From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 19:01:04 MDT
This is a corrected copy...
"Email Stripper" chopped off a few paragraphs. - TWC
//ZDS// FWD (forteana) The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating
You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)
> August 3, 2003
> By STEPHEN J. DUBNER
>
> The most brilliant young economist in America -- the one so
> deemed, at least, by a jury of his elders -- brakes to a
> stop at a traffic light on Chicago's south side. It is a
> sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy
> Cavalier with a dusty dashboard and a window that doesn't
> quite shut, producing a dull roar at highway speeds.
>
> But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets:
> gas stations, boundless concrete, brick buildings with
> plywood windows.
>
> An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless
> right on his sign, which also asks for money. He wears a
> torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red
> baseball cap.
>
> The economist doesn't lock his doors or inch the car
> forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He
> just watches, as if through one-way glass. After a while,
> the homeless man moves along.
>
> ''He had nice headphones,'' says the economist, still
> watching in the rearview mirror. ''Well, nicer than the
> ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn't look like he has many
> assets.''
>
>
> Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the
> average person. Differently, too, than the average
> economist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling
> one, depending on how you feel about economists. The
> average economist is known to wax oracularly about any and
> all monetary issues. But if you were to ask Levitt his
> opinion of some standard economic matter, he would probably
> swipe the hair from his eyes and plead ignorance. ''I gave
> up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn't
> know,'' he says. ''I mean, I just -- I just don't know very
> much about the field of economics. I'm not good at math, I
> don't know a lot of econometrics, and I also don't know how
> to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock
> market's going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the
> economy's going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether
> deflation's good or bad, if you ask me about taxes -- I
> mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything
> about any of those things.''
>
> In Levitt's view, economics is a science with excellent
> tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of
> interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability
> to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make
> so much money, why do they still live with their mothers?
> Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What
> really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade?
> Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at
> heart? Why do black parents give their children names that
> may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to
> meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling
> corrupt?
>
> And how does a homeless man afford $50 headphones?
>
> Many
> people -- including a fair number of his peers -- might not
> recognize Levitt's work as economics at all. But he has
> merely distilled the so-called dismal science down to its
> most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want,
> or need. Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using
> personal observations and curiosities (though he does fear
> calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile
> of data to find a story that no one else had found. He
> devises a way to measure an effect that veteran economists
> had declared unmeasurable. His abiding interests -- though
> he says he has never trafficked in them himself -- are
> cheating, corruption and crime.
>
> His interest in the homeless man's headphones, meanwhile,
> didn't last long. ''Maybe,'' he said later, ''it was just
> testimony to the fact I'm too disorganized to buy a set of
> headphones that I myself covet.''
>
> Levitt is the first to say that some of his topics border
> on the trivial. But he has proved to be such an ingenious
> researcher and clear-eyed thinker that instead of being
> consigned to the fringe of his field, the opposite has
> happened: he has shown other economists just how well their
> tools can make sense of the real world.
>
> ''Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative
> people in economics and maybe in all social science,'' says
> Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of
> Technology. ''He represents something that everyone thinks
> they will be when they go to grad school in econ, but
> usually they have the creative spark bored out of them by
> endless math -- namely, a kind of intellectual detective
> trying to figure stuff out.''
>
> Levitt is a populist in a field that is undergoing a bout
> of popularization. Undergraduates are swarming the
> economics departments of elite universities. Economics is
> seen as the ideal blend of intellectual prestige (it does
> offer a Nobel, after all) and practical training for a
> high-flying finance career (unless, like Levitt, you choose
> to stay in academia). At the same time, economics is ever
> more visible in the real world, thanks to the continuing
> fetishization of the stock market and the continuing
> fixation with Alan Greenspan.
>
> The greatest change, however, is within the scholarly
> ranks. Microeconomists are gaining on the macro crowd,
> empiricists gaining on the theorists. Behavioral economists
> have called into doubt the very notion of ''homo
> economicus,'' the supposedly rational decision-maker in
> each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more
> inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into
> bordering disciplines -- psychology, criminology,
> sociology, even neurology -- with the intent of rescuing
> their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical
> models.
>
> Levitt fits everywhere and nowhere. He is a noetic
> butterfly that no one has pinned down -- he was once
> offered a job on the Clinton economic team, and the Bush
> campaign approached him about being a crime adviser -- but
> who is widely appreciated.
