Word: levitts
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...Richard Uviller ’51, Levitt Professor Emeritus of Law at Columbia University and expert on criminal law, died on April 19 after battling bladder cancer...
...example, it turns out that drug dealers don't really make so much money after all. Levitt and a colleague who had obtained copies of a Chicago gang's accounting books found that street-corner crack dealers in the 1980s made less than minimum wage. They stayed in the job because they aspired to rise through the ranks and make six figures--which only a few top leaders ever achieved. In other words, the authors explain, "the gang's wages [were] about as skewed as wages in corporate America...
...crime rate, Levitt makes a convincing case that more abortions did lead to fewer poor, unwanted kids, which led to fewer criminals. Levitt has faced scorching criticism for that claim, which he has been making since 2001. But here and throughout the book he remains blissfully devoted to facts, even unpleasant ones. He calmly displays evidence that abortion has had a greater effect on crime than have broken-window strategies of policing or economic prosperity. But as a crime-control measure, it is "terribly inefficient," he writes, as only an economist could, since the number of aborted fetuses...
...Levitt has published most of this material before in academic journals. But Freakonomics is accessible to people who don't understand regression analysis, the procedure statisticians use to sort through data. And its authors knit in research by other scholars. Each chapter is an enlightening field trip, like the investigations into human nature in Malcolm Gladwell's books, The Tipping Point and Blink. But in Freakonomics, attempts to link the chapters together fall flat. There is no unifying theory here, which is a shame...
...Still, Levitt does his own number crunching, unlike Gladwell. And he forms some different conclusions. While Blink argues that our subconscious judgments are often correct, Levitt finds human error everywhere. We aren't very good at judging risk, assessing causality and avoiding temptation, he learns. But he relishes studying us anyway. --By Amanda Ripley