beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear   without being paid for has also gone up. Dont let that con- tinue. I dont imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourselves?     In the beginning, Feldman left behind an open basket for the cash, but too often the money vanished. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. In the end, he resorted to making small plywood boxes with a slot cut into the top. The wooden box has worked well. Each year he drops off about seven thousand boxes and loses, on average, just one to theft. This is an intriguing statistic: the same people who routinely steal more than 10 percent of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box-a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft. From Feldmans perspective, an office worker who eats a bagel with- out paying is committing a crime; the office worker probably doesnt think so. This distinction probably has less to do with the admittedly small amount of money involved (Feldmans bagels cost one dollar each, cream cheese included) than with the context of the "crime." The same office worker who fails to pay for his bagel might also help himself to a long slurp of soda while filling a glass in a self-serve restaurant, but he is very unlikely to leave the restaurant without paying. So what do the bagel data have to say? In recent years, there have been two noteworthy trends in the overall payment rate. The first was a long, slow decline that began in 1992. By the summer of 2001, the overall rate had slipped to about 87 percent. But immediately after September 11 of that year, the rate spiked a full 2 percent and hasnt slipped much since. (If a 2 percent gain in payment doesnt sound like much, think of it this way: the nonpayment rate fell from 13 to 11