Associated Press reporter Robert Tanner writes an article today stating that evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty reduces crime. As with most media coverage of controversial issues, there is a paragraph or two in which the other side makes its case. In this instance, the lone voice arguing against the efficacy of the death penalty is Justin . . .
This week’s New York Magazine breaks down how money is made by all kinds of New York City individuals and businesses from a yellow-cab driver to sex shops to financial firms. Levitt gets a hat tip in the “Drug Dealer” write-up. A CDC study finds that violence costs the U.S. more than $70 billion per year, as much as the . . .
There was a nifty article in the New York Times Magazine a while back about “literary spam,” junk e-mail that includes passages from literary classics, in the hopes that legitimate text would fool spam filters. (Apparently, it doesn’t.) I just got a piece of spam that’s even niftier. Its subject line: “yipping econometrica psychophysiology flourish.” Considering the kind of messages . . .
If you wanted to get elected President of the United States, which of these would you least like to be? (At least, according to the fraction of those surveyed who said they wouldn’t vote for a candidate with this characteristic): a) Black b) Catholic c) Homosexual d) Jewish e) Female f) Atheist The answer is here at www.data360.org, an interesting . . .
Turns out the “CSI” effect on the criminal justice system may not be quite as severe as we thought. Michigan Circuit Judge and Eastern Michigan University criminology professor Donald E. Shelton has published a paper indicating that the TV show’s effects on jurors may be exaggerated. The data, consisting of a survey of 1,027 jurors called for duty in a . . .
Back when I worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine, it was a pretty regular occurrence to send an article up to the legal department for vetting. One of the lawyers that I dealt with there was named Adam Liptak. I liked him a great deal for two reasons: as with the other lawyers there, he always . . .
As reported by Wired’s Regina Lynn: Controversy is brewing in virtual reality world Second Life over the occurrence and potential illegality of online rape. The 3-D virtual world, built and owned by its more than 6 million users, currently allows members to engage in a wide range of sexual activities. You can buy S&M gear and solicit strippers, escorts, and . . .
Last week’s New Yorker “Annals of Law” column dealt with the increased public interest in forensic crime investigations in the wake of TV shows like CSI. Written by the excellent Jeffrey Toobin, the article looks at how the show’s popularity has mainstreamed and glamorized forensic analysis to the point of altering criminal trials. (Here’s a summary, though the full piece . . .
We’ve mentioned a few times on this blog (see here and here) how often criminals seem to have the middle name “Wayne.” Turns out the shooter in the Kansas City Mall was named David W. Logsdon. I have a pretty good guess what the “W” stands for. (hat tip to Matt Randolph.)
Aside from the actual sadness of events such as this, I am additionally saddened by how they tend to play out in public. They become instant platforms for people with all sorts of motives to opine and rant against their pet targets — media, guns, mental illness, privacy, etc. — when in fact what happened was a tragedy and an . . .
Have you ever heard of Chef Jeff Henderson? Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either. That’s when our publicist mentioned him and his new book. (We have the same publisher.) Jeff grew up in L.A. and San Diego, became a big-time crack dealer, and was sentenced to a long term in prison, where he learned to cook and became . . .
The National Football League’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, has just made it a lot more expensive to be a thug. Goodell suspended the Titans’ Pacman Jones without pay for the upcoming season (a loss of $1.29 million in base salary) and the Bengals’ Chris Henry for the first half of the season (surrendering as much as $230,000 in base pay). Jones . . .
Usually our quizzes are more on the whimsical side, but here is a serious one that requires a real investment of time. Some academics (at most one out of the three is an economist) in the United Kingdom recently published a paper in a journal called Applied Economics claiming that a 1 percent increase in the price of beer in . . .
I previously blogged about a woman who had the odd hobby of clipping newspaper articles for crimes where the perpetrator had the middle name “Wayne.” The blog News of the Weird also has reported on this phenomenon. The latest gruesome crime out of Texas doesn’t break the mold: What, neighbors at the Red Oak Place apartments wondered, was going on . . .
If you are going to murder someone, be sure to not leave your fingerprints behind all over Google, as this woman apparently did. Her searches included “how to commit murder,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses,” as well as searches on local gun laws. And while I don’t mean to heap even more dishonor on Walgreens, guess where she bought . . .
