That’s what Christina Hoff Sommers believes:

Boys are falling behind girls in our nation’s schools. Fewer boys graduate from high school, and boys are less likely to attend college. One education expert has quipped that if current trends continue, the last male will graduate from college in 2068. A recent story in the New York Times carried more bad news for boys. A significant gender gap favoring girls has arisen inside New York City’s gifted and talented programs. According to the article, “Around the city, the current crop of gifted kindergartners…is 56 percent girls, and in the 2008-9 year, 55 percent were girls.” In some of the most elite programs, almost three-fifths of the prodigies are girls. Could it be that girls are simply smarter than boys?

There is a negative relationship between income and vegetarianism, according to a new paper published by the Economic and Social Research Institute:

In relatively poor countries, vegetarianism appears to be a necessity as opposed to a dietary choice. For the well educated however, vegetarianism is becoming a more popular lifestyle choice. Results also suggest that in relatively poor countries local production of meat increases consumption of meat.

The figure below illustrates the relationship between the relative price of meat to non meat items and vegetarianism:

The authors note:

Where the relative price of meat to non meat items is below 2, the level of vegetarianism varies largely. Where the relative price of meat to non meat items increases from 2 to 2.5, the level of vegetarianism also increases sharply for the countries included in our sample.

Interestingly, “no clear pattern exists” between inequality and vegetarianism:

While the government claims that in 2009 it investigated 439,000 financial crimes that caused 1 trillion roubles ($32 billion) of damage to the economy, it also admits that this was only a fraction of the total crimes committed. An end-2009 report from PricewaterhouseCoopers deemed Russia’s the world’s most fraudulent economy. Of the companies surveyed, 82.5% said they had been subjected to at least one major economic crime in the past year.

From Forbes, on Russia’s corruption problem.

The Billboard Liberation Front has announced  a “partnership” with Philip Morris:

The Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) is honored to announce a new marketing partnership with Philip Morris (PM) that finally brings together the rugged sense of American independence with your most important choice as a consumer: your death. The message of “My Life. My Death. My Choice.” informs and empowers the consumer to choose, as their god given right, how they want to die. Philip Morris brings this message to the consumer to remind them that some rights are inalienable in life as they are in death.

Now while this is meant to be a joke, I can’t help but laugh that libertarians, including myself, accept this as a reasonable argument. Since I own my life, don’t I hold the right to decide my health choices?

How is it that two different people can read the same sign and walk away with such diverging reactions?

After they stop drivers for exceeding the speed limit, police often have the discretion to alter the penalty. We investigated the degree to which extra-legal factors (apologies and other verbal responses), in addition to speed over the limit, predict ticket costs for speeding. Surveys of speeders were conducted in the U.S. and Canada. The data suggest that what people say to police matters. Participants who reported statements of remorse, e.g., “I’m sorry,” received lower fines for speeding. The relation of speeders’ responses to ticket costs is discussed from legal and psychological perspectives.

From “The Value of Remorse: How Drivers’ Responses to Police Predict Fines for Speeding” in Law and Human Behavior via Barking up the Wrong Tree.