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644782e
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These budding drug lords bumped up against an immutable law of labor: when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn't pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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d52a251
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Some people would argue that we don't do a very good job. But taking the long view, that is clearly not true. Consider the historical trend in homicide (not including wars), which is both the most reliably measured crime and the best barometer of a society's overall crime rate. These statistics, compiled by the criminologist Manuel Eisner, track the historical homicide levels in five European regions. The steep decline of these numbers over..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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e796421
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serendipitous
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Steven D. Levitt |
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f50bcbd
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In examining the income gap between black and white adults--it is well established that blacks earn significantly less--scholars have found that the gap is virtually eradicated if the blacks' lower eighth-grade test scores are taken into account. In other words, the black-white income gap is largely a product of a black-white education gap that could have been observed many years earlier. "Reducing the black-white test score gap," wrote the..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9ad03b9
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Superman and the Bible are plainly cut from the same template: baby Superman and baby Moses are both rescued from certain death, sent off by their desperate parents in a rocket ship/wicker basket, and are then raised by an alien family but always remember the ways of their people and spend their lives fighting for justice.)
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Steven D. Levitt |
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bdf125e
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the gap steadily grows over the second and third grades.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9872c97
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Just how are the black schools bad? Not, interestingly, in the ways that schools are traditionally measured. In terms of class size, teachers' education, and computer-to-student ratio, the schools attended by blacks and whites are similar. But the typical black student's school has a far higher rate of troublesome indicators, such as gang problems, nonstudents loitering in front of the school, and lack of PTA funding. These schools
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Steven D. Levitt |
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78b4674
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In Switzerland, every adult male is issued an assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep the gun at home. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9a9da52
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For every extra year a young person was exposed to TV in his first 15 years, we see a 4 percent increase in the number of property-crime arrests later in life and a 2 percent increase in violent-crime arrests.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0632991
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talisman
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a8c9070
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conundrum:
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Steven D. Levitt |
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fa8b273
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But this is not to say that parents don't matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago--who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ef34df9
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The basic reality," Sandman told the New York Times, "is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,
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Steven D. Levitt |
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79b5068
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But if you are told that you have a 10 percent chance of dying within the next year, you might worry a lot more, perhaps even choosing to live your life differently. And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next minute, you'll probably panic. So it's the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear--which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ba6f382
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Five Terms Correlated to a Higher Sale Price Granite State-of-the-Art Corian Maple Gourmet Five Terms Correlated to a Lower Sale Price Fantastic Spacious ! Charming Great Neighborhood
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Steven D. Levitt |
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efd29be
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If you study the words in ads for a real-estate agent's own home, meanwhile, you see that she indeed emphasizes descriptive terms (especially "new," "granite," "maple," and "move-in condition") and avoids empty adjectives (including "wonderful," "immaculate," and the telltale "!"). Then she patiently waits for the best buyer to come along"
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a1e1206
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The results of Tetlock's study were sobering. These most expert of experts--96 percent of them had postgraduate training--"thought they knew more than they knew," he says. How accurate were their predictions? They weren't much better than "dart-throwing chimps," as Tetlock often joked."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ef1793f
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The basic reality," Sandman told the New York Times , "is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9338000
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We arrive at the conservative figure of approximately 200,000 women in the regular army of vice.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a686b72
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Harris argued, albeit gently, that parents are wrong to think they contribute so mightily to their child's personality. This belief, she wrote, was a "cultural myth." Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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2fdd220
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In 1960, about 40 percent of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8 percent in the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom. It hardly helped that teachers' wages were falling significantly in relation to those of other jobs. "The quality of teachers has been declining for decades," the chancellor of New York City'..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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c26043c
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More people are probably run over each year by TV news vans.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0079857
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The U.S. "war on drugs" has been relatively ineffective precisely because it focuses on sellers and not buyers. While drug buyers obviously outnumber"
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Steven D. Levitt |
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8142939
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Herley would like to see a smart computer programmer pretend to be dumb in order to outwit a smart scammer who is also pretending to be dumb in order to find a victim who is, if not dumb, then extremely gullible.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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48d75f7
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Advertising too is a brilliant tool for creating conventional wisdom. Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn't a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis"--a then obscure medical term for bad breath. Listerine's new ads featured forlorn you..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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many Indian parents express a strong "son preference."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0e798bd
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teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even C.I.A. analysts. But numbers don't.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ee9e386
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is still common for a bride's parents to give the groom or his family cash, cars, or real estate. The
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Steven D. Levitt |
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paid $2.50 to smother a baby girl born with a cleft deformity
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Steven D. Levitt |
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70ecf2b
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Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear. Fear that your children will find you dead on the bathroom floor of a heart attack if you do not have angioplasty surgery. Fear that a cheap casket will expose your grandmother to a terrible underground fate. Fear that a $25,000 car will crumple like a toy in an accident, whereas a $50,000 car will wrap your loved ones in a cocoon of impregnable steel. The fe..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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344c3f1
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At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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When the eyes were watching, Bateson's colleagues left nearly three times as much money in the honesty box. So the next time you laugh when a bird is frightened off by a silly scarecrow, remember that scarecrows work on human beings too.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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488de9b
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More than 70 percent of the men in his generation have sex before they marry, compared with just 33 percent in the earlier generation.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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043709d
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Of all the women in Venkatesh's study, 83 percent were drug addicts.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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919ab55
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Why has the prostitute's wage fallen so far? Because
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Steven D. Levitt |
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b5ccd84
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that number is 58 percent
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a7d75d5
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Dead horses were extremely unwieldy
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Steven D. Levitt |
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34da815
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it stank to the heavens; when
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Steven D. Levitt |
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999fc61
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people respond to incentives--
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Steven D. Levitt |
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vaunted progress as a major player in the global economy,
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Steven D. Levitt |
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4177665
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Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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b0734e5
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is a systematic means of describing how people make decisions and how they change their minds;
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Steven D. Levitt |
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35 million fewer females than males in the population.
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Steven D. Levitt |