Re: Levitt article
In a message dated 8/4/03 9:41:08 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The article discusses Levitt's research style: his tendency to ask odd but interesting questions and be clever enough to be able to test the hypotheses with publically available data. It also has some discussions of his career path and a little about his personal life. Fabio Thanks, Fabio. So what's so bad about that? David
Re: Levitt article
I couldn't access the article. Could anyone either copy and paste it to me (privately so as not to distrub others) or perhaps just give me a briefy summary? Thank you. David Levenstam The article discusses Levitt's research style: his tendency to ask odd but interesting questions and be clever enough to be able to test the hypotheses with publically available data. It also has some discussions of his career path and a little about his personal life. Fabio
Re: Levitt article
Along those lines, the following is a Paul Krugman article, which quite humorously recaps a similar media event about a wunderkind economist -- probably a story only economists would find funny. http://www.pkarchive.org/cranks/legend.html At 09:51 PM 8/4/2003 -0500, you wrote: The article discusses Levitt's research style: his tendency to ask odd but interesting questions and be clever enough to be able to test the hypotheses with publically available data. It also has some discussions of his career path and a little about his personal life. Fabio Thanks, Fabio. So what's so bad about that? David Well, the article's style and tone was a little odd. For example, as someone else pointed out, it seemed to imply that Steve Levitt was alone in the economic analysis of crimes and other non-market behaviors. It also has this aw-shucks attitude, depicting a wunderkind who was ignored by the profession until the profession was stunned and surprised by his wit. All in all, not the worst article ever written, combining the story of an interesting economist with some weird framing. Fabio
Re: Levitt article
The article discusses Levitt's research style: his tendency to ask odd but interesting questions and be clever enough to be able to test the hypotheses with publically available data. It also has some discussions of his career path and a little about his personal life. Fabio Thanks, Fabio. So what's so bad about that? David Well, the article's style and tone was a little odd. For example, as someone else pointed out, it seemed to imply that Steve Levitt was alone in the economic analysis of crimes and other non-market behaviors. It also has this aw-shucks attitude, depicting a wunderkind who was ignored by the profession until the profession was stunned and surprised by his wit. All in all, not the worst article ever written, combining the story of an interesting economist with some weird framing. Fabio
The Levitt article
Title: The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life) August 3, 2003 The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)By STEPHEN J. DUBNER he 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
Re: Levitt article
Here it is. Fabio, we expect better work from you next time! :-) Alex http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03LEVITT.html?pagewanted=printposition= -- Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314 Web Page: http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/ and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366
Re: Levitt article
It is an annoying piece, even if it shows the public what Levitt is up to, because it strongly indicates that Levitt is an outlier in the profession in his interests. Forty years ago, he would have been a rarity in the profession. Today, he is pretty standard. Bill Sjostrom - Original Message - From: Alex Tabarrok [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 2:34 PM Subject: Re: Levitt article Here it is. Fabio, we expect better work from you next time! :-) Alex http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03LEVITT.html?pagewanted=printposition= -- Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics, MSN 1D3 George Mason University Fairfax, VA, 22030 Tel. 703-993-2314 Web Page: http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/ and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621 Tel. 510-632-1366
Re: Levitt article
What I found interesting is that in economics, like in many other fields, there are problem solvers (people who figure out specific paradoxes, empirical facts, etc) and theory builders. Levitt is a supremely able problem solver, a niche that didn't exist 30-40 years ago in the economics profession. Fabio On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, William Sjostrom wrote: It is an annoying piece, even if it shows the public what Levitt is up to, because it strongly indicates that Levitt is an outlier in the profession in his interests. Forty years ago, he would have been a rarity in the profession. Today, he is pretty standard. Bill Sjostrom
Re: Levitt article
In an earlier message, William Sjostrom suggested that Levitt's research is typical of the economics field. I am very curious about this statement, because it is at odds with my casual empiricism, and I would like to see it backed by some concrete evidence. Perhaps this reflects my own ignorance of the literature, but I would like to know who does such clever, but careful empirical work. If this is true, I'd like to read it. Are there people out there that collect interesting data to approach previously intractable questions from a new direction? The best example of this that I can think of is a working paper that estimated the scope of corruption in Indonesia by looking at how the stock prices of companies that has close links to the Suharto government reacted to news about his health. I can't seem to find this paper to provide you with a citation. Dimitriy V. Masterov ___ Dimitriy V. Masterov Center for Social Program Evaluation 1155 East 60th St. Room 038 Chicago, IL 60637 Work: (773)256-6005 Fax: (773)256-6313
