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Just how much women’s underwear can be stashed in one person’s closet? “Next I discovered two loose pairs of women’s underwear. Next I discovered a Pokemon lunchbox containing 20 pairs of women’s underwear, and next I discovered a blue hardened briefcase containing 73 pairs of women’s underwear.”
Dori Smith had her personalized license plate (“WEB GEEK”) stolen and she wants it back, no questions asked. “I know a lot of people in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area. I know a lot of Web geeks. The chances are good that whoever ends up with my plate knows someone who knows someone who knows me.”
Because of his open source programming connection, Hans Reiser’s arrest for his wife’s murder was big news in that community. After his wife disappeared, Reiser bought 2 books on murder, including David Simon’s Homicide. Simon is the creator of The Wire.
Sounds like a tactic out of The Wire: instead of mass arrests, law enforcement officials in a North Carolina city have been using pressure from families and the threat of arrest to drive drug dealers out of business. (thx, micah)
A pair of economists looked at the number of parking tickets accrued by diplomats at the UN (tickets for which they are not charged) to determine each country’s corruption level. “Since, as their study reports, there is ‘essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations,’ the authors hypothesized that any cross-national variation in parking-violation rates should flow from culture alone.” The worst offenders were the Kuwaitis, followed by Egypt. Diplomats from Canada, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark had 0 parking tickets. Here’s the whole paper. (thx, susan)
According to data from an annual FBI study, New York City was the safest large city in the US in 2005. Least safe big city: Dallas.
Old news, but the copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream stolen two years ago from an Oslo museum has been recovered. M&M’s will honor their offer of 2 million M&M’s for the safe recovery of the painting. No word on whether the reward was responsible for the recovery.
Stolen mobile phone + automatic upload of the thief’s photos to Flickr = art project. (thx, stewart)
Mars, Inc. is offering a reward of 2 million dark chocolate M&M’s for the safe return of The Scream, the Edvard Munch painting stolen from a museum in Norway in 2004. Mmmm….Munch. (via girlhacker)
This is going to sound like an Onion article but isn’t. David Copperfield got held up at gunpoint after a show last weekend and when the robbers asked him for his valuables, “he pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them”. Copperfield’s got a gun pointed at his head and he’s doing an impromptu magic show for the thieves! What’s better than that? Nothing. (via the superficial)
Lots of chatter lately about the “broken windows” theory of why the US crime rate dropped so dramatically in the 80s and 90s. Writing in the Boston Globe, Daniel Brook explores the possible cracks in the theory, while proponents William Bratton & George Kelling defend it from “attacks” from ‘liberals”, “anti-police groups”, and “ivory-tower academics”. Gladwell says broken windows holds up, Dubner disagrees, and Gladwell rebuts.
If you’ve been following the lost camera story, there’s a happy ending for you…Judith got her camera back from the mean Canadian family.
My pal Judith lost her camera on vacation in Hawaii and tried to make the best of the situation by starting a project using other people’s Flickr photos to reconstruct a trip journal. Now, a family has found her camera but won’t give it back to her because they don’t want to take it away from the 9 yo kid that found it. “We can’t tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card”. The dishonesty displayed here is maddening.
Beautiful people commit less crime. “Other studies have shown that unattractive men and women are less likely to be hired, and that they earn less money, than the better-looking. Such inferior circumstances may steer some to crime, Mocan and Tekin suggest.”
Stabilized version of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy Assassination. Stabilized means the camera movement has been digitally edited out…the video is super-clear now.
There’s nothing good about the shooting of airline passenger Rigoberto Alpizar by air marshals. Guns on airplanes — I don’t care who’s wielding them under what authority — is a bad idea; some alternative thinking is needed.
Subway has gotten rid of their Sub Club cards and stamps, citing the greater ease of fraud these days with color printers and such. Before they stopped it, my dad cashed in his entire supply of cards, eating free for about two weeks.
An alleged pervert on the NYC subway was caught by cameraphone and the picture was posted to Flickr. No word on an identification yet. (thx newley)
Grant McCracken offers an alternate theory for why crime fell in the 90s: rap music replaced violence among urban youths as a way to gain esteem. Compare with Levitt and Gladwell.
Freakonomists Levitt and Dubner: where did all the crack cocaine go? Well, it didn’t. Go. But the crime did.
The illegality of “Rio funk” music has driven it deep into the slums of Rio De Janeiro, controlled by the drug lords. “Funk songs used to pay homage to those who had died, but now it is fashionable to name-check those still alive. Juca is often asked by drug soldiers to write lyrics that include their names.”
Blog of Joseph Duncan, who’s being held for murder and kidnapping in Idaho. “My intent is to harm society as much as I can, then die.”
How the black market for stolen credit cards and identities works.
Four nuns and a priest from Romania face murder charges after crucifying another nun. I think it was probably all the violent TV and video games they were exposed to.
Two years ago, Stephen Dubner wrote an article for the NY Times Magazine on Steven Levitt, an economist with a knack for tackling odd sorts of problems. Last year, Dubner and Levitt collaborated on an article called What the Bagel Man Saw about the economic lessons gleaned from a man who’s been successfully selling bagels on the honor system in offices for more than 20 years. Now Levitt and Dubner are out with a new book called Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Nearly Everything, an overview of Levitt’s work and collaborations with other economists.
