Innovations We Take For Granted

What do American football and dairy have in common? Take the immigration quiz. Pre-order bonuses.

Dear Friends,

I hope this message finds you well and thriving. 

The reaction to the Freakonomics Radio episodes has been phenomenal, drawing a lot of attention and curiosity. Hundreds of people (including many of you) took the Truth About Immigration quiz to test their knowledge about one of the world’s most important but misunderstood topics. Interestingly, the average score has been less than 40%. This isn't surprising, but it's a clear indication of the widespread need for accessible, factual information about immigration. This very challenge inspired me to write the book. If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, I invite you to do so.

We’re just about four weeks away from the release of my book, and I’d like to announce a few exciting pre-order bonuses. If you pre-order a copy by June 4, you'll receive:

• A discussion guide for group conversations and book groups

• A guide for how to have conversations about immigration, to help navigate discussions on a topic that is often fraught with emotion

• And a free signed bookplate that you can stick to your book

Just pre-order your copy, forward your receipt to zeke@preorderbonuses.com, and these exclusive bonuses are yours. More details can be found here. If you already ordered a copy, follow the same procedure to get your bonuses.

And if it’s not too much to ask, please let all your friends and colleagues know! You might think that one extra copy doesn’t make much of a difference, but it really does. I didn’t understand until now that the difference between getting on a bestseller list and not getting on it can hinge on a surprisingly small number of sales.

I hate asking for things… 

… so let me move on quickly to something of more substance. Today’s post is about innovations that make our lives better but which we take for granted. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it.

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Innovations We Take for Granted

What do American football and dairy have in common?

For starters, they’re deeply embedded in the American experience. In the case of the Green Bay Packers, they’re basically the same thing. But even for those who don’t identify as cheeseheads, nothing is more traditional than watching your favorite NFL/college team on the gridiron or eating a dairy-heavy meal like a bowl of cereal, a steaming plate of mac n’ cheese, or deep fried cheese curds. (The latter of which accounted for a non-trivial chunk of my weight gain when I lived in Minnesota during graduate school.)

But football and dairy have another thing in common, at least in the United States. Had it not been for immigration, we would’ve missed out on key innovations that are central to our enjoyment of both traditions. (I recognize that you might not love football or cheese, but there's a bigger lesson in these stories that applies to all of us. So stay with me.)

Let’s start with football.

Last season (2023), NFL kickers converted 85.8% of field goal attempts—the second-highest success rate ever (2013 was the high point). Football fans take it for granted that placekickers will succeed more often than not—except those rooting for the Buffalo Bills, but that’s another story. The routine is always the same: the kicker marks the spot where the ball will be snapped and then stands at a 45 degree angle by taking 2 steps back from the spot and another 3 steps to the side. A bit like a knight’s move in chess. The kicker runs diagonally and kicks the ball with the inner side of the foot. The ball flies in between the goals and 3 extra points are on the board.

But this taken-for-granted approach, often referred to as “soccer style” placekicking, was not at all the norm until relatively recently. 

Before then, kickers would run at the ball in a straight line and kick it with their toes. Toe kicking is scientifically inferior compared to soccer style kicking. It’s basic physics. First, toe kickers strike the ball with less surface area—the front tip of the shoe is smaller than the entire instep —and thus are less accurate (less margin for error). Second, toe kickers generate all the force from the swing of the kicking leg, whereas the swing of the hips allows soccer kickers to generate more angular momentum to send the ball farther.

The first time I saw old footage of NFL kickers using their toes, I was surprised. We would never kick a ball that way in the soccer-obsessed country where I grew up. What I find even more crazy is that, despite there being a scientifically superior way, every American football placekicker used their toes for decades. Their field goal success rate was terrible—about 50% on average in 1960 and below 30% for attempts longer than 40 yards.

There wasn’t a single soccer style kicker in the NFL.

Until Pete Gogolak showed up in the 1960s.

Pete was born in Budapest in 1942. It wasn’t easy to grow up in Soviet-controlled Hungary. The government took control of the Gogolak’s house and forced them to live with another family. Pete’s father, a dentist, had to surreptitiously exchange his services in exchange for black market food and other goods because the rations provided by the government weren’t enough to make ends meet. 

Despite the hardships, Pete had one great source of joy in his youth: soccer. He played in the youth ranks of Ferencvaros, Hungary’s most popular team and the seedbed of many of the country’s finest players. Looking back on his youth, Pete described himself as “a pretty good player. I had a strong leg, able to control the ball [and] feed the other players, but unfortunately I never had speed… So I don’t think I would’ve ever played big time soccer.” One of his teammates at Ferencvaros was Florian Albert, widely considered one of the best players in the world in his generation. 