>
> ''Steve isn't really a behavioral economist, but they'd be
> happy to have him,'' says Austan Goolsbee, who teaches
> economics at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of
> Business. ''He's not really an old price-theory guy, but
> these Chicago guys are happy to claim him. He's not really
> a Cambridge guy'' -- although Levitt went to Harvard and
> then M.I.T. -- ''but they'd love him to come back.''
>
> He has critics, to be sure. Daniel Hamermesh, a prominent
> labor economist at the University of Texas, has taught
> Levitt's paper ''The Impact of Legalized Abortion on
> Crime'' to his undergraduates. ''I've gone over this paper
> in draft, in its printed version, at great length, and for
> the life of me I can't see anything wrong with it,''
> Hamermesh says. ''On the other hand, I don't believe a word
> of it. And his stuff on sumo wrestlers -- well, this is not
> exactly fundamental, unless you're Japanese and weigh 500
> pounds.''
>
> But at 36, Levitt is a full professor in the University of
> Chicago's economics department, the most legendary program
> in the country. (He received tenure after only two years.)
> He is an editor of The Journal of Political Economy, a
> leading journal in the field. And the American Economic
> Association recently awarded him its John Bates Clark
> Medal, given biennially to the country's best economist
> under 40.
>
>
> He is a prolific and diverse writer. But his paper linking
> a rise in abortion to a drop in crime has made more noise
> than the rest combined. Levitt and his co-author, John
> Donohue of Stanford Law School, argued that as much as 50
> percent of the huge drop in crime since the early 1990's
> can be traced to Roe v. Wade. Their thinking goes like
> this: the women most likely to seek an abortion -- poor,
> single, black or teenage mothers -- were the very women
> whose children, if born, have been shown most likely to
> become criminals. But since those children weren't born,
> crime began to decrease during the years they would have
> entered their criminal prime. In conversation, Levitt
> reduces the theory to a tidy syllogism: ''Unwantedness
> leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness;
> abortion leads to less crime.''
>
> Levitt had already published widely about crime and
> punishment. One paper he wrote as a graduate student is
> still regularly cited. His question was disarmingly simple:
> Do more police translate into less crime? The answer would
> seem obvious -- yes -- but had never been proved: since the
> number of police officers tends to rise along with the
> number of crimes, the effectiveness of the police was
> tricky to measure.
>
> Levitt needed a mechanism that would unlink the crime rate
> from police hiring. He found it within politics. He noticed
> that mayors and governors running for re-election often
> hire more police officers. By measuring those police
> increases against crime rates, he was able to determine
> that additional officers do indeed bring down violent
> crime.
>
> That paper was later disputed -- another graduate student
> found a serious mathematical mistake in it -- but Levitt's
> ingenuity was obvious. He began to be acknowledged as a
> master of the simple, clever solution. He was the guy who,
> in the slapstick scene, sees all the engineers futzing with
> a broken machine -- and then realizes that no one has
> thought to plug it in.
>
> Arguing that the police help deter crime didn't make Levitt
> any enemies. Arguing that abortion deterred crime was
> another matter.
>
> In the abortion paper, published in 2001, he and Donohue
> warned that their findings should not be seen ''as either
> an endorsement of abortion or a call for intervention by
> the state in the fertility decisions of women.'' They
> suggested that crime might just as easily be curbed by
> ''providing better environments for those children at
> greatest risk for future crime.''
>
> Still, the very topic managed to offend nearly everyone.
> Conservatives were enraged that abortion could be construed
> as a crime-fighting tool. Liberals were aghast that poor
> and black women were singled out. Economists grumbled that
> Levitt's methodology was not sound. A syllogism, after all,
> can be a magic trick: All cats die; Socrates died;
> therefore Socrates was a cat.
>
> ''I think he's enormously clever in so many areas, focusing
> very much on the issue of reverse causality,'' says Ted
> Joyce, an economist at Baruch College who has written a
> critical response to the abortion paper. ''But in this case
> I think he ignored it, or didn't tend to it well enough.''
>
> As the news media gorged on the abortion-crime story,
> Levitt came under direct assault. He was called an
> ideologue (by conservatives and liberals alike), a
> eugenicist, a racist and downright evil.
