Freakonomics on basketball and crime

By Sam Rubenstein

The Freakonomics blog is linking to someone who knows of someone that put an interesting theory out there. The physical and aggressive nature of playing sports breeds violent criminal activitin kids, and they’ve got the numbers to support this theory. Naturally the title of the piece takes a shot at basketball, the only sport that has any criminals in it. Not baseball, where you hold a weapon in your hands and you throw a ball 100 MPH at someone’s head (Mr. Clemens) to assassinate him. Not football, where the name of the game is to kill anything that moves. Basketball is once again the perceived breeding ground for criminals.