $117
    Eckerd: $115
    CVS: $115
    Sam’s Club: $15
    Costco: $12
    Those aren’t typos. Walgreens charges $117 for a bottle of the same pills for which Costco charges $12.
    I was skeptical at first. Why on earth, I asked Wolf, would anyone pay $100 extra—probably every month—to fill a prescription at Walgreens instead of Costco?
    His answer: if a retiree is used to filling his prescriptions at Walgreens, that’s where he fills his prescriptions, and he assumes that the price of a generic drug (or, perhaps, any drug) is pretty much the same at any pharmacy. Talk about information asymmetry; talk about price discrimination !
    I had meant to write about this, and had collected a few relevant links: a TV news report in Houston about Wolf’s discovery ; an extensive price comparison compiled by a TV news reporter in Detroit; a Consumer Reports survey ; and a research report on the subject from Senator Dianne Feinstein.
    But I had forgotten all about this issue until I read a comprehensive Wall Street Journal article that does a good job of measuring the difference in prices between chains. Most of the differences aren’t as drastic as Wolf’s example, but are often still huge. Perhaps