>
> In reality, he seems to be very much none of those. He has
> little taste for politics and less for moralizing. He is
> genial, low-key and unflappable, confident but not cocky.
> He is a respected teacher and colleague; he is a
> sought-after collaborator who, because of the breadth of
> his curiosities, often works with scholars outside his
> field -- another rarity for an economist.
>
> ''I hesitate to use these words, but Steve is a con man, in
> the best sense,'' says Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at
> Columbia University. ''He's the Shakespearean jester. He'll
> make you believe his ideas were yours.'' Venkatesh was
> Levitt's co-author on ''An Economic Analysis of a
> Drug-Selling Gang's Finances,'' which found that the
> average street dealer lives with his mother because the
> take-home pay is, frankly, terrible. The paper analyzed one
> crack gang's financial activities as if it were any
> corporation. (It was Venkatesh who procured the data, from
> a former gang member.) Such a thing had never been tried.
> ''This lack of focus,'' Levitt deadpanned in one version of
> the paper, ''is perhaps partly attributable to the fact
> that few economists have been involved in the study of
> gangs.''
>
> Levitt speaks with a boyish lisp. His appearance is High
> Nerd: a plaid button-down shirt, nondescript khakis and a
> braided belt, sensible shoes. His pocket calendar is
> branded with the National Bureau of Economic Research logo.
> ''I wish he would get more than three haircuts a year,''
> his wife, Jeannette, says, ''and that he wasn't still
> wearing the same glasses he got 15 years ago, which weren't
> even in fashion then.'' He was a good golfer in high school
> but has so physically atrophied that he calls himself ''the
> weakest human being alive'' and asks Jeannette to open jars
> around the house.
>
> There is nothing in his appearance or manner, in other
> words, that suggests a flamethrower. He will tell you that
> all he does is sit at his desk, day and night, wrestling
> with some strange mountain of data. He will tell you that
> he would do it free (his salary is reportedly more than
> $200,000), and you tend to believe him. He may be an
> accidental provocateur, but he is a provocateur
> nonetheless.
>
> He takes particular delight in catching wrongdoers. In one
> paper, he devised a set of algorithms that could identify
> teachers in the Chicago public-school system who were
> cheating. ''Cheating classrooms will systematically differ
> from other classrooms along a number of dimensions,'' he
> and his co-author, Brian Jacob of the Kennedy School of
> Government, wrote in ''Catching Cheating Teachers.'' ''For
> instance, students in cheating classrooms are likely to
> experience unusually large test-score gains in the year of
> the cheating, followed by unusually small gains or even
> declines in the following year when the boost attributable
> to cheating disappears.''
>
> Levitt used test-score data from the Chicago schools that
> had long been available to other researchers. There were a
> number of ways, he realized, that a teacher could cheat. If
> she were particularly brazen (and stupid), she might give
> students the correct answers. Or, after the test, she might
> actually erase students' wrong answers and fill in correct
> ones. A sophisticated cheater would be careful to avoid
> conspicuous blocks of identical answers. But Levitt was
> more sophisticated. ''The first step in analyzing
> suspicious strings is to estimate the probability each
> child would give a particular answer on each question,'' he
> wrote. ''This estimation is done using a multinomial logit
> framework with past test scores, demographics and
> socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables.''
>
> So by measuring any number of factors -- the difficulty of
> a particular question, the frequency with which students
> got hard questions right and easy ones wrong, the degree to
> which certain answers were highly correlated in one
> classroom -- Levitt identified which teachers he thought
> were cheating. (Perhaps just as valuable, he was also able
> to identify the good teachers.) The Chicago school system,
> rather than disputing Levitt's findings, invited him into
> the schools for retesting. As a result, the cheaters were
> fired.
>
> Then there is his coming ''Understanding Why Crime Fell in
> the 1990's: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Seven
> That Do Not.'' The entire drop in crime, Levitt says, was
> due to more police officers, more prisoners, the waning
> crack epidemic and Roe v. Wade.
>
> One factor that probably didn't make a difference, he
> argues, was the innovative policing strategy trumpeted in
> New York by Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton.
>
> ''I think,'' Levitt says, ''I'm pretty much alone in saying
> that.''
