A heartfelt post by Lawrence Lessig which clearly demonstrate the downsides of being the public leading figure for a movement.

It's lonely on top ... but the impact he's making is immeasurable; his talks, his books, and his blog have influenced the way I view intellecutal property and have made me more aware of the IP struggle in today's society.

One always sacrifices for the many.

. . .

Yesterday I went to Barnes and Noble after Nasty Nate recommended "Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Let me just say that from the moment I got home, I opened up the book and couldn't put it down. I finished the book three hours later, and my head was spinning from all the cool little tidbits.

The book makes suggestions about around society that is backed up with data. Think about it like a blogger who actually takes the time to research his points (ZING!). Levitt is an economist who writes about all sorts of topics - he writes about the economics of gangs (why do gang members still live with their moms?) as well the factors that contribute to a falling crime rate.

One of the most interesting chapters in Freakonomics was the impact of legalized abortions on the falling crime rate. Levitt has postulated in a paper that the real reason crime rates fell so drastically in the early 90s was the legalization of abortion in 1973; suddenly kids that would have been born into families that did not want them (according to Levitt, unwanted children that are born tend to be be at greater risk of becoming criminals) were not being born. I haven't looked at the data, but the evidence he presents (in the book the evidence is light) is very intriguing - he clearly distinguished between causation and correlation in this case by showing that states with earlier legalized abortion dates showed a drop in crime before those that adopted legalized abortion later. I wonder how this matches against world data?

In any case, I highly recommend going over to your local Barnes and reading over a few chapters of the book. If you live in Chapel Hill, give me a holler and I can loan you my copy.

I've now moved onto Albert Camus' "The Stranger," which for some odd reason, I've never read.