Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Economic Affairs, 11th December 2006
Reviewed by Ed Smith
Freakonomics is a quirky, clever and provocative collaboration by a Harvard economist and a New Yorker journalist. It has prompted debate, challenged orthodoxies and climbed bestseller lists around the world. In short, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have produced a cult book – about economics, of all things. How did they do it?
One of the book’s strengths is its combination of academic irreverence and intellectual seriousness. Freakonomics is really a series of case studies, loosely linked around economic themes: incentives, information cliques, measuring crime rates, and interpreting class aspiration. Levitt and Dubner have a taste for unusual examples, and much of the book’s cleverness comes in their choice of evidence, as the chapter titles demonstrate. What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? It isn’t hard to see that more people will read about economic incentives when it is illustrated with examples from sumo wrestling. And finding out about drug dealers is probably more intrinsically attractive to most book buyers than the economic structure of career paths. The exotic subject matter, in other words, eases the intellectual effort on the part of the reader. And why shouldn’t it? Isn’t the job of an essayist or academic to persuade? It is all too easy to criticise Freakonomics for dumbing down. But in this case the populism is underpinned by great lucidity of thought. At the core of each chapter is a paradox or counter-intuitive idea that is satisfyingly resolved over the course of the essay. Which sounds more off-putting to a parent: your child going to play with a family which owns a gun, or with a family which owns a swimming pool? But Levitt demonstrates that there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the US. Meanwhile, there is one child killed by a gun for every one million plus guns. The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close. Levitt is surely correct in his conclusion that ‘most of us are terrible risk assessors.’ And Levitt and Dubner are also right that the scare-mongering mass media exacerbates our bad risk assessments. One good example not in the book – perhaps I could offer I for Freakonomics 2? – is how many people are terrified of a dramatic tragedy at the hands of international terrorists. Yet the same people rarely consider the enormous risks they take by their own abysmal driving, or the long-term risks of heart disease due to eating and living unhealthily. Which is more likely to kill you: ‘Al ’Quaeda, a road accident or bad diet?’ Give Levitt time, and he’ll come up with the answers.
The most infamous chapter in Freakonomics is about the correlation between abortion and crime-rates. Levitt believes that the Supreme Court ruling in 1973 of Roe vs. Wade, which ensured the right of women to choose an abortion, effectively eliminated a generation of babies many of whom would have been born into difficult circumstances. In other words, a lot of potential criminals were never born. Levitt argues that this has been the real reason why crime rates have fallen in the US since the 1990s. Almost everyone, from the religious right to the liberal left, has been appalled by Levitt’s idea, perhaps because it takes unblinking rationality to an uncomfortable degree. But that, surely, is Levitt’s job: he is entitled to be as provocative as he likes.
My problem with Freakonomics was more concerned with style and voice. Sometimes the plain-spoken, morally-neutral prose style grates – ‘As institutions go, the Ku Klux Klan has had a markedly up-and-down history.’ And who is writing this book? Is Levitt the mind and Dubner the pen? Or is Levitt writing most of it, with Dubner merely leaning over the typewriter with a copy of E. B. White’s Elements of Style to hand? Either way, a co-authored book shouldn’t constantly allude to its writer’s brilliance. This trait begins in the prologue. The ‘most brilliant young economist in America’ (that’s Levitt) is having dinner at the Society of Fellows in Harvard, when philosopher Robert Nozick says, ‘Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need a unifying theme?’ (Maybe I’m going to be one of those reviewers who is so brilliant that I don’t need someone else’s book on which to hang my ideas?) Later, as it is explained how much Levitt has enraged everyone with his ideas about abortion and crime, a physical description of the man concludes with the assertion, ‘There is nothing in his appearance or manner, in other words, that suggests a flamethrower.’ (So now we know: only flamboyant dressers are intellectually fearless.) Trust the tale, said D.H. Lawrence, never the teller. When Levitt, or Dubner, or whoever, can think and write this well, they should let the book do the talking. Levitt might reply: look at the bestseller lists. Perhaps self-promotion works.