Steven Levitt
Article
Steven Levitt is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 25, 2021 and November 27, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “One of my all-time favorite studies is Steven Levitt’s Heads Or Tails: The Impact Of A Coin Toss On Major Life Decisions And Subsequent Happiness”; “you may know Steven Levitt from Freakonomics”. It most often appears alongside US, 2002 meta-analysis by Cochrane Collaboration, 5-HTP.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 25, 2021
- Last seen: November 27, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 2002 meta-analysis by Cochrane Collaboration (1 shared issues)
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- 5-HTP (1 shared issues)
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- 5-HTP (1 shared issues)
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- Abrams 2012 (1 shared issues)
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- ACLU (1 shared issues)
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- age-crime curve (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Tabarrok (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- amitriptyline (1 shared issues)
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- Andrea Cipriani (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Esposito (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
One of my all-time favorite studies is Steven Levitt’s Heads Or Tails: The Impact Of A Coin Toss On Major Life Decisions And Subsequent Happiness. A researcher got subjects who were unsure whether or not they wanted to make a big change in their lives to decide by flipping a coin. The people who randomly ended up in the “do make the change” group ended up much happier six months later. (2 points on a 1-10 scale). This was especially true when the subject was considering breaking up (2.7 points happier) or quitting a job (5.2 points happier). This doesn’t mean everyone should break up with their partner and quit their job! But it does mean that if you really want to do that, and you’ve been holding off out of fear, you should consider not holding off.
We previously predicted a similar increase in incarceration would lead to an 80% decrease in crime in the US, but El Salvador got a 95% decrease in crime. Why did they do so much better than our prediction? I think because they started with half our incarceration rate and ten times our murder rate. When you’re starting from someplace terrible, without any of the low-hanging fruit picked, it’s easy to make progress! I can’t find good statistics on other crimes like theft, but the crappy statistics I find say it hasn’t budged (1, 2). Why not? Either my statistics are bad, or the gangs that the government cracked down on weren’t in the theft business.4 Incapacitation Fine, so despite power laws there’s no way to easily solve crime just by imprisoning a small number of people. How much bang for the buck do we get by incapacitating criminals? You would think this would be easy to figure out: just determine how many crimes the marginal prisoner commits per year. Then that’s how many crimes incapacitation prevents per year. But although it’s easy to see how many times the marginal prisoner has been arrested, most crimes don’t result in arrest. How do you know how many crimes they really committed? Some bold scientists have tried asking them - giving prisoners surveys about their criminal histories - but obviously these should be greeted with heavy skepticism. The method criminologists have settled on is to wait for big shocks to incarceration - big enough to affect the general crime rate - then see how much the crime rate goes up or down. The best study here is probably Levitt 1996 (you may know Steven Levitt from Freakonomics). In the 1970s, US prisons were overcrowded. The ACLU argued the overcrowding was a rights violation - a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” - and sued a dozen states. They won all their lawsuits, and judges in all states said the government had to free prisoners until prison crowding returned to a non-cruel, usual level. So at a slightly different time in each state, many prisoners got released all at once. By examining the effects of this sudden release on the crime rate, we can determine how much crime the incarceration of those prisoners was preventing. Levitt does a lot of fancy statistics, and Roodman reanalyzes with even more fancy statistics, but the good news is they both agree and get numbers somewhat contrary to Roodman’s biases, which make me trust them more. Each year of imprisoning the type of prisoner who got released under the ACLU lawsuits prevented 6 property crimes and 1 violent crime. This suggests the average criminal commits ~7 crimes per year, which I think matches well with the data above showing that the median prisoner has 10 past arrests and some have 30+. Other studies on incapacitation, mostly taken from Roodman, that I trust less than Levitt: Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law that caused some criminals to get released early. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 3 crimes per prisoner per year. This is lower than Levitt’s estimate of 7, but crime rates went down in general between Levitt’s study period (the 70s) and Owens’ (the 2000s), so they might both be right.