>
> He comes from a Minneapolis family of high, if unusual,
> achievers. His father, a medical researcher, is considered
> a leading authority on intestinal gas. (He bills himself as
> ''The Man Who Gave Status to Flatus and Class to Gas.'')
> One of Levitt's great uncles, Robert May, wrote ''Rudolph
> the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' -- the book, that is; another
> great uncle, Johnny Marks, later wrote the song.
>
> At Harvard, Levitt wrote his senior thesis on thoroughbred
> breeding and graduated summa cum laude. (He is still
> obsessed with horse racing. He says he believes it is
> corrupt and has designed a betting system -- the details of
> which he will not share -- to take advantage of the
> corruption.) He worked for two years as a management
> consultant before enrolling at M.I.T. for a doctorate in
> economics. The M.I.T. program was famous for its
> mathematical intensity. Levitt had taken exactly one math
> course as an undergraduate and had forgotten even that.
> During his first graduate class, he asked the student next
> to him about a formula on the board: Is there any
> difference between the derivative sign that's straight
> up-and-down and the curly one? ''You are in so much
> trouble,'' he was told.
>
> ''People wrote him off,'' recalls Austan Goolsbee, the
> Chicago economist who was then a classmate. ''They'd say,
> 'That guy has no future.'''
>
> Levitt set his own course. Other grad students stayed up
> all night working on problem sets, trying to make good
> grades. He stayed up researching and writing. ''My view was
> that the way you succeed in this profession is you write
> great papers,'' he says. ''So I just started.''
>
> Sometimes he would begin with a question. Sometimes it was
> a set of data that caught his eye. He spent one entire
> summer typing into his computer the results of years' worth
> of Congressional elections. (Today, with so much
> information so easily available on the Internet, Levitt
> complains that he can't get his students to input data at
> all.) All he had was a vague curiosity about why incumbents
> were so often re-elected.
>
> Then he happened upon a political-science book whose
> authors claimed that money wins elections, period. ''They
> were trying to explain election outcomes as a function of
> campaign expenditures,'' he recalls, ''completely ignoring
> the fact that contributors will only give money to
> challengers when they have a realistic chance of winning,
> and incumbents only spend a lot when they have a chance of
> losing. They convinced themselves this was the causal story
> even though it's so obvious in retrospect that it's a
> spurious effect.''
>
> Obvious, at least, to Levitt. Within five minutes, he had a
> vision of the paper he would write. ''It came to me,'' he
> says, ''in full bloom.''
>
> The problem was that his data couldn't tell him who was a
> good candidate and who wasn't. It was therefore impossible
> to tease out the effect of the money. As with the
> police/crime rate puzzle, he had to trick the data.
>
> Because he himself had typed in the data, he had noticed
> something: often, the same two candidates faced each other
> multiple times. By analyzing the data from only those
> elections, Levitt was able to find a true result. His
> conclusion: campaign money has about one-tenth the impact
> as was commonly accepted.
>
> An unknown graduate student, he sent his paper to The
> Journal of Political Economy -- one professor told him he
> was crazy for even trying -- where it was published. He
> completed his Ph.D. in three years, but because of his
> priorities, he says, he was ''invisible'' to the faculty,
> ''a real zero.'' Then he stumbled upon what he now calls
> the turning point in his career.
>
> He had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the
> venerable intellectual Harvard clubhouse that pays young
> scholars to do their own work, for three years, with no
> commitments. Levitt felt he didn't stand a chance. For
> starters, he didn't consider himself an intellectual. He
> would be interviewed over dinner by the senior fellows, a
> collection of world-renowned philosophers, scientists and
> historians. He worried he wouldn't have enough conversation
> for even the first course.
>
> Instead, he was on fire. Whatever subject came up -- the
> brain, ants, philosophy -- he just happened to remember
> something pithy he'd read. His wit crackled as it had never
> crackled before. When he told them about the two summers he
> spent betting the horses back in Minnesota, they ate it up!
>
>
> Finally -- disquietingly -- one of them said: ''I'm having
> a hard time seeing the unifying theme of your work. Could
> you explain it?''
>
> Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme
> was, or if he even had one.
>
> Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in
> and neatly summarized what he saw as Levitt's theme.
>
> Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that's my theme.
>
> Another fellow
> then offered another theme.
>
> You're right, Levitt said, that's my theme.
>
> And so it
> went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher
> Robert Nozick interrupted. If Levitt could have been said
> to have an intellectual hero, it would be Nozick.
