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Archive for July, 2011

Should We Be Talking About a "Crime Dividend"?

Here’s an interesting article by Megan Finnegan from West Side Spirit, a neighborhood newspaper in New York City, about the shutdown of a 30-year-old citizens’ crime-prevention program.
Why did it shut down?
In part because funding was cut. But also because it had essentially accomplished its mission:

Like many neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Upper West Side has seen a precipitous drop in crime over the past several decades. Since 1990, total crime rates have been reduced by 84 percent in the 20th Precinct and 82 percent in the 24th Precinct, with the highest reductions in grand larceny auto, murder, robbery and burglary.

This got me to thinking:
When wars end, we expect a “peace dividend.” When crime ends, what kind of “crime dividend” (or, perhaps, “safety dividend”) should we expect?


Scientific Literacy Does Not Increase Concern Over Climate Change; Now Go Shout About It

A new study by the Cultural Cognition Project, a team headed up by Yale law professor Dan Kahan, shows that people who are more science- and math-literate tend to be more skeptical about the consequences of climate change. Increased scientific literacy also leads to higher polarization on climate-change issues:

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: Limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: Respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: The individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this, “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.


Helmetless Motorcyclist Killed While Riding to Overturn Helmet Law

From the (Syracuse) Post-Standard:

A Parish man who was participating in a motorcycle helmet protest ride was killed this afternoon when he went over the handlebars of his motorcycle and injured his head on the pavement, state police said.
Philip A. Contos, 55, of 45 East St., Parish, was not wearing a helmet while driving a 1983 Harley Davidson motorcycle south on Route 11 in Onondaga with a large group of other motorcyclists, troopers said. …
Evidence at the scene and information from the attending physician indicate Contos would have survived if he had been wearing a Department of Transportation approved helmet, troopers said.

When foreign friends visit the States and are puzzled by some of the quirks of our Government, I often point to helmet laws — which differ state by state — as an example of how things work, or fail to work, depending on your point of view.
If the strongest argument in favor of a universal helmet law is that we all share medical and emergency costs to some degree and should therefore minimize them, what is the strong argument against such a law?
One bizarre unintended consequence of the rollback in helmet laws: more human organs available for transplantation. From SuperFreakonomics Illustrated:
Between 1994 and 2007, six states repealed laws that required all motorcyclists to wear helmets. Here’s a look at per-capita organ donations from male victims of motor-vehicle crashes in those states versus all other states.*
*See Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Brian Moore, “Donorcycles: Motorcycle Helmet Laws and the Supply of Organ Donors.”


Will China Need a New Debt Ceiling Too?

I don’t know enough about the Chinese economy — or the U.S. economy, for that matter — to say just how big a deal this is, but I sense it’s potentially pretty big:

China said local governments owe debt equal to more than a fourth of the country’s economic output, the first time Beijing has put a number on such debt, fueling fears banks could again face mountains of bad loans and underlining the limits Beijing faces as it battles inflation.
The National Audit Office said Monday that local-government debts total some 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.65 trillion), or 27% of China’s gross domestic product last year. The report Monday was billed as a comprehensive tally of such debt, much of which was incurred during a two-year stimulus-spending binge ordered by Beijing to fight the effects of the global recession.
Some analysts say the National Audit Office’s figure failed to count certain kinds of local government debt, meaning the actual total could be even higher.
Either way, the figure released Monday affirms analysts’ belief that the true level of China’s government debt is considerably higher than has been acknowledged by the Finance Ministry, which puts just the central government’s debt at 17% of GDP without taking into account local governments’ debt.


Strike Three: Do MLB Umpires Express Racial Bias in Calling Balls and Strikes?

Our paper on discrimination in baseball has finally been published (June AER). While it received a lot of media and scholarly comment in draft, the final version contained a whole new section. The general idea is that those discriminated against will alter their behavior to mitigate the impacts of discrimination on themselves. But while reducing the impacts, these changes are not costless. For example, if you’re an Hispanic pitcher and think that the white umpire is against you, you’ll change your pitches. Where will you throw? How will you throw?


No Comment

We once made a podcast about the etiquette of following (and being followed) on Twitter. But it didn’t address this possibility:


Rule of Thumb

I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
Joseph asked:

“Rule of thumb. I have heard it was a common law rule about the thickness of a switch with which no punishment would occur for spousal abuse. I have also heard that this is not correct. I cannot find a definitive source and meaning.”


Why You're More Likely to Die After Getting Paid

Last year, Notre Dame economist William Evans, along with Timothy Moore from the University of Maryland, documented that mortality rates spike by almost one percent on the first day of every month, remain high for the next few days, and then steadily decline over the course of the month. Now they think they’ve figured out one reason why: our paychecks are killing us.
In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Public Economics, Evans and Moore examined the death records of four demographic groups in the U.S.: seniors on Social Security; military personnel; families receiving tax rebate checks in 2001; and recipients of Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividends. Their results show that mortality increased the week after checks arrived for each of these groups.


The Price Elasticity of Heroin

A new study has some interesting things to say about the demand curve of heroin users. Drawing data from volunteers who use the drug daily, researchers Juliette Roddy, Caren Steinmiller, and Mark Greenwald tested three parameters: an income shock; removing the financial support of family and friends; and multiplying the the risk of getting caught. They found that income reduction had some effect: as income decreases, those who purchase a lot of heroin scaled back more than those who bought a little. When government subsidies were removed, participants also attested that they would buy less. They also found that participants with cocaine in their urine were more efficient drug buyers – this subgroup lowered transaction costs by shaving both distance (making sure they lived close to a drug dealer) and time in their purchases. They found that the more frequent the user, the most cost-effective they are about their heroin purchases, with those who also use cocaine being the most effective shoppers.


If You Have to Walk Outside to Smoke, Does the Exercise Benefit Counteract the Smoking?

A reader named Aras Gaure, who identifies himself as a trainee with the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, writes to us:

At my workplace, smoking is prohibited –- as in a substantial number of other indoor workplaces. In order for me to have a smoke, I have to walk about 10 meters, get down 2 flights of stairs (a total of nineteen steps), and then walk 15 meters to the nearest terrace. In one workday, I have about 4-5 cigarettes, which means I cover a distance of about 200-250 meters and between 144 and 180 steps every day with regard to my smoking. Many people obviously smoke more and have to cover an even greater distance in order to have a cigarette. As a result of continuous bans on smoking around the world, people (who don’t quit) in many cases have to go through physical exertion numerous times a day to have a smoke. My question is whether or not this (in any sense or form) can be considered beneficial (especially for people who otherwise wouldn’t get this exercise)?

An interesting question but my sense is that the amount of exercise Aras describes — or even 5x that amount — is so minimal that it wouldn’t come close to offsetting the downsides of smoking. There are certain reported “health benefits of smoking,” including weight loss, but even for someone who likes finding counterintuitive trends, I have a hard time buying Aras’s wishful thinking. Am I wrong?


FREAK-est Links

This week: Why is our vision getting worse? Could an airline-style loyalty program work for public transportation? Why rich people are bad at reading the emotions of strangers, and a Cornell study uncovers corruption among Amazon’s top reviewers.