Not Entirely Dazzled

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the Freakonomics book is how weirdly gushing it is about how much of a genius economist Steven Levitt is. What makes it nauseating is that Steven Levitt is himself co-author of the book.

Perhaps it was not completely inappropriate for journalist Stephen Dubner to be so laudatory and hagiographical when he was writing about Levitt in his series of articles in the NY Times. He wanted people to know, Hey, this guy's research may look frivolous, but he's totally smart and stuff! (Although I think he went too far even in that context.) But when you then co-write a book with the target of all this overwrought verbiage, you should really have the sense to not go on at such length about what a brainiac maverick he is.

And if you're the rogue economist in question, you really shouldn't let him. This shit is going out under your own name. Doesn't that seem bizarrely self-aggrandizing? You really should make the point of establishing your own credibility as an expert in the book you write other ways. A classic approach is to let your bio point out that you won the Clark Medal, etc. But perhaps they were afraid we wouldn't read it and may come away with anything less than complete conviction that Steven Levitt is an utterly brilliant, visionary thinker. Or whatever.

Perhaps they had to call the book "Freakonomics" because the phrase "Staggering Genius" was already used in that Dave Eggers memoir. And "Iamanecongodonomics" is too long.

I found it hard to judge the value of this book, which is basically a discussion of the different research projects Levitt and his collaborators have done. It is definitely intended for the layman audience. Perhaps too much of the important stuff seemed obvious to me and the rest, well, it really is pretty insignificant-seeming at times.

It was also kind of unusual to read a book that is so strongly (it seems to me) in the spirit of traditional economic thinking, for all that Levitt is positioned as a rebel. At the same time (the book came out in 2005) that other economists are writing about how research in the other social sciences can enrich economic theory by complicating naive assumptions about rationality and so forth (i.e. behavioral economics), Levitt seems to be trying to use the rather stunted tools of homo-economicus-based economic analysis to understand everything in the world. It's a rather grandiose vision. Or it could be, if it weren't so clear that Levitt sees it mostly as a fun game to play.

One of the big stories told in the book was about the link between legalized abortion and the crime rate. Levitt and another economist had done research (regression analysis of available data) suggesting that the crime rate in the 1990's went down because a lot of the people who would have grown up to be criminals during that time had instead been aborted after the legalization of abortion in the 1970's. This was a very controversial finding. In fact, controversial enough that other people analyzed the data and believed the results to be flawed. I have not followed the back-and-forth on this issue, which is very technical, so I really have no strong sense of whether Levitt has been vindicated or his findings are questionable.

I didn't write down much that I read from the book, but I did make note of the following "fundamental ideas" that motivated the book:
1. Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
2. Conventional wisdom is often wrong.
3. Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.
4. Experts use their information advantage to serve their own agenda.
5. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world less so.

I also thought the findings of an analysis of real-estate ad terms and sales price were kind of interesting. Terms associated with a higher price: granite, state of the art, Corian, maple, gourmet. Terms associated with a lower price: fantastic, spacious, !, charming, great neighborhood. The authors suggest that realtors use a coded language to talk to each other and can communicate negative qualities while using phrases that appear positive to their customers.

In a good example of the more frivolous research, they found that voting on the TV show "Weakest Link" discriminates against Hispanics and the elderly: Hispanics because other team members believe they have poor skills and the elderly because other team members just prefer not to interact with them.

The best part about the book was that it inspired me to have a long argument with Robert, which I spent standing in the kitchen, about something involving incentives and the utility function and a bunch of other things that I can't even remember now. Good times, good times.