I'm hip-deep in the second season of Veronica Mars right now. The conventional wisdom seems to be that season 2 is inferior to season 1-- a standard implication of regression toward the mean-- but so far I think it is just as good if not better. [Spoilers ensue for anybody who hasn't yet seen the first 14 episodes of Season 2.]

Now, one major strength of the first season was its ability to draw a mystery through the entire season in one neat arc while also spinning off discrete discoveries and mysteries in individual episodes and clusters. I'm a little concerned that too much has been wrapped up in the first eight episodes, but I've been surprised on this score before.

On the other hand, the fact that Duncan has been packed off to Mexico means we don't have to put up with him anymore-- a good thing. It also means that Veronia's romantic agenda is cleared for a reprisal of Logan, who I have a fondness for, although not as strong as my girlfriend's crush.

Anyway, only vaguely relatedly, here are a few more Veronica Mars links:

1: My Mother, The Fiend apparently had an alternate non-canonical ending, available online here.

2: Apparently, fans were not necessarily meant to despise Jackie upon her first arrival on scene. I think Thomas misjudged that one.

3: I've also recently bought the soundtrack, largely to get the theme song by the Dandy Warhols, and it's shockingly good. I also like Mike Doughty's "I Hear The Bells", Something Happens's "Momentary Thing" and especially Ivy's "Ocean City Girl".

[Previous posts on Veronica Mars are here, here, and here.]

From the reading for Pam Karlan's Constitutional Litigation class:

The Eleventh Amendment is the Constitution's most arcane and obscure provision.

Tim Harford, the "Undercover Economist", promises to explain the rise in teen oral sex. I found his column interesting, not because it is wrong, exactly, but because it seems a great example of how something can be more or less right but still not explain.

His basic argument: oral sex is safer than penetrative sex. Since the early 90s, kids have gotten more information about the risks of penetatrive sex. Hence, like good little maximizers, they are substituting towards the less costly alternatives, and having relatively more oral sex. As further support for his claim, he notes the rise in teen virginity, the drop in hormonal contraceptive use, and the rise in condom use; he also cites a study showing that parental-notification laws decrease teen gonorrhea rates.

And I pretty much agree: even teens respond to incentives, modern teens are probably more aware of risks than they used to be, oral sex is, ceteris paribus, safer than penetrative sex. So what to I have against Harford? The most obvious problem, of course, is that the very same study that put teen fellatio in the headlines also showed a massive increase in anal sex. This is, to put it mildly, rather hard to square with the risk-minimizing hypothesis.

My real complaint is more general, though. Harford claims (at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I think) that "as an economist, [he] feels uniquely qualified to opine on why [increased teen oral sex] is happening." But the rest of his column undermines this: as he acknowledges, the gonorrhea paper shows that shame, not health risks or monetary costs, seems to be a rather large factor in behavior. Moreover, given that the mid-90s were when the new AIDS treatments turned the disease from a death sentence into something much less grim, one would think that the objective risks of penetrative sex actually went down during the period in question. Not to mention the fact that unprotected oral sex isn't all that safe relative to protected vaginal sex, STD-wise, and almost all oral sex is of the unprotected variety.

My point is simply that all of the explanatory work is really being done at the sociological and psychological stages of the explanation: if we really want to know what drives teen sex practices, we need to understand teenage perceptions of risks, outcomes, and dangers; we need to know why parental notification is so shaming (but moreso, according to the gonorrhea study, for white and hispanic than for black girls); we need to dig into how these things change over time. Because otherwise what we have is not explanation but tautology: teen sex went down because it got more costly to do so, and we know it got more costly not because we have independent reasons to think that these particular variables that increased are more salient than the ones that decreased as far as teen decision-making goes, but because, well, they went up, and sex went down, so they must be the costs that matter. This isn't explanation of a sort that genuinely sheds light.

Now, perhaps I say this only as someone so Chicago-bred that looking to incentives seems only natural; perhaps it does advance the explanatory ball at least a little down the field to insist on looking in that direction. Still, we economist-types could do with a little less self-assurance.

(Note that I'm not criticizing the Klick and Stratmann gonorrhea study; based on the abstract, at least, it seems to do a nice job of actually trying to isolate one particular mechanism. But my point is that it undermines, rather than supports, Harford's overall column.)

I am extremely pleased to report that I witnessed the wedding of the blogosphere's Angus Dwyer and Sarah Dwyer. It was my first trip to Texas, my first encounter with Lone Star, "The national beer of Texas," and many other entertainments, but all of that is mere second-place trivia in comparison with the main event. Congratulations and best wishes.