Being good enough to play for Ferencvaros in the 1950s was no small feat. This was the golden age of Hungarian soccer. The Mighty Magyars, as the Hungarian team was known, are considered by many as the best national team of all time. Led by legendary players like Ferenc Puskas and Sandor Kocsis, they won all but one of their 69 games between 1950 and 1956, scoring 436 goals along the way. Their single defeat, against Germany in the final of the 1954 World Cup, is still considered one of the most shocking results in the history of the game.

The success of mid-20th century Hungarian soccer cast a long shadow. The innovative tactics and techniques introduced by the Mighty Magyars’ became the basis for the modern game we play today. Even in the 1950s everybody knew that the sport would never be the same.

What nobody could’ve predicted is that Hungarian soccer, in the form of a young Pete Gogolak, would also revolutionize American football placekicking. 

In 1956, as the Mighty Magyars were ending their historic run of success, Hungarians attempted a revolution to overthrow the communist government. When it failed, Pete’s parents decided to flee Hungary and requested refuge in the United States. The family landed in New Jersey and lived in the army barracks of Camp Kilmer for a few months until Pete’s father found employment. The Gogolaks settled in Ogdensburg, NY, a small town on the St. Lawrence river near the border with Canada.

Pete was deeply disappointed that the local High School didn’t have a soccer team. He was hoping he could show off the skills he’d developed playing for Ferencvaros. Some time later, he watched his first American football game on TV with bewilderment. “I see this bunch of guys with helmets punching and hitting each other, getting in little groups whispering in each other’s ears.” But most striking of all was that “this big guy… lines up and [kicks] the ball straight on with his toe.” Pete turned to his father and said, “Look at the funny way this guy kicks the ball.”

When the next academic year began, Pete tried out for the (American) football team. The coach explained that the team didn’t kick field goals because they had no kickers, and then asked if there were any kickers among the group. Pete raised his hand and asked if he could give it a try. The whole team was watching. As the center and the holder lined up in their usual position, Pete stood at a 45 degree angle from the ball. “I’ve never forgotten the frightful expression on the holder’s face. He says, “Coach, coach, is this guy gonna kick the ball into the stands?” Pete missed the field goal and “everybody started laughing.” They said, “send this guy back to Hungary. What is he trying to do to mess up this great American football?” 

Pete was undeterred. “I was amazed that nobody had tried to do this.” 

During the summer before his senior year, he practiced everywhere he could—cow pastures, streets, football fields. The team wasn’t very good, but Pete’s skill had improved substantially. He sent film to Syracuse, but they didn’t believe soccer style kicking would work and didn’t offer him a scholarship. He ended up at Cornell because they offered him a partial scholarship. In his very first game against Yale, Pete successfully converted three field goals. The year before, Cornell had kicked only 5 field goals in the entire season. 

“Suddenly, I started getting publicity.”

By the time he graduated in 1964, Pete wanted to go professional. But coming from an Ivy League school was a disadvantage. NFL teams weren’t interested. One of his coaches called the Buffalo Bills of the AFL (back then, the AFL and NFL hadn’t yet merged), who drafted Pete in the last round of the draft “as a novelty.” Kickers weren’t seen as key players and often played in other positions.

In his first preseason game against the Jets, Pete kicked a 57 yard field goal. 

The Bills won the AFL championship twice in a row, and Pete became the second-highest scorer in the league. The value of his kicking was undeniable, and the New York Giants of the NFL came calling. That same year (1966), Pete’s younger brother Charlie was drafted in the first round by the Washington Redskins. 

Almost immediately, every team started drafting soccer style kickers from Europe. According to ESPN, “Garo Yepremian (Cyprus) started kicking for the Detroit Lions midway through the '66 season. Then came Jan Stenerud (Norway) to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967, Bobby Howfield (England) to the Denver Broncos in '68, Horst Muhlmann (Germany) to the Cincinnati Bengals in '69 and Toni Fritsch (Austria) to the Dallas Cowboys in '71. Suddenly, the purely American sport was attracting impact players from around the globe.”

By 1977, when Pete retired as a professional football player, half of the teams in the NFL had a soccer style kicker—most of them foreign born. Ten years later, toe kickers had gone the way of the dinosaur (Mark Moseley, the last one, retired in 1986) and most soccer style kickers were natives (born in the US). Today, soccer style kicking is so taken for granted that it seems surprising it was ever any other way.

How is it possible that a demonstrably inferior approach to kicking persisted for so long? Why did it take a refugee from a soccer-obsessed country to change things?

The answers to these questions can teach us a powerful lesson about the inseparability between innovation and the movement of people.