>
> ''How old are you, Steve?'' he asked.
>
> ''Twenty-six.''
>
>
> Nozick turned to the other fellows: ''He's 26 years old.
> Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he's going
> to be one of those people who's so talented he doesn't need
> one. He'll take a question and he'll just answer it, and
> it'll be fine.''
>
> The University of Chicago's economics department had a
> famous unifying theme -- the Gospel of Free Markets, with a
> conservative twist -- and would therefore not have seemed
> the most likely fit for Levitt. As he sees it, Chicago is
> about theory, deep thinking and big ideas, while he is
> about empiricism, clever thinking and ''cute but ultimately
> insubstantial ideas.''
>
> But Chicago also had Gary Becker. To Levitt, Becker is the
> most influential economist of the past 50 years. Long
> before it was fashionable, Becker brought microeconomic
> theory to offbeat topics, the family and crime in
> particular. For years, Becker was demonized -- a single
> phrase like ''the price of children'' would set off untold
> alarms. ''I took a lot of heat over my career from people
> who thought my work was silly or irrelevant or not
> economics,'' Becker says. But Chicago supported him; he
> persevered, winning the Nobel Prize in 1992; and he became
> Steven Levitt's role model.
>
> Becker told Levitt that Chicago would be a great
> environment for him. ''Not everybody agrees with all your
> results,'' he said, ''but we agree what you're doing is
> very interesting work, and we'll support you in that.''
>
> Levitt soon found that the support at Chicago went beyond
> the scholarly. The year after he was hired, his wife gave
> birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after
> Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a slight fever.
> The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started
> vomiting the next morning, his parents took him to the
> hospital. A few days later he was dead of pneumococcal
> meningitis.
>
> Amid the shock and grief, Levitt had an undergraduate class
> that needed teaching. It was Gary Becker -- a Nobel
> laureate nearing his 70th birthday -- who sat in for him.
> Another colleague, D. Gale Johnson, sent a condolence card
> that Levitt still quotes from memory.
>
> Levitt and Johnson, an agricultural economist in his 80's,
> began speaking regularly. Levitt learned that Johnson's
> daughter was one of the first Americans to adopt a daughter
> from China. Soon the Levitts adopted a daughter of their
> own, whom they named Amanda. In addition to Amanda, they
> have since had a daughter, now almost 3, and a son. But
> Andrew's death has played on, in various ways. They have
> become close friends with the family of the little girl to
> whom they donated Andrew's liver. (They also donated his
> heart, but that baby died.) And not surprisingly for a
> scholar who pursues real-life subjects, the death also
> informed Levitt's work.
>
> He and Jeannette joined a support group for grieving
> parents. Levitt was struck by how many children had drowned
> in swimming pools. They were the kinds of deaths that don't
> make the newspaper -- unlike, for instance, a child who
> dies while playing with a gun.
>
> Levitt was curious and went looking for numbers that would
> tell the story. He wrote up the results as an op-ed article
> for The Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent
> counterintuition for which he has become famous: ''If you
> own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the
> swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a
> child than the gun is.''
>
> Trying to get his mind off death, Levitt took up a hobby:
> rehabbing and selling old houses in Oak Park, where he
> lives. This experience has led to yet another paper, about
> the real-estate market. It is his most Chicago-style paper
> yet, a romp in price theory, a sign that the university's
> influence on him is perhaps as strong as his influence on
> it. But Levitt being Levitt, it also deals with corruption.
>
>
> While negotiating to buy old houses, he found that the
> seller's agent often encouraged him, albeit cagily, to
> underbid. This seemed odd: didn't the agent represent the
> seller's best interest? Then he thought more about the
> agent's role. Like many other ''experts'' (auto mechanics
> and stockbrokers come to mind), a real-estate agent is
> thought to know his field far better than a lay person. A
> homeowner is encouraged to trust the agent's information.
> So if the agent brings in a low offer and says it might
> just be the best the homeowner can expect, the homeowner
> tends to believe him. But the key, Levitt determined, lay
> in the fact that agents ''receive only a small share of the
> incremental profit when a house sells for a higher value.''
> Like a stockbroker churning commissions or a bookie
> grabbing his vig, an agent was simply looking to make a
> deal, any deal. So he would push homeowners to sell too
> fast and too cheap.
