Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)

Steven Levitt, an economist at U Chicago, is less interested in numbers and more interested in why people turn out the way they do. He examines the influence of incentive, heredity, the neighborhood you grew up in, etc.

Some of his conclusions are less than earth-shattering. For example, African-American names (DeShawn, Latanya) don't influence African-American test performance. As a second example, Levitt compiled data regarding online dating websites and concluded that bald men and overweight women fared badly. Not rocket science.

However, Levitt livens up the book with some controversial discussions. He believes that the dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s can be traced to Roe v. Wade. He thinks that the children who would have committed crimes (due to being brought up by impoverished, teenage, single mothers) are simply not being born as often.

He also writes about the man who more or less singlehandedly contributed to the KKK's demise by infiltrating their group and leaking their secret passwords and rituals to the people behind the Superman comic book (Superman needed a new enemy).

Interestingly, he also discusses how overbearing parents don't contribute to a child's success. For example, having a lot of books in the house has a positive influence on children's test scores, but reading to a child a lot has no effect. Highly educated parents are also a plus, while limiting children's television time is irrelevant. Similarly, political candidates who have a lot of money to finance their campaigns are still out of luck if no one likes them.

In the chapter entitled "Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers," Levitt explores the economics of drug dealing. An Indian, Harvard-affiliated scholar decided to get up close and personal with crack gangs and got some notebooks documenting their finances. Levitt concludes that drug dealers' empires are a lot like McDonald's or the publishing industry in Manhattan - only the people on the very top of the pyramid do well financially, while the burger flippers, editorial assistants, and low-level drug runners don't (indeed, some of them work for free, or in return for protection!)

Overall, this is a lively read, with some obvious conclusions and some not so obvious.

This book succeeds at analyzing sociological developments in a way that is entertaining because Steven Levitt, an economist who strays from convention, has a knack for unpeeling layers and layers of assumptions and myth and showing the real causes behind trends. He shows, to name some examples, how our names affect our career paths; how abortion and the crime rate are related; how a man used his cunning to humiliate the Klu Klux Klan rather than rely on conventional methods; how easy it is to identify the role of public school teachers when they help their students cheat on standardized tests; why drug dealing is only lucrative for the dealers at the top of the pyramid; the myth that real estate agents are looking for our best interests.

The book, co-authored by Stephen J. Dubner, is breezy and anecdotal, which is an effective format for presenting a lot of sociological trends without being dry or losing the scintillating reportage in dense prose.

The lesson of this book is that we should be leery of trusting society's common assumptions or common wisdom. In other words, the book encourages us to keep our mind alert and break out of the mold in the way we see things. By looking at social trends with a fresh eye, the book succeeds at making economic trends a fun, adventurous endeavor.

If I were to criticize the book, it would be that it is too short. It's barely 200 pages and if you take out the blank chapter pages, the charts, the lists, and so on, it's really closer to 150 pages. Because the material is so current and topical, the method of "freakonomics" presented here would make a good format for a monthly magazine. My guess is that there will be many sequels.

Having myself survived the economics program at the University of Chicago as a young graduate student twenty years ago, I know how decidedly eccentric their laurelled scholars can be. One of the most prestigious of the current crop there, Steven D. Levitt, along with journalist Stephen J. Dubner, has written a most intriguing and mind-bending book that uses Chicago-style econometric approaches and applies those to social and political issues that otherwise seem mundane and have no apparent basis in coherent theory which would support the behavior under study. In fact, this book of compelling case studies bears similarities to the approach taken by author Malcolm Gladwell in his recent best-selling book, "The Tipping Point", where he takes primarily historical events and analyzes them almost anecdotally as exercises in human behavior, in his case, making connections and how ideas become trends not by gradual insinuation but by a singular dramatic moment.

But Levitt's canvas is broader, his theories and findings are far more diverse, and his approach is far more quantitative in nature. For example, he challenges the perception that campaign spending determines elections. Levitt's analysis takes a fresh look by contrasting races in which the same two congressional candidates run repeatedly against each other. What he concludes is that a winning candidate can spend half as much as before and lose only one percent of the vote, while a losing candidate who doubles campaign spending picks up only one percent more. Basically they prove that no matter how much candidates spend on their campaigns, the results would not be marginally affected. In another example, the authors describe a seller's real estate agent, who lives on commission and has an incentive to sell a listed home for maximum dollar. Again, this is a misconception since the authors contend the small financial reward to an agent who sells a home for a few thousand more dollars is dwarfed by the greater money to be made by selling properties for less but quicker. Levitt's research into the sale of one hundred thousand Chicago homes found that agents keep their own homes on the market an average of ten days longer and sell them for more than three percent more than the homes they list and sell for clients.

