Last week, I decided to treat myself to a smartphone and ordered a Blackberry Storm. While my new unit was being activated and sent over, the SIM card on my older phone was deactivated. As I haven't yet received the Blackberry, I have been cell phone-less for the last five days or so.
Not having a phone has been an interesting experience. Some thoughts:
(1) I am much more productive now with work: I need to get a draft of my third dissertation paper done by the first week of Jan (check back in over the next few days for a summary of this work), and I've made more progress in the last week or so than over the previous four weeks.
(2) My social life has taken a tremendous hit: I sent out an e-mail to some friends and family giving them my home phone number. In spite of me being an excellent conversationalist, nobody has called my alternate number. I attribute this to the fact that having a cell phone diminishes the returns to memorizing phone numbers to zero. As such, the fixed cost of learning a new number or entering into your address book becomes high enough for people to wait until your old number comes back online to call. At least, this is what I am telling myself.
(3) My risk of getting cancer has probably remained constant: There is a growing and very controversial body of work on whether cell phone use (or exposure to mobile towers) increases ones risk of getting various tumors. Most of these studies suffer from omitted variables bias and the fact that cell phone use being widespread only for 10-15 years or so, the follow up period is just not long enough to make many of the purported positive results to actually be plausible.
(4) My risk of getting in a car accident may not have changed, either: This one is based on a really clever piece of research by Saurabh Bhargava and Vikram Pathania trying to get at the causal effects of cell phone use of traffic accidents. From their abstract:
Previous research in the laboratory and by epidemiologists has compared the danger of cell phone use while driving to that of illicit levels of alcohol. This paper investigates the causal link between driver cell phone use and crash rates by exploiting a natural experiment - the discontinuity in marginal pricing at 9pm on weekdays when cellular plans transition from peak to off-peak pricing. We first document that this pricing threshold induces a 20 to 30% jump in call volume for two samples of callers. We then document the corresponding change in the fatal and all crash rate. Using the years prior to the introduction of two-tier pricing as a control, as well as weekends as a second control, we find no evidence for a relative rise in crashes after 9pm on weekdays from 2002-2005. The upper bounds of our estimates rule out increases in all crashes larger than 1.0% and increases in fatal crashes larger than 1.3% - these upper bounds reject the increases implied by most existing studies. An analysis of regional trends in cell phone ownership and crashes, legislation banning driver cell phone use, and differences in urban and rural ownership confirm our basic result. We discuss possible explanations and present a behavioral model to reconcile this counterintuitive finding with existing research.
6 comments:
I dropped my cellphone service when my contract ran out a couple of years ago and I was very happy, except for when I was meeting up with someone and we needed to contact each other about being late or changing locations. I signed up for service again when I moved because my new apartment offered wireless internet, but no phone service.
"As such, the fixed cost of learning a new number or entering into your address book becomes high enough for people to wait until your old number comes back online to call."
also, we are in the middle of the holidays - people might be too busy to call anyway?
Yes, but why would an economist such as yourself get a Blackberry Storm, which likely will have a negative effect on your productivity?
See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/technology/personaltech/27pogue.html and other reviews.
Valli: Good point.
Dan: Yeah, I saw these reviews, and others like them. I guess I just wanted something cool.
I'm not sure how the smartphone will make me more productive just yet, but I do know that it lessens a dead-weight loss I will face later in the year. Supposedly we are supposed to have a PDA device for third year med. By coupling that requirement with a phone, I feel like I come out ahead.
wash u gives you PDAs when you start 3rd year - with the required software to do patient tracking on it!
perhaps you can try to get the software on your blackberry and sell the PDA wash u gives you.
I'm impressed at the cellphone/driving paper-reading through it, they cover their bases pretty well (though much of it remains the black box of computing that means nothing to me). Interesting stuff, counter-intuitive indeed; it'd be interesting to read a Cochrane or the like that attempted to square away all of the evidence (their discussions in the paper are a little south of satisfying, I feel).
I guess the only potential problem with that discontinuity is the particular LATE parameter that it estimates - the time of day when cell phone use spikes could also be a weird time for traffic patterns. But I really like the paper.
I wonder how people would even go about studying cell phone use and traffic injuries in a laboratory setting. Doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
I wonder how long it will take for epidemiology to move into the world of causal inference.
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