>
> Now if Levitt could only measure this effect. Once again,
> he found a clever mechanism. Using data from more than
> 50,000 home sales in Cook County, Ill., he compared the
> figures for homes owned by real-estate agents with those
> for homes for which they acted only as agents. The agents'
> homes stayed on the market about 10 days longer and sold
> for 2 percent more.
>
>
> Late on a summer afternoon, Levitt is in his office, deep
> inside one of the university's Gothic behemoths. The
> ceiling is stained, the plaster around the window
> crumbling. He is just back from sabbatical at Stanford, and
> his desk is a holy mess: stacks of books and journals, a
> green sippy cup and a little orange squeeze hippo.
>
> This is his afternoon to meet with students. Levitt drinks
> a Mountain Dew and talks softly. Some students come for
> research assignments, some for advice. One has just written
> her undergraduate thesis: ''The Labor Market Consequence of
> Graduating College in a Bad Economy.'' For a thesis, Levitt
> tells her, it's very good. But now she wants to have it
> published.
>
> ''You write like a college student, and that's a problem,''
> he says. ''The thing is, you're telling a story. There's
> foreshadowing going on, all those tricks. You want the
> reader going down a particular path so when they get the
> results, they understand them and believe them. But you
> also want to be honest about your weaknesses. People are
> much less harsh on weaknesses that are clear than
> weaknesses that are hidden -- as they should be.''
>
> Be honest about your weaknesses. Has there ever been a
> prize-winning scholar as honest about his weaknesses as
> Steven Levitt? He doesn't understand economics, he claims,
> or math. He's a little thinker in a world of big thinkers.
> He can't even open a jar of spaghetti sauce at home, poor
> guy.
>
> Friends say that Levitt's self-deprecation is as calculated
> as it is genuine. Within academia, economists take pride in
> being the most cutthroat of a cutthroat breed. Anyone who
> writes papers on ''Weakest Link'' (contestants discriminate
> against Latino and elderly peers, Levitt concluded, but not
> blacks or women) and sumo (to best manage their tournament
> rankings, wrestlers often conspire to throw matches) had
> better not also be arrogant.
>
> Or maybe it is not self-deprecation at all. Maybe it is
> self-flagellation. Maybe what Steven Levitt really wants is
> to graduate from his ''silly'' and ''trivial'' and
> ''shallow'' topics.
>
> He thinks he's onto something with a new paper about black
> names. He wanted to know if someone with a distinctly black
> name suffers an economic penalty. His answer -- contrary to
> other recent research -- is no. But now he has a bigger
> question: Is black culture a cause of racial inequality or
> is it a consequence? For an economist, even for Levitt,
> this is new turf -- ''quantifying culture,'' he calls it.
> As a task, he finds it thorny, messy, perhaps impossible
> and deeply tantalizing.
>
> Driving home to Oak Park that evening, his Cavalier glumly
> thrumming along the Eisenhower Expressway, he dutifully
> addresses his future. Leaving academia for a hedge fund or
> a government job does not interest him (though he might, on
> the side, start a company to catch cheating teachers). He
> is said to be at the top of every economics department's
> poaching list. But the tree he and Jeannette planted when
> Andrew died is getting too big to move. You get the feeling
> he may stay at Chicago awhile.
>
> There are important problems, he says, that he feels ready
> to address.
>
> For instance? ''Tax evasion. Money-laundering. I'd like to
> put together a set of tools that lets us catch terrorists.
> I mean, that's the goal. I don't necessarily know yet how
> I'd go about it. But given the right data, I have little
> doubt that I could figure out the answer.''
>
> It might seem absurd for an economist to dream of catching
> terrorists. Just as it must have seemed absurd if you were
> a Chicago schoolteacher, called into an office and told
> that, ahem, the algorithms designed by that skinny man with
> thick glasses had determined that you are a cheater. And
> that you are being fired. Steven Levitt may not fully
> believe in himself, but he does believe in this: teachers
> and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and
> politicians, and even C.I.A. analysts. But numbers don't.
>
>
>
>
> Stephen J. Dubner is the author, most recently, of
> ''Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper.'' He is writing a book
> about the psychology of money.
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03LEVITT.html?ex=1060924501&ei=1&en=c8f9a5805b60223f
> Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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