John Richard Lott Jr. is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.
More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John R. Lott Jr. that says violent crime rates go down when states pass "shall issue" concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. Each edition of the book was refereed by the University of Chicago Press. As of 2019, the book is no longer published by the University of Chicago Press. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 13 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies and by Lott and his co-author John Whitley in The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
A theory regarding the effect of legalized abortion on crime is a controversial hypothesis about the reduction in crime in the decades following the legalization of abortion. Proponents argue that the availability of abortion resulted in fewer births of children at the highest risk of committing crime. The earliest research suggesting such an effect was a 1966 study in Sweden. In 2001, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University argued, citing their research and earlier studies, that children who are unwanted or whose parents cannot support them are likelier to become criminals. This idea was further popularized by its inclusion in the book Freakonomics, which Levitt co-wrote.
Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. is an American economist and professor at Harvard University. Following a difficult childhood, Fryer earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas at Arlington, but once there chose to concentrate instead on academics. Graduating cum laude in 2+1⁄2 years, he went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago with Gary Becker. He joined the faculty of Harvard University and rapidly rose through the academic ranks; in 2007, at age 30, he became the second-youngest professor, and the youngest African American, ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 2015.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Published on April 12, 2005, by William Morrow, the book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. Based on the success of the original book, Levitt and Dubner have grown the Freakonomics brand into a multi-media franchise, with a sequel book, a feature film, a regular radio segment on National Public Radio, and a weekly blog.
Paul Feldman is the "Bagel Man" mentioned in Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, a man who started his own business selling bagels, instead of pursuing his old occupation as director of non-defense research at the Center for Naval Analyses. He would leave bagels next to a box with a slit in the top in an office building, leaving a sign asking whoever took a bagel to give money in return.
Stephen Joseph Dubner is an American author, journalist, and podcast and radio host. He is co-author of the popular Freakonomics book series: Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, Think Like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank. He is the host of Freakonomics Radio.
Henry Farrell is an Irish-born political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught at the University of Toronto and earned his PhD from Georgetown University. His research interests include, trust and co-operation; E-commerce; the European Union; and institutional theory.
Emily Fair Oster is an American economist who has served as the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence at Brown University since 2019, where she has been a professor of economics since 2015. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research was brought to the attention of non-economists through the Wall Street Journal, the book SuperFreakonomics, and her 2007 TED Talk.
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies at Columbia University, a position he has held since 1999. In his work, Venkatesh has studied gangs and underground economies, public housing, advertising and technology. As of 2018, he is the Director of Signal: The Tech & Society Lab at Columbia University.
Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't is a book by writer and public policy researcher John R. Lott, Jr., author of previous works More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns. Freedomnomics takes an economic look at the effects of the free market, and presents some arguments against those found in Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The publications The American and National Review ran positive reviews, with critic Robert VerBruggen stating that Lott "renders lots of charts, graphs and statistical analysis into clear, uncomplicated conversation."
Decree 770 was a decree of the communist Romanian government of Nicolae Ceaușescu, signed in 1967. It restricted abortion and contraception, and was intended to create a new and large Romanian population. The term decreței is used to refer to those Romanians born during the time period immediately following the decree.
Peter T. Leeson is an American economist and the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. In 2012 Big Think listed him among "Eight of the World's Top Young Economists". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is the second non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and The New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner, released in early October 2009 in Europe and on October 20, 2009 in the United States. It is a sequel to Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Freakonomics: The Movie is a 2010 American documentary film based on the 2005 book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by economist Steven D. Levitt and writer Stephen J. Dubner. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2010 and had a theatrical release later that year. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 66% based on reviews from 64 critics.
John J. Donohue III is an American law professor, economist, and the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is widely known for his writings on effect of legalized abortion on crime and for his criticism of John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime.
Freakonomics Radio is an American public radio program and podcast network which discusses socioeconomic issues for a general audience. While the network, as of 2023, includes five programs, the primary podcast is also named Freakonomics and is a spin-off of the 2005 book Freakonomics. Journalist Stephen Dubner hosts the show, with economist Steven Levitt as a regular guest, both of whom co-wrote the book of the same name. The show is primarily distributed as a podcast, and is among the most popular on iTunes.
Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain is the third non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book was published on May 12, 2014 by William Morrow.
After decades of increasing crime across the industrialised world, crime rates started to decline sharply in the 1990s, a trend that continued into the new millennium. Many explanations have been proposed, including situational crime prevention and interactions between many other factors complex, multifactorial causation.
When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants is an edited collection of blog posts by American authors Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of the Freakonomics series. It was published by HarperCollins imprint William Morrow on May 5, 2015.
