| ashu |
Posted
on 05-Aug-03 11:05 AM
The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER
The 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.
For more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03LEVITT.html
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| ashu |
Posted
on 05-Aug-03 06:38 PM
>>Ashu ko classmate ho?
Hoina.
He is a few years senior.
I did not know him at all until early this year, when he won the Clark Bates medal.
Since then, I have downloaded quite a few of his papers, and have been struck by
the the kind of off-beat, counter-intuitive questions he asks and then sets out to answer.
I like this sentence: "[Levitt] has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world."
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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| gunda |
Posted
on 05-Aug-03 11:35 PM
Is he not steven Landsburg, an armchair economist??? in someways we all are armchair economist because we all have theories no how things are and how things work, eveyone can lend their rationals and reasons on a state of reality. Some of his theories are so dubious and simplistic that it ts only good to kill your time. Once I asked a homelessman who had a new CD boombox and sony portable Sony CD walkman. I asked him where got the money to buy it, he said his banker friend gave it to him and he can not sell be for boooze because he see his friend everyday ourside the building where he has made his shrine. I belive him, he has no reason to lie, even he did I don't mind him having few luxery items, he is after all human being like rest of us who once had same aispirations and dreams like all of us.. ...
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