There is very little scholarly research about unions and organized crime according to the article and book I found on the topic. It may be that the topic now seems unimportant because another article said that the mafia wasn’t particularly…
Blog Archives
Why buy a lotto ticket when other kinds of gambling are much more profitable?
The lottery is much less efficient than most form of gambling than most because each lottery ticket has an expected loss of more than 50% after taxes whereas slot machines have an expected loss of only about 10% and the…
Posted in Labor
Racial progress: compare the riots of 1967 with the riots today. We’ve come a long way baby.
Read this classic Esquire essay from 1968. Police brutality was way worse back then. They just massacred people in some cases. White supremacist militias were more dangerous and shot more people. Entire neighborhoods burned for days. It was close to…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Black lives matter more in countries with fewer guns. Even most police don’t need guns.
As I’ve written before, I’m not a gun-control advocate because there are lots of other factors that can reduce violence that are more politically feasible. For example, Franklin Zimring has numerous suggestions for how to change the rules of engagement…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Prejudice is inefficient and often hurts the people with the prejudices — sometimes as much or more than their targets.
Posted in Discrimination, Inequality
Some basic economics of the covid-19 pandemic
In 2007, the St. Louis Fed summarized research about the 1918 influenza pandemic and used it to predict what would happen in a pandemic like the present covid-19 crisis. Their predictions have been pretty accurate. For example, the report predicted…
The addictive dangers of modernity
For all the millennia of history before modern times, humans had very few options for entertainment and recreation. Food was bland, drugs were scarce, more time was spent making music than listening to it, and most social interaction was done…