That is the proposal being considered in the South Carolina Senate. Prisoners would receive up to 180 days of time served for donating an organ or bone marrow. The following exchange of quotes from an A.P. article pretty much sums up the positions of nearly every debate over how organ donation should be incentivized: Mary Jo Cagle, chief medical officer . . .
Some interesting e-mails turn up in the Freakonomics in-box. Here’s a recent one: I downloaded your book FREAKONOMICS on Limewire. Can I pay you something for this great book? Call it guilt or trying to use file sharing in an honest way, but I’d like to pay you something. This is also an experiment in how accessible famous people are. . . .
Thanks to articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, a working paper by Chris Foote and Chris Goetz that is sharply critical of John Donohue and me has gotten an enormous amount of attention. In that working paper Foote and Goetz criticized the analysis underlying one of the tables in our original article that suggested a link between . . .
Csaba Toth, a blog reader from Hungary, sent me the link to an article that claims that fresh fruits, whole-grain bread, and a salad bar are the real way to fight crime. The most compelling part of the article reads as follows: Bernard Gesch, physiologist at the University of Oxford, decided to test the anecdotal clues in the most thorough . . .
The official murder rate in New Orleans has dropped to zero. The last recorded murder in the city occurred on Aug. 27, two days before Hurricane Katrina. It seems that Katrina, along with ruining a few hundred thousand lives, also dispatched most of the criminals, particularly the drug dealers and their customers. As N.O. criminologist Peter Scharf told the New . . .
A few days ago, we asked whether blogging is perhaps dangerous to professors seeking tenure. Here is proof that citing Freakonomics can be dangerous to your academic health as well. A reader sent in this e-mail the other day, which we now reprint in full — minus the young man’s name and college, for obvious reasons. Dr. Levitt: I was . . .
A recent story on the AP wire: OKLAHOMA CITY — A man got a prison term longer than prosecutors and defense attorneys had agreed to because of Larry Bird. The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooting with an intent to kill and robbery. But Eric James Torpy wanted his prison . . .
In yesterday’s New York Times, Mike McIntyre writes about the reasons crime has fallen in New York City. Most of the article is about how Mayor Bloomberg claims credit for his police department. The article then goes on to say: Academic experts cite several plausible contributors to the nationwide trend, including an aging population (young men are responsible for most . . .
Several years ago, Steve Levitt and Ian Ayres wrote a paper about Lojack, the silent anti-auto-theft device. They found that crime theft falls overall in areas where even a small percentage of the cars carry Lojack. I got to thinking about Lojack when we received this e-mail the other day from a reader frustrated with the volume of bicycle thefts . . .
A host of commenters on my Bill Bennett post get very agitated over the question of “crimes” vs. “the crime rate.” The term “crime rate” implies a denominator, typically “per 100,000 residents.” So the number of crimes can fall, but the crime rate can rise if the population shrinks. Bill Bennett said, “But I do know that it’s true that . . .
Bill Bennett and I have a fair amount in common. We’ve both written about crime (his “superpredator” theory gets a quick discussion in Freakonomics), we have both thought a lot about illegal drugs and education (he was the original “drug czar” and is a former Secretary of Education), and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it . . .
Years ago, I got an M.F.A. in fiction writing, thinking I’d be one of those novel-writing university professors who wear tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. But I gave up on fiction, and here’s why. The novel I was writing at the time was about a family very much like my own. Although I knew a good bit about my . . .
Okay, how’s this for an example of crime prevention: transcendental meditation. Several years ago in Washington D.C., 3,000 people got together to meditate and … yes, drove drown crime throughout the city. That’s their story, at least. For all I know, this is an old story; it may also be totally insane. But it makes for interesting reading: click here . . .
In the Freakonomics chapter about real estate agents’ informational advantage, we discussed the different terms that agents use in want ads, and those terms’ correlation with higher or lower sales prices. Alas, there was one kind of information — whether or not a murder was committed in the house, for instance — that didn’t make the dataset. Here, however, from . . .
My colleague Chad Syverson passed along the following news clipping, although as a native North Dakotan, he swears this sort of thing would never happen in North Dakota (only in Moorhead, Minnesota which is right across the state line): Former Realtor ordered to pay fine for attempted theft By Amy Dalrymple The Forum – 06/10/2005 A former real estate agent . . .