Freakonomics vs Tipping Point?

[fredrickegerman]

This article points out that Freakonomics and The Tipping Point disagree on the causes of the reduction of crime in New York City in the mid 90's.

desireearmfeldt gave me a copy of the latter book for Christmas, and I'd previously borrowed the former from firstfrost. In both cases I felt like I was reading something rather like a business book. That said, Freakonomics

Comments

[ukelele]

I did really like Freakonomics (and it provides fascinating fodder for baby name discussions, particularly if you happen to be an affluent white northeasterner -- !). But I also really liked this critique of the methods, and you probably will too. Long but very worth reading the whole thing, including footnotes.

[fredrickegerman]

This comment made it worth it:

"Levitt's book is Edward de Bono for the green eyeshades set. I am wholly suspicious of this outpouring of creativity on the part of economists, rather as I would suspect and fear a sudden outbreak of interest in stochastic calculus among teachers of modern dance."

[kirisutogomen]

That's an excellent critique of the methods, but not so much as a critique of the book. As the blogger admits, Levitt's instruments are usually pretty strong. Re: natural experiments, Levitt plucked some of the choicest available. His many imitators have been engaged in some meta-datasnooping, though.

Maybe the blogger mentions it in parts 1 or 2, but I found Ariel Rubinstein's review to be more on-target with respect to the shortcomings of the actual book.

(Also, for the non-statisticians, the blogger has gotten mixed up in a couple of places in trying to describe endogeneity, referring to it as an independent variable being correlated with the variance of the error term, which doesn't actually make sense. (It should just be "correlated with the error term.") It's a strange mistake, since they clearly know what they're talking about otherwise.)

[tomatoe333]

"The Internet will collapse in 1996."

-Burt Metcalfe

As I recall, you were one of the believers of that statement... ;-)

[fredrickegerman]

Burt Metcalfe? What was actually predicted was an infrastructure meltdown. Instead we started throwing money like crazy at the problem right around that time, turning Cisco into a juggernaut who secretly control the world. Say, whatever happend to Bay Networks? :-)

[kirisutogomen]

I don't know about Tipping Point, but my impression of Gladwell is that he's a very excitable person who always thinks that whatever he has most recently encountered is the most revolutionary idea since sliced heads.

Freakonomics is certainly written in a popular style, but it isn't nearly as anecdotal in nature as a business book usually is. (Incidentally, it wasn't written by real economists. It was written by a real economist and a journalist.)

[ilai]

I have not read Freakonomics, but as I was reading The Tipping Point I kept thinking, "okay, you're trying to make us all excited about this point here--but where's the actual research? Where's the proof?" After I finished the book I still didn't think I had a satisfactory answer. The connections Gladwell makes are interesting, but the word that kept popping into my head was "tenuous".

[psychohist]

I think it's a mistake to assume, as the Register article does, that "size of the police force" and "Bratton's policing methods" are independent variables. Bratton's community policing methods, which include assigning officers in a way that allows them to get to know the community where they work, as well as the "cleaning up the graffiti" stuff, may well require more resources than whatever his predecessor in New York was using. Certainly the "don't bother to clean up the graffiti" policy instituted in the 1970s, while touted as allowing for greater freedom of expression for harmless youths, might well have been partially driven by budget constraints.

I don't see Levitt's theory and Gladwell's theory as mutually exclusive; they merely deal with different time frames. I do think they share the feature of shaky statistical foundations; perhaps the best way of thinking of them is as two small parts to some big whole, much of which is still unexplained.