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Deaths,” reporting by Irene M. Kunii and Hiroki Tashiro, Time (International

Edition), September 30,1996.

THE BAGEL MAN: Paul Feldman was looking for a research economist to take

an interest in his data, and brought himself to Steven Levitt’s attention. (Several

other scholars had passed.) Levitt and then Dubner subsequently visited

Feldman’s bagel operation near Washington, D.C. Their research led to an article

that was substantially similar to the version of the story published here: Stephen

J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “What the Bagel Man Saw,” The New York

Times Magazine, June 6, 2004. Levitt is also writing an academic paper about

Feldman’s bagel operation. / 47 The “Beer on the Beach” study is discussed in

Richard H. Thaler, “Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice,” Marketing

Science 4 (Summer 1985), pp. 119–214; also worth reading is Richard H. Thaler,

The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (New York:

Free Press, 1992).

2. HOW IS THE KU KLUX KLAN LIKE A GROUP OF REAL-ESTATE AGENTS?

UNMASKING THE KU KLUX KLAN: A number of excellent books have been

written about the Ku Klux Klan. For general history, we relied most heavily on

Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1987), and David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The

First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,

1965); see also Stetson Kennedy, After Appomattox: How the South Won the War

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995). Of most particular interest to us

was Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic

University Press, 1990), which was originally published as I Rode with the Ku

Klux Klan (London: Arco Publishers, 1954). But Stetson Kennedy himself is

probably the greatest living repository of Klan lore. (For more information, see

www.stetsonkennedy.com; also, many of Kennedy’s papers are housed in the

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.) The authors

visited Kennedy at his home near Jacksonville, Florida, interviewing him and

availing ourselves of his extensive collection of Klan paraphernalia and

documentation. (We also tried on his Klan robes.) We are most grateful for his

cooperation. The Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. accompanied us; he and

Steven Levitt are currently collaborating on a series of papers about the Ku Klux

Klan. It should be noted that Fryer was driving the rental car as we first sought

out Kennedy’s house on a sandy back road. We stopped to ask a neighbor for

directions. Kennedy is still considered an enemy in Klan circles, and the neighbor

was plainly protective of Kennedy’s whereabouts. So he peered into the car—

directly at Fryer, who is black—and in all earnestness asked, “Y’all ain’t Klan, are

ya?” Fryer assured him we were not.

WHAT HAPPENED TO TERM-LIFE RATES? See Jeffrey R. Brown and Austan

Goolsbee, “Does the Internet Make Markets More Competitive? Evidence from

the Life Insurance Industry,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 3 (June 2002),

pp. 481–507.

SUPREME COURT JUSTICE LOUIS D. BRANDEIS writing that “Sunlight is said

to be the best of disinfectants”: See Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money—

and How Bankers Use It (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914).

THE BRAND-NEW USED-CAR CONUNDRUM: This thesis, and indeed much

of what we think today about “asymmetric information,” stems from a paper

that George A. Akerlof wrote during his first year as an assistant professor at

Berkeley in 1966–67. It was rejected three times—two of the journals told Akerlof

that they “did not publish papers on topics of such triviality,” as he later

recalled—before being published as George A. Akerlof, “The Market for

‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of

Economics, August 1970. Some thirty years later, the paper won Akerlof the

Nobel Prize in Economics; he is widely considered the nicest man to have ever

won the award.

THE ENRON TAPES: As of this writing, the tapes could be heard on http://

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/01/eveningnews/main6_20626.shtml. See

also Richard A. Oppel Jr., “Enron Traders on Grandma Millie and Making Out

Like Bandits,” New York Times, June 13, 2004.

ARE ANGIOPLASTIES NECESSARY? See Gina Kolata, “New Heart Studies

Question the Value of Opening Arteries,” New York Times, March 21, 2004.

THE REAL REAL-ESTATE STORY, REVISITED: See Steven D. Levitt and Chad

Syverson, “Market Distortions When Agents Are Better Informed: A Theoretical

and Empirical Exploration of the Value of Information in Real-Estate

Transactions,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2005.

TRENT LOTT, NOT-SO-SECRET SEGREGATIONIST? The circumstances

surrounding Lott’s damaging comments are well summarized in Dan Goodgame

and Karen Tumulty, “Lott: Tripped Up by History,” Time.com/cnn.com,

December 16, 2002.

