Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Police Shootings by State v. Percent of the Population that is Black

After my recent post on police shootings I was curious and did some googling on the topic. By coincidence, right about that time Peter Moskos (i.e., Cop in the Hood) wrote this: I looked at the Washington Post data of those shot and killed by police in 2015 and 2016 and broke it down by […]

Shootings by Police Officers: Self-Control and More

I stumbled on a recent paper in the Police Quarterly entitled “Quick on the Draw: Assessing the Relationship Between Low Self-Control and Officer-Involved Police Shootings.” The authors are Christopher M. Donner, Jon Maskaly, Alex R. Piquero, and Wesley G. Jennings from Loyola, U of Texas at Dallas, U of Texas at Dallas and U of […]

Poverty, Crime and Causality

I was bouncing around my twitter feed and landed on this tweet which in turn took me to a paper entiteld Childhood family income, adolescent violent criminality and substance misuse: quasi-experimental total population study. The paper appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2014. Here’s the basic summary: Background Low socioeconomic status in childhood […]

Shooting in Little Rock

I used to live in Little Rock,  so waking up this morning to the news of the shooting in Little Rock was a bit of a shock.  Fortunately, the expletive expletive who did the shooting was a bad shot and nobody got killed. I don’t even know how to comment on this, though, so I’m […]

Some Examples of the Hiring Process

A just-released paper by the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) looks at hiring processes in the Australian Public Service Commission. Here’s the summary: This study assessed whether women and minorities are discriminated against in the early stages of the recruitment process for senior positions in the APS, while also testing the impact […]

Explaining the Gender Wage Gap

From Thomas Edsall in the NY Times At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate. In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men. Wealth — and the ability to […]

Gay Pride Around the World

We begin in the US: …the Dyke March Collective also ejected three people carrying Jewish Pride flags (a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center). According to one of those individuals—A Wider Bridge Midwest Manager Laurel Grauer—she and her friends were approached a number of times in the park because they were […]