Thursday Links

 The Dirty Secret of the Muslim World.  It's slavery, and it is and is not a secret. It is long-known to people who read about the last ten centuries of the Middle East at all. But it is mostly unknown in the popular imagination, and it is mostly unstudied in any detail by academics. 

How to Measure Competition It has examples in industries we are all familiar with 

 In short, we want to measure whether markets are rewarding excellence or sclerosis. It turns out that such a measure exists: what is called the Olley-Pakes decomposition. The decomposition measures whether customers are switching to more productive companies. If productive companies are gaining market share, we might judge that the market is competitive and working well. If they’re not, and more productive businesses are not doing better than less productive ones, something is wrong, and intervention could be necessary.

People who have a spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder.  The British results are slightly different from the usual American results.  I have arrow-of-causation questions here, but it's interesting.

Why are there so many Chinese people?  Psmiths again.

Thinking About Crime at 50 

Like many crime researchers, Wilson saw a society’s crime level as shaped chiefly by the degree of restraint exercised by the community in which offenders operate. More than the police or courts, a community’s informal systems of social control—the norms and rules defining not only criminal behavior but also “orderliness”—play the central role. The idea of a community keeping the peace has roots in an older legal tradition that Wilson at times sought to evoke. Recovering it sheds light on today’s crime debates and sets the stage for a renewed appreciation of Wilson’s continued relevance.

"Predatory crime does not merely victimize individuals; it impedes and, in the extreme case, prevents the formation and maintenance of community.”