Freakonomics

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 ma

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, Ke

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?

NICOLAE CEAUSESCU’S ABORTION BAN: Background information on Romania and the Ceau?escus was drawn from a variety of sources, including “Eastern Europe, the Third Communism,” Time, March 18, 1966; “Ceausescu Ruled with an Iron Grip,” Washington Post, December 26, 1989; Ralph Blumenthal, “The Ceau?escus: 24 Years of Fierce Repression, Isolation and Independence,” New York Times, December 26, 1989; Serge Schmema

December 30, 1989; Karen Breslau, “Overpla

THE GREAT AMERICAN CRIME DROP: As noted earlier, this material is drawn from Steven D. Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990’s: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Six That Do Not,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 1 (2004), pp. 163–90. / 120 James Alan Fox’s “intentional overstatement”: See Torsten Ove, “No Simple Solution for Solving Violent Crimes,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 1999.

POLITICIANS WERE GROWING INCREASINGLY SOFTER ON CRIME: This and a number of related issues are discussed in Gary S. Becker and Guity Nashat Becker, “Stiffer Jail Terms Will Make Gunmen More Gun-Shy,” “How to Tackle Crime? Take a Tough, Head-On Stance,” and “The Economic Approach to Fighting Crime,” all in The Economics of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), pp. 135–44; the chapters were adapted from Business Week articles by the same authors.

INCREASED RELIANCE ON PRISONS: Concerning the fifteenfold increase in drug-crime prisoners, see Ilyana Kuziemko and Steven D. Levitt, “An Empirical Analysis of Imprisoning Drug Offenders,” Journal of Public Economics 88, nos. 9–10 (2004), pp. 2043–66. / 123 What if we just turn all the prisoners loose? See William Nagel, “On Behalf of a Moratorium on Prison Construction,” Crime and

Delinquency 23 (1977), pp. 152–74. / 123 “Apparently, it takes a Ph.D . . .”: See John J. DiIulio Jr., “Arresting Ideas: Tougher Law Enforcement Is Driving Down Urban Crime,” Policy Review, no. 75 (Fall 1995).

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: For a full report on New York State’s failure to execute a single criminal, see “Capital Punishment in New York State: Statistics from Eight Years of Representation, 1995–2003” (New York: The Capital Defender Office, August 2003), which is available as of this writing at nycdo.org/8yr.html. More recently, New York’s Court of Appeals found the death penalty itself unconstitutional, effectively halting all executions. / 125 Executing 1 criminal translates into 7 fewer homicides: See Isaac Ehrlich, “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death,” American Economic Review 65 (1975), pp. 397–417; and Isaac Ehrlich, “Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Evidence,” Journal of Political Economy 85 (1977), pp. 741–88. / 125 “I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death”: From Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s dissenting opinion in a 1994 Supreme Court decision denying review of a Texas death-penalty case: Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141(1994); cited in Congressional Quarterly Researcher 5, no. 9 (March 10,1995). It should be noted that American juries also seem to have lost their appetite for the death penalty—in part, it seems, because of the frequency with which i