N.F.L. cleans house. Sort of.

The National Football League’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, has just made it a lot more expensive to be a thug. Goodell suspended the Titans’ Pacman Jones without pay for the upcoming season (a loss of $1.29 million in base salary) and the Bengals’ Chris Henry for the first half of the season (surrendering as much as $230,000 in base pay). Jones has been arrested five times since he was drafted two years ago; Henry was arrested four times between Dec. 2005 and June 2006.

So here is the question: in the upcoming N.F.L. draft, how much has the value of crime-prone players fallen? Individual teams and the league itself put together fat dossiers on every legitimate draft pick, including psychological profiles and criminal tendencies. Has Goodell’s new anti-crime stance just made good citizenship more valuable?

Have money, will eat.

Here is a new working paper called“Why Is the Developed World Obese?” by Sara Bleich, David Cutler, Christopher Murray, and Alyce Adams. They conclude that “rising obesity is primarily the result of consuming more calories” (as against declining physical activity), and that “the increase in caloric intake is associated with technological innovations such as reduced food prices as well as changing sociodemographic factors such as increased urbanization and increased female labor force participation.”

In other words: when there is a lot of tasty food around and it is relatively cheap, people tend to eat a lot of it.

O.K. future economists what is your solution to curb obesity? Think incentives.