I was recently reading a famous old economics paper called “The Fable of the Bees,” by Steven N.S. Cheung. In a footnote, Cheung writes one of the most wonderful sentences I’ve read in a long time: Facts, like jade, are not only costly to obtain but also difficult to authenticate. From what I can tell — hey, I’m no Fred . . .
The A.C.L.U. has done it again, but this time on a grand scale.
I published an academic paper back in 1996 that tried to measure the impact that changes in the prison population have on the crime rate. It turns out that this is a hard question.
The answer to that question is almost certainly “no,” but a new study that is getting lots of media attention does claim that there is a correlation between having an uncommon name and being more likely to show up in the juvenile justice system. The study finds this relationship to be true both for blacks and whites.
With macroeconomic issues taking center stage, it is not clear that other issues, like crime, will get much attention in the Obama administration. Personally, however, I think it is an excellent time to reflect on our current approach to fighting crime. The United States has enjoyed a great deal of success over the last 15 to 20 years in reducing . . .
What do Bruce Pardo and Atif Irfan have in common? In case you’re not familiar with their names, let me rephrase: What do the white guy who dressed up as Santa and killed his ex-wife and her family (and then committed suicide) and the Muslim guy who got thrown off a recent AirTran flight on suspicion of terrorism have in . . .
Nothing grabs headlines like dire warnings about homicide trends. And there is no criminologist better at garnering headlines than James Alan Fox, whom you might remember from Freakonomics for the ominous reports he produced about juvenile homicide for Attorney General Janet Reno in the 1990’s, even as crime began to plunge. James Alan Fox is baaaack with a new report . . .
I just received the following e-mail from my accountants, who have several clients invested with Bernard Madoff. They are passing along some year-end tax advice that contains at least a sliver of good news: Taxpayers who invested in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC directly, or through a fund of funds, have a loss that is most probably categorized as . . .
I’m not a big fan of focus groups (when it comes to businesses figuring out what customers want) for a number of reasons. First, they are unnatural settings with a very high degree of scrutiny, which may distort how people respond. Second, it seems likely that people will tend to say what they think others expect them to say, or . . .
CNBC delves into the Bernie Madoff story tonight at 9 p.m. E.S.T. For those intrigued by white-collar crime, this should be quite an interesting show. I’m still struggling to understand how a fund that claims to have $17 billion in assets can have defrauded investors for $50 billion. Had he also borrowed $33 billion that he will never repay, so . . .
Bernard L. Madoff is not a young man, and if he is convicted of the crimes of which he stands accused, he may spend the rest of his life in prison. But on the off chance he doesn’t, he may wish to consider Sam Antar, of Crazy Eddie fame, as a future role model. Do you remember Crazy Eddie? A . . .
I’m pretty sure Manny Pacquiao is a better fighter than Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton. But who is the better crime fighter? At least for one day, it appears that Pacquiao wins that title as well.
Photo: G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times A few years back, I wrote an article about the N.F.L.’s annual “rookie symposium,” a four-day gathering during which the league tries to warn incoming players about all the pitfalls they may face — personal threats, bad influences, gold-digging women, dishonest money managers, etc. The N.F.L. even brought in a bunch of veterans . . .
Photo from the University of Washington. If you’re reading this post on a laptop computer, rest easy. Your computer may have just become far less appealing to thieves. The University of Washington has released a free program that will track your laptop if it’s stolen. If the program is installed on a computer with a built-in camera, it will . . .
The Supreme Court recently struck down the gun ban in Washington, D.C. A similar gun ban in Chicago may be the next to go. The primary rationale for these gun bans is to lower crime. Do they actually work? There is remarkably little academic research that directly answers this question, but there is some indirect evidence. Let’s start with the . . .
I love to read books written by police officers about being police officers, and books written by criminals about being criminals. In the latter category, I highly recommend Brutal by Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas. Kevin Weeks was Whitey Bulger‘s right-hand man. He is loyal, loves to punch people in the face, and doesn’t mind committing the occasional murder. It . . .
