I thought I had finally accepted that economics has turned into a world in which each article tries to one-up the last article with bad puns and migraine-inducing abstracts.*

Then comes along Roland G. Fryer, Jr. and Steven D. Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) to pull me in with a catchy title (complete with bad pun) and a compelling abstract to their latest article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, “Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Oh, look, abstract that doesn’t make a mystery of the authors’ findings, while still making me want to read the entire article:

Rather than a terrorist organization, the 1920s Klan is best described as social organization with a wildly successful multi-level marketing structure fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.

It’s enough to restore faith in economics.

*Like this life-sucking first sentence from some big-name economists: “We consider the robustness of extensive form mechanisms to deviations from common knowledge about the state of nature, which we refer to as information perturbations.“