Pete Boettke repeatedly drives this mantra into our heads. “When history defies what logic dictates,” that’s what makes a paper topic or a research project. Here are a few:
(1) The United States scores exceptionally on the Economic Freedom Index, this would imply a large role for free enterprise alongside a stable and reliable administration of justice. Yet at the same time, the US incarcerates more people than the world has ever known. A first response would be that the incarceration trend is in fact an integral foundation of the economic freedom, i.e. justice, law enforcement and secure property rights allow for economic freedom. But shouldn’t the ordering of the countries match for the top scorers on both economic freedom and prison populations if this were true?

(2) In the late 1980s economists and criminal justice researchers expected the 1990s to be a youth crime wave. Criminals were apparently harder and younger than in times past, yet in the US the 1990s were a time when violent crime plummeted. On the other hand the UK does not seem to be sharing the drop in crime. Culture and generational effects seem far less influential compared to policies, institutions and the incentives they create. What specific policies are driving the radically different crime rates observed in the economically similar US and UK settings? No I don’t think all the violent criminals in the US moved to the UK.