Philip Jackson Cook (born October 15, 1946) is an American economist. He is Terry Sanford Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University. He is best known for his research on the economics of crime, particularly gun violence, and for The Winner-Take-All Society, his 1995 book co-authored with Robert H. Frank. His other major research areas include health and safety regulation, including alcohol taxation and the societal costs of drinking; the economics of state lotteries; and income distribution.
Education and career Cook received a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1968 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. While a graduate student at Berkeley, he published a short proof of the Slutsky equation in The American Economic Review in 1972, his first academic publication.
Cook joined the Duke faculty as an assistant professor in 1973, shortly after the founding of the university's Sanford Institute of Public Policy, which he later directed from 1985 to 1989 and again from 1997 to 1999. Since 2017 he has held the titles of Terry Sanford Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke.
Research Cook's research applies economic analysis to crime, violence, and other social problems, including firearms, alcohol consumption, gambling, policing, and education.
Economics of crime Cook's work on crime examines how circumstantial factors, such as the availability and cost of weapons and alcohol and the level of policing, affect the likelihood and severity of criminal behavior. He has also studied the role of private actors in crime prevention, including business improvement districts.
He has published more than 40 papers with the economist Jens Ludwig on crime prevention, firearms, policing, juvenile offending, and prisoner reentry; Duke has described Ludwig as his most frequent collaborator. Cook co-edited the volumes Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs and Lessons from the Economics of Crime: What Reduces Offending?, which review the evidence on competing approaches to crime control.
Gun violence Cook has worked extensively on the topic of violent crime, and particularly gun violence in the United States. In the 1970s, he began to investigate the variable density and availability of firearms among US states, and showed that they correlate with various forms of lethal gun violence including suicide by firearm and death by armed robbery. The techniques Cook developed for this analysis have since been adopted by other researchers in the field.
He has authored three books on the topic of gun violence and policy. His 2000 book Gun Violence: The Real Costs with Jens Ludwig presents a view on gun violence from an economic perspective. The book applies a framework for valuing "irreplaceable commodities" which Cook developed earlier in his career to calculate a holistic figure of 80 billion dollars for the total cost of gun violence in the United States in a recent year. He edited Evaluating Gun Policy, which was published in 2003 by the Brookings Institution. He co-authored The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know with Kristin Goss; it was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. He co-authored the book Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem with Anthony Braga, published in 2023.
His later research has addressed private firearm sales, the pathways by which legally purchased guns are diverted to criminal use, gun theft, and the relationship between a weapon's characteristics and the severity of injury. He has also studied the role of police investigations in solving and deterring shootings.
Alcohol A major area of Cook's research since the 1970s has been the study of public policy measures to curb the societal harms associated with alcohol, including alcoholism, drunk driving, and underage drinking. In a 1982 paper with George Tauchen, Cook argued for the efficacy of alcohol taxes – then an unpopular position. Using different tax rates among states as a natural experiment, they showed that increases in the tax rate on liquor were associated with a reduction in the consumption of heavy drinkers and in liver cirrhosis mortality. His 2007 book Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control reviews the history of and body of research around alcohol control measures and argues that US legislators have neglected supply-side policies, including higher excise taxes.
Lotteries and gambling With Charles Clotfelter, Cook co-authored Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America (1989), an economic analysis of how state lotteries are designed, marketed, and played. Their later research examined consumer demand for lottery products and the fiscal role of state-sponsored gambling.
Policing and criminal justice Cook has served on National Academies panels addressing school shootings, juvenile justice, the deterrent effect of capital punishment, underage drinking, and proactive policing, and as vice chair of the National Research Council's Committee on Law and Justice. He has also consulted for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Enforcement Division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
His policing research has examined how technology affects criminal investigation, including a study of Chicago's Area Technology Centers, which provide investigators with rapid access to video evidence in shooting cases. He has also evaluated an employment-focused prisoner reentry program and interventions for disadvantaged youth.
Education and youth Cook has studied school starting age, academic performance, truancy, and their relationship to juvenile delinquency, as well as whether childhood exposure to environmental lead, including from private well water, affects later academic and behavioral outcomes.
Inequality Cook's most cited work is his 1995 book The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us, written with Robert Frank. The book examines the trend of rising economic inequality since the 1970s and argues that technological advances are increasing the reach of the highest performers, allowing them to capture an increasingly disproportionate share of earnings. They see the system of extremely well-paid "superstars", which previously existed only in areas like sports and entertainment, being replicated in other economic sectors. They further warn that this trend has the risk of leading to a misallocation of human capital by diverting too many talented individuals – who overestimate their likelihood of success – to "winner-take-all markets" at the expense of other career opportunities.
The book was reviewed in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus described it as a thoughtful analysis of how growing income disparities arose, while the Harvard Business Review reviewer argued that winner-take-all markets played an interesting but far from dominant role in the wider economy. Frank and Cook later wrote the entry on the "winner-take-all society" for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
Awards and honors Cook was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (then the Institute of Medicine) in 2001. In 2008 he received the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, as well as the Richard A. Stubbing Teacher Mentor Award from Duke's Sanford Institute of Public Policy. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology in 2012.
In 2020, Cook and Franklin E. Zimring were awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for their research on gun violence and its prevention.
Selected works 2023, with Anthony Braga: Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem 2014, 2020 (2nd edition) with Kristin A. Goss: The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know , 2007: Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control 2002, with Jens Ludwig: Gun Violence: The Real Costs 1996, with Robert H. Frank: The Winner-Take-All Society 1989, 1991 (paperback), with Charles T. Clotfelter: Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America ,
References
External links Philip J. Cook faculty page, Sanford School of Public Policy