Interesting Story about Economist Steven Levitt

I saw a story on one of the several Fox or MSNBC conservative TV programs about an economist who concluded that one of the factors that led to the decrease in crime in the 1990's was the Roe v. Wade decision. Basically saying that allowing abortion decreased crime. The guy got pummelled for this paper. Turns out he makes all these crazy correlations between events, like if you have a child, a gun, and a swimming pool, your child is 100 times more likely to die in the swimming pool than by the gun.

NY Times wrote an article on him and it's an interesting read. Here's the full story The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)

Here's an interesting quote from it for any of you who are selling your home.

While negotiating to buy old houses, Levitt found that the seller's agent often encouraged him, albeit cagily, to underbid. This seemed odd: didn't the agent represent the seller's best interest? Then he thought more about the agent's role. Like many other ''experts'' (auto mechanics and stockbrokers come to mind), a
real-estate agent is thought to know his field far better than a lay person. A homeowner is encouraged to trust the agent's information. So if the agent brings in a low offer and says it might just be the best the homeowner can expect, the homeowner tends to believe him. But the key, Levitt determined, lay in the fact that agents ''receive only a small share of the incremental profit when a house sells for a higher value.'' Like a stockbroker churning commissions or a bookie grabbing his vig, an agent was simply looking to make a deal, any deal. So he would push homeowners to sell too fast and too cheap.

Now if Levitt could only measure this effect. Once again, he found a clever mechanism. Using data from more than 50,000 home sales in Cook County, Ill., he compared the figures for homes owned by real-estate agents with those for homes for which they acted only as agents. The agents' homes stayed on the market about 10 days longer and sold for 2 percent more.

- NY Times - The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)