Dr. Levitt was kind enough to answer a few questions I had about the book:
jkottke: In Freakonomics, you state that you’re interested in applying economic tools to “more interesting” subjects than what one may have learned about in my high school economics class. What’s your definition of economics? Is it a tool set or a science or what?
Steven Levitt: I think of economics as a worldview, not a set of topics. This worldview has a few different pieces. First, incentives are paramount. If you understand someone’s incentives, you can do a pretty good job of predicting their behavior. Second, the appropriate data, analyzed the right way are key to understanding a problem. Finally, political correctness is irrelevant. Whatever the answer happens to be, whether you think it will be popular or not, that is the answer you put forth.
jkottke: Your talent for ignoring seemingly applicable but ultimately irrelevant information (not that different from a professional-grade batter taking cues from certain aspects of a pitcher’s mechanics and ignoring the extraneous ones in order to hit well), where does that come from? Good genes or was it all the books in your childhood home?
Levitt: If nothing else, I had an unusual home environment. My father is a medical researcher whose claim to fame is that he is the world’s expert on intestinal gas (he’s known as the King of Farts). My mother is a psychic who channels books. From an early age, my life was different from that of other kids. For instance, when I was in junior high, my father would wake me up at night to drill me with questions in hopes that I would be the star of the local high school quiz show.
jkottke: In looking at the world through data, you’ve investigated cheating schoolteachers, falling crime rates due to abortion, and the parallels between McDonald’s corporate structure and the inner workings of a crack-dealing gang. What’s the oddest or most surprising thing you’ve uncovered with this approach? Maybe something you still can’t quite believe or explain?
Levitt: It’s not the oddest result I’ve ever come up with, but there is one finding I have always puzzled over: when cities hire lots of Black cops, the arrest rates of Whites go up, but no more Blacks get arrested. When cities hire White cops, the opposite happens (more Black arrests, no more White arrests). It was an amazingly stark result, but I’m not quite sure what the right story is.
jkottke: In the chapter on the effect of abortion on crime rates, you and Stephen take care emphasizing what the data says and the strong views that people in the US hold on the issue of abortion. Still, if someone wants to twist your observations into something like “abortion is good because it lowers crime”, it’s not that difficult. Have your observations in this area caused any problems for you? Any extreme reactions?
Levitt: I have gotten a whole lot of hate mail on the abortion issue (as much from the left as from the right, amazingly). What I try to tell anyone who will listen — few people will listen when the subject is abortion — is that our findings on abortion and crime have almost nothing to say about public policy on abortion. If abortion is murder as pro-life advocates say, then a few thousand less homicides is nothing compared to abortion itself. If a woman’s right to choose is sacrosanct, then utilitarian arguments are inconsequential. Mainly, I think the results on abortion imply that we should do the best we can to try to make sure kids who are born are wanted and loved. And it turns out that is something just about everyone can agree on.
jkottke: In the book, you say “a slight tweak [in incentives] can produce drastic and unforseen results”. If you were the omnipotent leader of the US for a short time, what little tweak might you make to our political, cultural, or economic frameworks to make America better (if you can forgive the subjectivity of that word)?
Levitt: I would start by increasing the IRS budget ten-fold and doing a lot more tax audits. If everyone paid their taxes, tax rates could be much lower and otherwise honest people wouldn’t be tempted to cheat. For some reason, everyone hates the idea. But we can’t all be cheating more than average on our taxes. I think it would be for the better. And after I got done with that, I’d legalize sports betting, and I would also do away with most of the nonsense and hassle that currently goes into airport security.
jkottke: In the war between the film and music industries and their customers, there’s an argument over how much the explosive increase in Internet piracy affects sales of CDs, movie tickets, and DVDs. Using the same data, the music/movie industry argues that sales are down because of piracy (or at least diminished from what they “should” be in a piracy-free marketplace) while the other side argues that sales are up and that piracy may actually have a beneficial effect. The question of “how does piracy affect record/movie sales?” seems well suited to your particular application of economic tools. Have you looked at this question? And if not, do you have sense of which special view of the data might reveal an answer?
Levitt: I have not myself studied the issue. I have a former student who has studied this issue. Alejandro Zentner. He argues that music sales are way down as a consequence of downloading. He uses the availability/price of high-speed internet across areas and relates that to patterns of self-reported music buying.
But on the other hand, I have a good friend Koleman Strumpf who has also written on this and comes to the opposite conclusion using a whole bunch of clever arguments.
This is a great issue - an important one and a tough one. Having studied both of these papers, I don’t know which one to believe.
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Thanks, Steven. For more information on Freakonomics, check out the book’s web site — which includes a weblog written, in part, by the authors — or buy the book on Amazon. Check out also this email conversation between Levitt and Steve Sailer on the connection between legalized abortion and reduced crime in the 1990s, a short profile in Wired, and this profile in Esquire (free subscription required).
Update: Here’s a Freakonomics excerpt from Slate on how distinctively black or white names affect a child’s course in life.
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