THE WEAKEST LINK: See Steven D. Levitt, “Testing Theories of Discrimination:

Evidence from The Weakest Link,” Journal of Law and Economics 17 (October

2004), pp. 431–52. / 79 The theory of taste-based discrimination originates with

Gary S. Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1957). / 79 The theory of information-based discrimination is

derived from a number of papers, including Edmund Phelps, “A Statistical

Theory of Racism and Sexism,” American Economic Review 62, no. 4 (1972), pp.

659–61; and Kenneth Arrow, “The Theory of Discrimination,” Discrimination in

Labor Markets, ed. Orley Ashenfelter and Albert Rees (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1973).

THE ONLINE DATING STORY: See Dan Ariely, Günter J. Hitsch, and Ali

Horta.su, “What Makes You Click: An Empirical Analysis of Online Dating,”

University of Chicago working paper, 2004.

VOTERS LYING ABOUT DINKINS / GIULIANI: See Timur Kuran, Private

Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); also Kevin Sack, “Governor

Joins Dinkins Attack Against Rival,” New York Times, October 27, 1989; and

Sam Roberts, “Uncertainty over Polls Clouds Strategy in Mayor Race,” New

York Times, October 31, 1989.

VOTERS LYING ABOUT DAVID DUKE: See Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies;

also Peter Applebome, “Republican Quits Louisiana Race in Effort to Defeat Ex-

Klansman,” New York Times, October 5, 1990; and Peter Applebome, “Racial

Politics in South’s Contests: Hot Wind of Hate or Last Gasp?” New York Times,

November 5, 1990.

DAVID DUKE, MASTER OF INFORMATION ABUSE: Among the many helpful

sources for this material were Karen Henderson, “David Duke’s Work-Release

Program,” National Public Radio, May 14, 2004; and the exhaustive John

McQuaid, “Duke’s Decline,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 13,2003.

3. WHY DO DRUG DEALERS STILL LIVE WITH THEIR MOMS?

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH’S “CONVENTIONAL WISDOM”: See “The

Concept of the Conventional Wisdom,” the second chapter of The Affluent

Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).

MITCH SNYDER AND THE HOMELESS MILLIONS: The controversy over

Snyder’s activism was covered widely, particularly in Colorado newspapers,

during the early 1980s and was revisited in 1990 when Snyder committed

suicide. A good overview is provided in Gary S. Becker and Guity Nashat

Becker, “How the Homeless ‘Crisis’ Was Hyped,” in The Economics of Life (New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), pp. 175–76; the chapter was adapted from a 1994

Business Week article by the same authors.

THE INVENTION OF CHRONIC HALITOSIS: The strange and compelling story

of Listerine is beautifully told in James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads That Shook the

World: The Century’s Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed

Us All (New York: Crown, 2000), pp. 60–69.

GEORGE W. BUSH AS A MAKE-BELIEVE COWBOY: See Paul Krugman, “New

Year’s Resolutions,” New York Times, December 26, 2003.

NOT AS MUCH RAPE AS IS COMMONLY THOUGHT: The 2002 statistics from

the National Crime Survey, which is designed to elicit honest responses, suggests

that the lifetime risk of a woman’s being the victim of unwanted sexual activity

or attempted unwanted sexual activity is about one in eight (not one in three, as

is typically argued by advocates). For men, the National Crime Survey suggests a

one-in-forty incidence, rather than the one-in-nine incidence cited by advocates.

NOT AS MUCH CRIME AS THERE ACTUALLY WAS: See Mark Niesse,

“Report Says Atlanta Underreported Crimes to Help Land 1996 Olympics,”

Associated Press, February 20, 2004.

SUDHIR VENKATESH’S LONG, STRANGE TRIP INTO THE CRACK DEN: As

of this writing, Venkatesh is an associate professor of sociology and African

American studies at Columbia University. / 93–99 The biographical material on

Venkatesh was drawn largely from author interviews; see also Jordan Marsh,

“The Gang Way,” Chicago Reader, August 8, 1997; and Robert L. Kaiser, “The

Science of Fitting In,” Chicago Tribune, December 10, 2000. / 99–109 The

particulars of the crack gang are covered in four papers by Sudhir Alladi

Venkatesh and Steven D. Levitt: “The Financial Activities of an Urban Street

Gang,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 3 (August 2000), pp. 755–89;

“‘Are We a Family or a Business?’ History and Disjuncture in the Urban

American Street Gang,” Theory and Society 29 (Autumn 2000), pp. 427–62;

“Growing Up in the Projects: The Economic Lives of a Cohort of Men Who Came

of Age in Chicago Public Housing,” American Economic Review 91, no. 2 (2001),

pp. 79–84; and “The Political Economy of an American Street Gang,” American

Bar Foundation working paper, 1998. See also Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh,

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 2000). / 104Crack dealing as the most dangerous job

in America: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ten most dangerous

legitimate occupations are timber cutters, fishers, pilots and navigators,

structural metal workers, drivers/sales workers, roofers, electrical power

installers, farm occupations, construction laborers, and truck drivers.