The penetrating analyses provided by Levitt appear to have no bounds as he identifies Chicago teachers, who were proven to be changing their students' test answers and ultimately fired for their actions; sumo wrestlers who were found to be cheating as well; and even the alternative and more lucrative career options that crack dealers may have at McDonald's versus making sales. He even questions the impact of a good first name in a person's later life and if children become more literate if their parents read to them. The conclusions surprised me as they will you. But the most compelling study he presents is related to the impact of Roe vs. Wade. In a study he conducted with Stanford law Professor John Donohue, Levitt makes a seemingly broad-stroked conclusion in attributing much of the drop in the U.S. crime rate to legalized abortion. Their argument was based on the theory that abortion prevented the births of unwanted children who otherwise would have been statistically more likely to mature into criminals. The crime rate drop coincided with the time those aborted pregnancies would otherwise have hit their teen years, and the trend showed up earlier in states such as California that were the first to enact more liberal access to abortions. Through the data they gather, the correlation is startling, and the conclusion is hard to refute despite the naysayers who felt the stuffy to be politically motivated. But to Levitt's academically inclined credit, he never seems like he has an ideological agenda as he lets the numbers do the talking for him. His genius is to take those seemingly meaningless sets of numbers, ferret out the telltale pattern and recognize what it all means. A brilliant mind is at work, as he takes the most mundane open-ended questions and actually answers them. Strongly recommended.

I expected much more from this book, including some actual economic theory and discussion of what separates insightful research from background noise. The only thought-provoking piece in this motley collection of entertaining (to some) factoids is the one about abortion being the cause of declining crime. Beyond that, everything the book touches is either mundane or rehashed from somewhere else, primarily the New York Times article by co-author Dubner.

A main premise in the book is that asking the right questions in life is important. It then proceeds to ask almost none of them. For instance, what do sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common? I guess the headline itself is good for a snicker, but then we assume that it will move on to discover some heretofore hidden connection of value to us. Don't get your hopes up. Instead, after pages of unnecessary background on educational competence testing, it is revealed that - no! - teachers have cheated to boost their students' scores. What's more, shhh, occasionally sumo wrestlers have cheated to improve a friend's ranking by letting him win. Again, shocking? Not at all. Both of these revelations have been explored before and cheating doesn't expose any commonality between teachers and sumo wrestlers that doesn't stem from both groups being merely human. People cheat. Teachers and sumo wresters are people. Therefore, they both cheat and that's what they have in common. Some groundbreaking research, eh? The authors could just as easily have chosen any arbitrary group of people, found a human trait, and then shown how both groups exhibit it. For instance, what do umbrella sellers and plumbers have in common? Both take advantage of urgent situations to charge higher prices. What do Balinese dancers and corporate lawyers have in common? Both eat smaller lunches during busy seasons.

This book's subtitle is, "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". A more appropriate one would have been, "An Ordinary Economist Ponders Too Long About the Widely Known Side of a Few Unimportant Subjects". Randomly put together, I might add, and that's another annoying point. The book has almost no organization whatsoever. Rather than taking the time to organize the book into a logical manner, the authors joke about it being a disorganized collection of points and claim that as proof of their rogue status. If that's rogue, I'll take conventional any day.

It's clear that these authors are intelligent men who probably have something worthwhile to write. Unfortunately, they didn't write it in this book. The "Freak" in Freakonomics is supposed to refer to offbeat analysis or an original perspective. Instead it refers to the strange fact that, so often in publishing, what's of lasting value goes out of print and what's fleetingly entertaining climbs the charts.

You would do well to skip this one.

Depending on one's attachment to a mindset put forward by political correctness, this book is going to seem either full of stunning observations or light reading, with a few worthy surprises. There's some negative feedback on this site about the book being more a collection of articles, which is a legitimate complaint. At least they would be well-written articles.

Besides the easy and clear writing style, the main strengths of "Freakonomics" appears to be that much (if not all) of Levitt's observations come from research that is in peer-reviewed publications, and that the featured academic personalities (Levitt, Fryer and Venkatesh) are contemporary and working today. Thus, the primary sources of most of the material, as well as contemporary critics are around to defend or refute the discussion in this book.

The nice thing about many economists today is that they utilize the internet to spout off on many topics that would at first glance seem outside their field. The authors of this book, Cowen, Kling, Tabarrok and others have regularly-updated blogs. Levitt is therefore certainly not unique in applying economic "tools" to a variety of contexts, but he takes advantage of the internet himself to defend this book.

An obvious flaw of "Freakonomics" is how it heaps praise on one of the authors between the chapters. This ridiculous pap should have been left behind in the NY Times Magazine. Ignoring that, there's two other things that are seriously bothersome:

1.) The accusation of regular discrimination on "The Weakest Link," a game show. Yes, there is a paper referenced, but some presentation of data would have been useful in the book. I wonder why the details were omitted in this case and presented in all the other subsections of this chapter. My primary reaction to this statement was strong skepticism. Apparently, one needs a subscription to "The Journal of Law & Economics" to know the sample sizes involved. More details would have been nice to see, because Levitt/Dubner go on to point the discrimination finger at other groups, using collected data to show people's actions betraying their declared intentions. What patterns do the data need to show in order to signal discrimination? In the case of "The Weakest Link," most readers will never get to find out.

2.) Exclusion of Thomas Sowell. I recognize that this is a popular science book, and not a scientific book that's popular, but the elephant in the room is clearly the complete absence of the work of Thomas Sowell. Not only is Sowell a contemporary economist who has researched and published extensively on race, culture and incentives, but for many people he has already accomplished what "Freakonomics" attempts to do: introduce people to economics by viewing current social problems in the context of incentives. Sowell's "Basic Economics" and "Advanced Economics" are both clear and non-quanitative books that exploit economic thinking in a way superior to "Freakonomics." I also recommend his "Affirmative Action Around the World" and "Cultures" series.

"Freakonomics" is a nice little read, and most people who pick it up and read it will likely enjoy it. Be sure to check out the website.