Economics and Egos

[asd109]

5) Freakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Comments

[yuda]

Their once-monthly articles in the New York Times Magazine are actually a lot less obnoxious in that regard. I guess when you've got a maximum word count, you can't spend too much of it fawning over yourself.

[jenniferm]

Word on the self-congratulatory style.

I also thought the two chapters on names were senseless fluff. I was also rather annoyed that Levitt claimed that, despite that fact that the existence of twins named Lemonjello and Orangejello is a well-known unproven and quite old urban legend, he begs the reader to believe him because he knows some guy who met the twins in a supermarket a few decades ago. Right. In a chapter which hinted at "Gee, don't black folk give their kids weird names!"

[asd109]

Yes! Also shithead.

And his insightful research on names was all stuff I had heard before.

[michigantroll]

You pretty much summed up my reaction to the book right there. There's some good stuff in it, and they present a good way of thinking about these kinds of issues, but you have to dig through some crap to get to it. They also come off as pretty credulous for a pair of guys who are supposed to be critical thinkers. In addition to the -jello twins, I think they've had to back off a bit on the story of the guy who infiltrated the Klan, too.

[strangebiller]

I haven't read it yet, but I saw him (or read, I can't remember which) in an interview and he was explaining how the dramatic decrease in crime during the late 90s was conclusively, directly and positively related to legalized abortion.

I don't even have to get into whether or not this is true, because it is so unprovable as to not even be debatable.

[asd109]

It actually makes a fair amount of sense as presented in the book, though I'd think the same argument would apply to more widespread availability of contraception as well, and they do discuss increases in numbers of police and increases in prison population as major factors as well. It's not that they are claiming abortion singlehandedly eliminated the crime problem, or that abortion should be pushed as a solution to crime.

[strangebiller]

I guess I just thought it was a little gratuitous, even if they could support it (Having not read it, I can't argue too far against their support of this position, but I still find it highly unlikely they passed my major hurdle of proving that people who committed crimes back in the 70s and 80s would have been aborted as babies, as well as somehow proving the negative that an aborted baby would have committed a crime if allowed to live).

Because even if it were provable and true, it's such a crock of shit. It's very similar to whats-his-name saying you could prevent crime by aborting all the black children in America. It doesn't do anything worthwhile - it's just controversial for the sake of being controversial.

[asd109]

Well, you can never prove that. You can prove or disprove a correlation in the population overall, and speculate whether it's causative.
Very little in the book is more than just "hey this is what we found". It's economics. It's not really supposed to offer guidance on how to live. (Despite the author's repeated insistence that economics is "real life situations").

[pecosy]

I always assume that some publisher or editor has more to do with titles and subtitles than the author does, especially for an non-established author.

I liked the book. I can't really blame him for tarting up some things to make them more insteresting to a general audience. Most people don't read books about statistics.

[asd109]

Like I said, the book was interesting, and worth reading. But it is a little heavy on the "this is so revolutionary and no one else has ever thought of it and ha ha you're all conventional thinkers" mantra.