Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. As it happens, Feldman’s accidental study provides a window on
to a form of cheating that has long stymied academics: white-collar crime. (Yes, shorting the bagel man is white-collar crime, writ however small.) It might seem ludicrous to address as large and intractable a problem as white-collar crime through the life of a bagel man. But often a small and simple question can help chisel away at the biggest problems. Despite all the attention paid to rogue companies like Enron, academics know very little about the practicalities of white-collar crime. The reason? There are no good data. A key fact of white-collar crime is that we hear about only the very slim fraction of people who are caught cheating. Most embezzlers lead quiet and theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected. What purpose does the “bagel man” serve in this argument? to shift the focus toward a specific man to entertain the reader with a funny story to show the seriousness of cheating to shed light on white-collar crime