The E.P.A. has proposed new rules that would drastically reduce the permissible level of lead in air pollution. If the change goes into effect, it will mark the first time lead emissions standards have been tightened since the agency went after leaded gasoline in the 1970’s. If lead contributed to the crime falloff of the 1990’s, are we looking at . . .
A few days ago, New York’s State Senate passed a bill making it illegal to recruit someone into a street gang. In the never-ending fight by city officials and legislators to combat gangs, this is one of the latest efforts to outmaneuver gang members. Other similar initiatives have included: city ordinances that limit two or more gang members from hanging . . .
Burglaries are on the decline across the United States, with at least one notable exception: increasingly, thieves are breaking into foreclosed homes — stripping out the copper pipes, wiring, and appliances — and selling their pilfered goods as scrap. From there, Treehugger reports, the scrap metal is most often shipped to China. Coincidentally, that’s the country Tyler Cowen credits for . . .
Most of us who eat meat regularly would still rather not kill an animal with our own hands. So we have, for generations, delegated that work to others. Jennifer Dillard, at Georgetown Law, authored a new paper looking at what that delegation costs the workers of industrial slaughterhouses. She argues that prolonged work on a kill floor exposes workers to . . .
Reader Roberto Ruiz alerted us to this mock news report from the Onion on an “anonymous donation” of 200 kidneys to a hospital. While the joke is graphic (and the accompanying video footage may not be suitable for the squeamish) the satire is right on point — in the absence of other ways to acquire urgently needed kidneys, some may . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia sociologist and author of “Gang Leader for a Day,” is back once again with his chronicle of watching “The Wire” with a group of gangland acquaintances. His past reports can be found here. I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t. The Thugs informed me that they were not interested in watching the last 2 episodes . . .
The gender-swapping trend in online gaming. New software fights fraud on gambling sites. (Earlier) Atlanta man builds robot to chase away drug dealers. (Earlier) Doctors don’t get enough sleep for optimal functioning.
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia sociologist and author of “Gang Leader for a Day,” is back once again for an eighth report after watching “The Wire” with a group of gangland acquaintances. His past reports can be found here. Where is Flavor? Readers of this blog may have noticed the absence of Flavor, the youngest member of “the Thugs,” from last week’s . . .
Is the Internet really filled with pedophilic sexual predators lurking in a social network or chat room near your child? Not necessarily, according to 3 nationwide surveys done by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The first two surveys consisted of responses from 3,000 teens who use the Internet in 2000, and . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia sociologist and author of “Gang Leader for a Day,” is back once again for a seventh report after watching “The Wire” with a group of gangland acquaintances. His past reports can be found here. The Thugs were bored. Episode 7 failed to move them. “Too slow,” griped Shine. “They’re making us wait,” said Orlando. “See, that’s when . . .
We’ve written quite a bit about online identity theft here at Freakonomics. But there’s another form of crime that’s been spreading through the Internet over the past few years: click fraud. As its name suggests, the crime involves clicking on a Web site’s ads repeatedly (or, in some cases, employing a software program to do it) in order to pad . . .
If you thought the cheating in sumo was bad enough, now they are talking about murder charges.
The Freakonomics in-box regularly fills up with interesting tales (like this one and this one). The other day, a reader from Dallas named Erik Hille took reader e-mail to a whole new level. He was writing about the Feb. 1 entry in our fact-a-day calendar, which excerpts a fact from our book in the chapter on crime: “The average sixty-five-year-old . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia sociologist and author of “Gang Leader for a Day,” is back for a sixth report after watching “The Wire” with a group of gangland acquaintances. His past reports can be found here. I had been waiting for the self-described “Thugs” to analyze the workings of City Hall and the fictional Baltimore Sun more consistently. This week, I . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia sociologist and author of “Gang Leader for a Day,” is back with another report after watching “The Wire” with a group of gangland acquaintances. Past posts can be found here. Dear Freakonomics.com readers: Your comments in the last discussion regarding the respective strategies of Marlo and Omar was so inspiring to “the Thugs” that they requested a . . .