- The best of dibs in Chicago: A photo essay of the objects people use to assert their property rights over a snow-filled parking spot they have shoveled. (This doesn’t always work so well in Hyde Park, with so many out-of-town residents. Last year someone walked off with my kitchen step-stool thinking it was left in the street for free. Norms are hard.)
- On the continuing theme of pandemic fiction, I just read Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. I won’t write a full post because I don’t recommend it such a long and tedious novel. My favorite part is that she wrote it in the 1820s, setting the novel in the years 2070–2100, and there has been no technological advances save for very fast dirigible balloons. Science fiction before modern economic growth failed to imagine the potential for and pace of progress? This is a good essay if you want to know more about the book.
- Illicit sand (FP, gated)
- A paper on the social preferences of ordinary versus organized criminals in Italy:
This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation which provides insights into the social preferences of organized criminals and how these differ from those of “ordinary” criminals on the one hand and from those of the non-criminal population in the same geographical area on the other. We develop experimental evidence on cooperation and response to sanctions by running prisoner’s dilemma and third party punishment games on three different pools of subjects; students, ordinary criminals and Camorristi (Neapolitan ‘Mafiosi’). The latter two groups were recruited from within prisons. Camorra prisoners show a high degree of cooperativeness and a strong tendency to punish defectors, as well as a clear rejection of the imposition of external rules even at significant cost to themselves. The subsequent econometric analysis further enriches our understanding demonstrating inter alia that individuals’ locus of control and reciprocity are associated with quite different and opposing behaviours amongst different participant types; a strong sense of self-determination and reciprocity both imply a higher propensity to punish for Camorra inmates, but quite the opposite for ordinary criminals, further reinforcing the contrast between the behaviour of ordinary criminals and the strong internal mores of Camorra clans.