Re: Levitt article
In my own biased view, one such group are experimentalists. The best experimental work provides extremely clever manipulations that generate data to address previously empirically intractable questions. The AER is full of such clever and careful work. Recent AER examples include Henrich et. al.'s efforts to use experiments to learn about how trust and market performance are related, Fehr et. al.'s efforts to examine the effect of sanctions on cooperation, List et. al.'s field experiments with baseball cards, and on and on (including work by ICES colleagues)... On balance I would argue that Levitt is indeed unusually clever (in the sense that he comes up with good questions and also finds interesting natural manipulations to study them), but that his particular approach to economic science is not novel: Vernon Smith has been using it for decades. - Dan - Original Message - From: Dimitriy V. Masterov [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 3:52 PM Subject: Re: Levitt article In an earlier message, William Sjostrom suggested that Levitt's research is typical of the economics field. I am very curious about this statement, because it is at odds with my casual empiricism, and I would like to see it backed by some concrete evidence. Perhaps this reflects my own ignorance of the literature, but I would like to know who does such clever, but careful empirical work. If this is true, I'd like to read it. Are there people out there that collect interesting data to approach previously intractable questions from a new direction? The best example of this that I can think of is a working paper that estimated the scope of corruption in Indonesia by looking at how the stock prices of companies that has close links to the Suharto government reacted to news about his health. I can't seem to find this paper to provide you with a citation. Dimitriy V. Masterov ___ Dimitriy V. Masterov Center for Social Program Evaluation 1155 East 60th St. Room 038 Chicago, IL 60637 Work: (773)256-6005 Fax: (773)256-6313
Re: Levitt article
In an earlier message, William Sjostrom suggested that Levitt's research is typical of the economics field. I am very curious about this statement, because it is at odds with my casual empiricism, and I would like to see it backed by some concrete evidence. Perhaps this reflects my own ignorance of the literature, but I would like to know who does such clever, but careful empirical work. If this is true, I'd like to read it. Are there people out there that collect interesting data to approach previously intractable questions from a new direction? I did not quite mean that most economists were as clever as Levitt. I meant only that the kinds of problems Levitt works on are now pretty standard. Crime has been a common topic among economists for decades. The reference to Levitt's work on real estate agents is basically just agency theory, again a topic for empirical work for some years. I do not mean to denigrate Levitt's creativity, which is simply huge. My complaint was about the way the Times told the story. They made it sound as if economists sit around all day making vague philosophical observations about capitalism and socialism, or something like that, rather than working on the small problems that most of us spend most of our time working on. Bill Sjostrom + William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Centre for Policy Studies National University of Ireland, Cork 5 Bloomfield Terrace, Western Road Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-490-3658 (fax) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
Re: Levitt article
and on (including work by ICES colleagues)... On balance I would argue that Levitt is indeed unusually clever (in the sense that he comes up with good questions and also finds interesting natural manipulations to study them), but that his particular approach to economic science is not novel: Vernon Smith has been using it for decades. - Dan Correct me if I am wrong, but a big difference between Vernon Smith and Levitt is that Smith focuses mostly on a single area - experimental econ with a cognitive focus - while Levitt is a bit more wide ranging in his interests. Nothing wrong with that, but maybe that's a reason Levitt is so distinctive. Few people have the cleverness to consistently spot interesting puzzles and then have the tenacity to find data that can actually test hypotheses. Of course, the long term interesting question: will such puzzle solving lead to greater economic insight? I think so. In mathematics, such puzzle solvers are good at showing all sorts of cherished ideas are wrong and the evidence accumulated from such research can force people to think in new ways. Also, puzzle solvers are good at finding tricks that can be used to solve other problems. I wouldn't be surprised if Levitt's long term legacy is like that of Paul Erdos the mathematician who was notorious for solving goofy problems, but whose solutions forced people to rethink a lot of math. Fabio
