Series
One surprising finding from economics or social science a month, and an honest read on how much to believe it.
Car seat laws that lower the birth rate. Judges who get harsher before lunch. Every entry takes one viral "study shows" claim, explains what the paper actually did, digs up the strongest critique, and gives the finding a rating from "fun story, probably noise" to "solid, replicated many times."
Identical resumes, random names, real job adverts. The 2004 experiment found a fifty percent gap in callbacks, and the 2022 replication at eighty thousand applications found it again.
Oct 9, 2026 · 7 min
A famous claim says New Jersey voters punished Woodrow Wilson for shark attacks. It rests on one county in one election, and it does not survive the second look.
Sep 11, 2026 · 7 min
Two economists phoned 410 fast food restaurants in 1992 and got an answer the textbook said was impossible. Thirty years of fighting about it produced one of the better-tested findings in economics.
Aug 14, 2026 · 8 min
Shift a chart of leaded petrol forward twenty-one years and it lands on the American crime wave. The mechanism is real. The size of the effect is the part that keeps shrinking.
Jul 10, 2026 · 8 min
An NFL upset loss raises reports of men assaulting their partners by about 10 percent that evening. A UK follow-up found the same spike, and blamed something else entirely.
Jun 12, 2026 · 7 min
The most quoted chart in behavioural science shows parole approvals falling to zero before lunch. The pattern is real. The hunger story probably is not.
May 8, 2026 · 7 min
A paper says child car seat mandates have prevented 145,000 births in the US since 1980, because three seats do not fit in the back of a sedan. The math is cleaner than the headline.
Apr 10, 2026 · 7 min