THE INVENTION OF NYLON STOCKINGS: It was Wallace Carothers, a young

Iowa-born chemist employed by DuPont, who, after seven years of trying, found

a way to blow liquid polymers through tiny nozzles to create a fiber of

superstrong strands. This was nylon. Several years later, DuPont introduced

nylon stockings in New York and London. Contrary to lore, the miracle fabric’s

name did not derive from a combination of those two cities’ names. Nor was it,

as rumored, an acronym for “Now You’ve Lost, Old Nippon,” a snub to Japan’s

dominant silk market. The name was actually a hepped-up rendering of “No

Run,” a slogan that the new stockings could not in fact uphold, but whose failure

hardly diminished their success. Carothers, a long-time depressive, did not live

to see his invention blossom: he killed himself in 1937 by drinking cyanide. See

Matthew E. Hermes, Enough for One Lifetime: Wallace Carothers, Inventor of

Nylon (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1996).

CRACK SLANG: The Greater Dallas Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse has

compiled an extraordinarily entertaining index of cocaine street names. For

cocaine powder: Badrock, Bazooka, Beam, Berni, Bernice, Big C, Blast, Blizzard,

Blow, Blunt, Bouncing Powder, Bump, C, Caballo, Caine, Candy, Caviar, Charlie,

Chicken Scratch, Coca, Cocktail, Coconut, Coke, Cola, Damablanca, Dust, Flake,

Flex, Florida Snow, Foo Foo, Freeze, G-Rock, Girl, Goofball, Happy Dust, Happy

Powder, Happy Trails, Heaven, King, Lady, Lady Caine, Late Night, Line, Mama

Coca, Marching Dust/Powder, Mojo, Monster, Mujer, Nieve, Nose, Nose Candy,

P-Dogs, Peruvian, Powder, Press, Prime Time, Rush, Shot, Sleighride, Sniff,

Snort, Snow, Snow-birds, Soda, Speedball, Sporting, Stardust, Sugar, Sweet Stuff,

Toke, Trails, White Lady, White Powder, Yeyo, Zip. For smokeable cocaine: Base,

Ball, Beat, Bisquits, Bones, Boost, Boulders, Brick, Bump, Cakes, Casper, Chalk,

Cookies, Crumbs, Cubes, Fatbags, Freebase, Gravel, Hardball, Hell, Kibbles n’

Bits, Kryptonite, Love, Moonrocks, Nuggets, Onion, Pebbles, Piedras, Piece,

Ready Rock, Roca, Rock(s), Rock Star, Scotty, Scrabble, Smoke House, Stones,

Teeth, Tornado.

THE JOHNNY APPLESEED OF CRACK: Oscar Danilo Blandon and his

purported alliance with the Central Intelligence Agency are discussed in great

detail, and in a manner that stirred great controversy, in a three-part San Jose

Mercury News series by Gary Webb, beginning on August 18, 1996. See also Tim

Golden, “Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. and Drugs Has a Life of Its

Own,” New York Times, October 21, 1996; and Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The

CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories

Press, 1998). The U.S. Department of Justice later examined the matter in detail in

“The C.I.A.–Contra–Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice

Department’s Investigations and Prosecutions,” available as of this writing at

www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/9712/ch01p1.htm.

GANGS IN AMERICA: See Frederick Thrasher, The Gang (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1927).

THE SHRINKING OF VARIOUS BLACK-WHITE GAPS, PRE-CRACK: See

Rebecca Blank, “An Overview of Social and Economic Trends By Race,” in

America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, ed. Neil J. Smelser,

William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, D.C.: National Academy

Press, 2001), pp. 21–40. / 113 Regarding black infant mortality, see Douglas V.

Almond, Kenneth Y. Chay, and Michael Greenstone, “Civil Rights, the War on

Poverty, and Black-White Convergence in Infant Mortality in Mississippi,”

National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2003.

THE VARIOUS DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF CRACK are discussed in Roland G.

Fryer Jr., Paul Heaton, Steven D. Levitt, and Kevin Murphy, “The Impact of

Crack Cocaine,” University of Chicago working paper, 2005.

4. WHERE HAVE ALL THE CRIMINALS GONE?