Soccer wasn’t completely unknown in the United States in the mid 1900’s. But it had fallen into oblivion because the country had severely restricted immigration from Europe through the 1924 National Origins Act. The millions of newcomers from soccer-loving countries that arrived until the 1920s, who would’ve otherwise kept coming and influenced the nascent professional football league, weren’t allowed in. America’s xenophobia resulted in a shortage of kicking talent. As the country turned inward, it closed itself off to novelty in many areas, perpetuating inferior ideas. Kicking might not be essential to national prosperity, but the same thing happened in other domains of knowledge like high-tech innovation.

Why couldn’t a football-loving American tourist to Europe, or a foreign sports correspondent in a soccer-loving country, or someone else with ties to Europe see the value of soccer style kicking?

We tend to think that novel ideas travel easily; that spotting something valuable in one place and applying it somewhere else is simple. But it’s actually quite complicated because knowledge is tacit—it’s deeply embedded in cultural, institutional, and local practices that outsiders have a hard time seeing and understanding. It takes someone deeply embedded in two places to see, translate, and apply useful knowledge across locations.

That’s why immigrants are so important to a society’s innovation engine. It’s not that immigrants are inherently smarter than nonimmigrants. It’s simply that the experience of migrating forces outsiders like Pete Gogolak to grapple with ideas, problems, and solutions across distinct places. Human movement unlocks knowledge that’s otherwise hidden and taken for granted in the context of a specific place. Interestingly, by the time the next generation comes around, what newcomers introduced as exotic becomes commonplace in the new location.

Which brings us to dairy products in America. (I’ll keep this story much shorter.)

Why are some parts of the United States—Wisconsin, Minnesota, Utah, New York—more dominant producers of dairy products than others? 

Some of it, of course, comes down to natural conditions. But that’s not the only explanation. Take a state like Utah, for example. Its desert environment isn't what you would consider ideal for dairy farming, but it punches above its weight in dairy production. And Michigan isn’t as important a producer of dairy as Wisconsin, even though the two states have a similar climate and landscape in the upper midwest.

So what’s the explanation?

Danish immigrants in the late 1800s.

It turns out that Denmark experienced something of a revolution in dairy technology in the 1880s, a bit like Hungary’s soccer revolution in the mid 1900s. Farmers in the Schleswig and Holstein regions of that Denmark started using centralized butter making facilities, where multiple farmers pooled resources instead of churning butter individually. Coupled with the invention of the automatic cream separator, which increased productivity exponentially, the new organizational form led Denmark to become a dominant dairy producer throughout Europe. 

Danish emigration followed these innovations. Compared to other European countries, who sent massive numbers of newcomers to America between 1890 and 1920, Danes were not a large diaspora. Only about 300,000 of them moved to America in that period. But the expertise in dairy production brought by a subset of these newcomers—their introduction of automatic cream separators and of centralized production facilities—had an outsized effect on where American dairy production flourished.

A study by Nina Boberg-Fazlic and Paul Sharp convincingly makes the case. The two figures below, which I’ve copied from the paper, pretty much tell the story. The first depicts the number of Danes in each US county (for which data is available) in 1880. The second shows the partial correlation between Danes and the number of dairy cows in each state. You can see how places like Utah, New York, and Wisconsin stand out. Using rigorous econometric methods, the authors go on to show the causal impact of Danish immigrants on both dairy production and on the use of modern dairy techniques like centralized production.

One thing I find interesting about this study is that the number of immigrants introducing a novel idea or practice need not be large. A few people with new ideas, like Pete Gogolak, influence others to try new things out. In the market for ideas, superior ways of doing things win out, until we don’t even realize that something which makes our daily lives better wasn’t always obvious.

Whether it's kicking a ball, producing dairy, or developing the latest high-tech gadget, societies closed off to newcomers are less innovative.

I’ll close with an interest afterword: 

Hungary’s soccer revolution—and the ripple effects it had within and outside a single sport and country—might never have happened had it not been for another immigrant. Jimmy Hogan was an English soccer player and coach. The sport was in its infancy when he was born in 1882. After Jimmy’s playing career was over, he became a coach. But unlike most of his contemporaries, he took his talents abroad and introduced the little-known sport of soccer to other countries like the Netherlands, Austria, and… Hungary. This is not the place to tell the full story. But Jimmy Hogan is widely credited with planting the seeds of Hungary’s golden age by introducing novel techniques while coaching the national team during the Wunderteam era of the 1930s.

The placekicking revolution in American football is, therefore, a story of human migration. Pete Gogolak’s movement from Hungary to America is the proximate cause. But the distant cause is the earlier migration of Jimmy Hogan from England to Hungary. 

And so it has always been.

If you want innovation, let the Pete Gogolaks of the world come. 

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