How Rolling Dice Helps Save Leopards
Researchers working in South Africa are using a rolled-dice trick to solicit honest answers from farmers suspected of illegally killing leopards and hyenas. The trick uses randomized response, a method developed in the 1960s to eliminate people’s bias toward giving evasive answers. The basic idea is to prompt honest answers to sensitive questions (on topics such as sexual and even criminal behavior) by asking people to give an answer based on a random event. Researchers believe the resulting sense of confidentiality teases out truthful answers.
The study is called “Identifying Indicators of Illegal Behavior: Carnivore Killing in Human-Managed Landscapes,” and has been published by Britain’s Royal Society; here’s the abstract: Read More »
More on Porn and Rape: Does Internet Access Increase Sex Crimes?
Last week we wrote about a new Scientific American Mind cover story that makes the case for a link between internet pornography and lower cases of rape – something we’ve been skeptical of in the past, and remain so today.
A new study from researchers in Norway and the Netherlands offers evidence that suggests the opposite effect, that higher levels of broadband access actually increase the rate of sex crimes.
The study is titled,”Broadband Internet: An Information Superhighway to Sex Crime?” Here’s a full version. And here’s the abstract: Read More »
Freakonomics Poll: Are you a Scion?
We had a poll earlier this week that asked: should you give your kids the company? That’s the question of our latest podcast and hour-long Freakonomics Radio special “The Church of Scionology.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or read the transcript here.) At this post’s publishing date, over 80% of those who voted chose that they would give their business to their children — if their heirs were competent and wanted the job.
The data on how many family businesses there are in the U.S. is sketchy; an often-quoted number is that 90% of all businesses are family businesses. But that comes from a paper written in the 1980s. A more reliable figure comes from Ronald C. Anderson and David M. Reeb; their 2003 paper measured founding family ownership present in 35% of firms in the S&P 500. Some estimates say that family businesses account for as much as 50% of the U.S. GDP. Read More »
Do Budget Cuts Cause More Riots?
The UK riots continue as PM David Cameron and the Metropolitan police flood London with 16,000 officers in hopes of calming the civil unrest.
Critics have suggested that this is the behavior of a generation that’s been ignored by the establishment. The anarchy on the streets of London has been attributed to high unemployment and disaffected youth, combined with a trigger event — the death of Mark Duggan, shot by police last Saturday.
A couple weeks ago, Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth put out their working paper “Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009.” It uses cross-country data in the 90-year period to examine whether riots and civil unrest increase as governments cut spending. They found a positive correlation between social instability and budget cuts. Read More »
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. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 