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How To Use, Abuse—And Fight Back With—Crime Statistics, Yale Kamisar
How To Use, Abuse—And Fight Back With—Crime Statistics, Yale Kamisar
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Statistics have an almost magical appeal in a "fact"-minded culture such as ours, among a people conditioned and accustomed to watch for-and attach great significance to-even the smallest fluctuations in say, the unemployment rate. Hence, as Darrell Huff graphically demonstrated in his famous little book, How to Lie with Statistics (1954), they can be-and have been-manipulated to terrorize or calm, inflate or depreciate, and above all, to sensationalize and over simplify. As Harvard criminologist Lloyd Ohlin noted recently, statistics are especially potent when "they give a sense of solid reality (usually false) to something people vaguely apprehend and when they …
The Problem Of Social Cost Revisited, Donald H. Regan
The Problem Of Social Cost Revisited, Donald H. Regan
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SOME years ago, in a paper entitled "The Problem of Social Cost," Professor Ronald Coase asserted and argued for a proposition which has since acquired the convenient sobriquet "the Coase Theorem." The proposition is: That in a world of perfect competition, perfect information, and zero transaction costs, the allocation of resources in the economy will be efficient and will be unaffected by legal rules regarding the initial impact of costs resulting from externalities. Note that there are two claims being made, which it is well to separate for purposes of discussion. The first claim is that, under the conditions described, …