Paying More And Enjoying It - Not!

What does crime really cost? Economist Steven Levitt of Harvard recently updated work by Vanderbilt law professor Mark Cohen that attempts to estimate the real cost of crime.

Instead of merely toting up the haul in armed robberies or burglaries, Cohen tallied all of the costs associated with various kinds of crime, from loss of income sustained by a murdered person’s family to the cost of counseling a rape victim to the diminished value of houses in highburglary neighborhoods.

These “quality of life” costs - based largely on actual compensatory damages awarded to crime victims in civil cases - raise the cost of crime considerably. One murder, Cohen and Levitt claim, costs society on average $2.7 million. While a robbery on average nets the robber $2,900 in actual cash, it produces $14,900 in “quality of life” expenses.

Women’s work on television

One more sign of the times: The housewife is vanishing from TV, replaced by a legion of Supermoms who do it all: hold a job, manage a house, raise precocious kids and still have time for their bumbling, doltish but occasionally zany husbands.

That’s one of the findings of a new study by William Holt III of Yale University, who recorded the occupations of women in television series in five-year intervals beginning in 1950. Holt found that housewives ruled in 1950 and 1955, when more than 60 percent featured female stars as homemakers. In 1990, just 23 percent were full-time homemakers.

He also found that working women have almost always been somewhat overrepresented on television. In 1990, for example, 57 percent of all TV women worked outside the home, compared to 52 percent in the real world, wrote Holt, a sociology graduate student, in a paper he presented recently at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Washington, D.C.

What we regret?

Most Americans regret what they didn’t do in their lives rather than what they did do.

National survey results reported this year suggest that middle age seems to be the time for regretting what might have been: 72 percent of those between the ages of 45 and 54 said they most regretted the paths not taken. Fewer than half of those 65 or older said they regretted things they hadn’t done - and one out of four said they had no regrets at all.

Here is how those surveyed responded to the question, “When you look back on your experiences in life and think of those things that you regret, what would you say you regret more, those things that you did but wish you hadn’t, or those things that you didn’t do but wish you had?”:

Regret things I’ve done was the answer of 21%; regret things I didn’t do, 61%; no regrets, 12%; and don’t know, 6%

The answers were to questions in a Washington Post national survey of 1,003 randomly selected adults conducted May 26-30 by ICR Research.

MEMO: Richard Morin’s Unconvention Wisdom column appears every other Sunday on the IN Life People page.