Our last Freakonomics column was about the indirect approach that Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, Kevin Murphy, and I used to try to measure crack cocaine use across places and over time in U.S. cities and states. Read all about it here. Some researchers in Italy took a very different, very bizarre approach, as discussed in a British newspaper article reprinted . . .
In the August 7, 2005, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt ask a simple question: Whatever happened to crack cocaine? Crack was the scourge of the 1980’s, leading to endless misery and violence. Today, it is rarely mentioned in the news media. Does that mean that crack has vanished? This blog post supplies additional research material.
Things move quickly in the modern world. Within two hours of posting my academic paper on car seats vs. seat belts on the Freakonomics web page (the first time this paper had seen light of day), another economist found the paper and tested its hypotheses on a very different data set and reported back the results. The economist is Paul . . .