Genius award

First the considerable success of Freakonomics, now this:

Kevin M. Murphy, an economist at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business who has studied everything from crack-cocaine addiction to the sources of wage inequality, was one of 25 individuals named as a 2005 fellow by the MacArthur Foundation.

...He is cut from the mold of Nobel Prize-winner Gary Becker, another Chicago researcher, who took economics beyond its traditional areas to show how the field could be used to explain social issues like drug addiction and family life.

Mr. Murphy's latest research assigns a dollar value to increasing life expectancies. Economists try to put hard numbers to the value people place on life itself by measuring the trade-offs individuals make when it comes to life-threatening activities like smoking, driving without a seat belt or choosing risky occupations.

Seems like non-traditional econ research is truly all the rage these days.