Freakonomics
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics is a fascinating, deftly narrated peek into human behavior that I would recommend for anyone interested in what makes people tick. The book focuses on the research of Steven Levitt, a renowned behavioral economist and one of the book’s coauthors, addressing questions ranging from “Why did the crime rate drop so suddenly in the 1990s?” to “What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?”
If the content seems difficult to categorize, that’s because it is — in fact, as Dubner notes in the book, Levitt was once asked at a scholarly conference what the “unifying theme” of his work was, and struggled to come up with an answer before one member of the group responded, “Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine.”
That’s just what Levitt does in Freakonomics. Having plowed headfirst into a mountain of data — everything from elementary students’ test scores to crack dealers’ ledgers to baby name records — he surfaces with new insight into the peculiar, quirky, and inexplicable bits of society that niggle at countless minds. However, just as often as he tackles a question for which there has been no obvious answer — e.g., how much the quality of parenting affects your child’s chance of succeeding in life — he also offers new, data-supported answers to questions that have multiple reasonable-sounding explanations, such as the reason for the 1990s drop in crime rate. Often he turns conventional wisdom on its head — not for the sake of being contrary, but rather because he has analyzed raw information to find patterns that simply happen to invalidate the more widely accepted theories.
As he writes in the book:
“An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. That’s because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention. An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.”
This description of pseudo-experts is perhaps the best characterization by contrast of Levitt and his work. He is not the harbinger of the newest super-generalized Secret a la Rhonda Byrne, nor is he the eighty-seven-hundredth scientist telling us that — surprise, surprise — people who exercise tend to weigh less. He makes conclusions based on what the information tells him, not to proclaim the latest sound bite or bloated kernel of truth, heavily processed for easy public repetition. As Levitt states numerous times, his inferences are founded on the data — and what the data have to say is sometimes startling, but always worth reading.
Kristin Baresich