Review: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Part of this book is right up my alley. It chronicles how a really clever economist applies the tools of his field to questions seemingly outside it. He tries to show, for instance, that we suburban parent types worry more about gun violence than about our swimming pools as life-threatening hazards for our children. Or he shows us that real estate agents have incentives to sell our houses for less than they might otherwise get. Or that sumo wrestlers have incentives to cheat when they find themselves in the crucial rubber matches of their events. Or even that there’s a way to determine which Chicago public school teachers were feeding their students answers on standardized tests.

Each of those anecdotes is presented cleverly, and there’s something satisfying in seeing someone make such clear sense of the world. Dubner chronicles Levitt’s breakthroughs with a pleasant enough pattern: we come to understand a problem, Levitt asks a clever question, and we see the sorts of data that give him insight no one else has ever gleaned.

This takes a notorious turn, though, when Dubner talks about Levitt’s most famous proposal. That is, in trying to figure out why crime dropped as dramatically as it did in the early 1990s, he determined that was the era when children were coming of age who would have been born if not for Roe vs. Wade. That is he proposes that crime dropped as it did because a generation of likely criminals were aborted.

To be fair, both authors acknowledge the dicey morality of that claim. Dubner takes it head on by declaring that morality is the story of the world as we would like it to be while economics is the story of the world as it is.

The two also dance around, at times thoughtfully, over the possibility that there are errors in the methodology. And maybe there are.

But the morality that seems violated here isn’t merely the Thou-shalt-not of abortion politics in either direction. Instead, it seems as if Levitt has violated a central tenet of his own work. He has, that is, oversimplified a complicated scenario.

A proclivity toward crime, like his airy assertion that IQ is hereditary (which it might be but, if so, it warrants a lot of explanation before it can be used as a stand-in for functional intelligence), is just something too full of variables for such a clearly declared premise. It may be that children whose parents didn’t want them – the potential children who were aborted – do have a higher likelihood of committing crime, but surely there’s more to it than that. More skilled economists than Levitt – like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein – have traveled similar territory, and they’ve done it by acknowledging more ambiguity. And by making less sweeping claims.

This starts with the pleasure of watching someone who builds a fascinating case insight by insight and term by term. By the time this ends, though, it feels as if our authors have tried to slip a couple of major terms by us, as if they’ve gotten us to accept premises we never signed on for.

There’s cleverness here, but it falls short of Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, and it leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth.

And I’m tempted to dock it another half star for reprinting the original articles Dubner wrote on Levitt. It seems an unnecessary appendix, and it’s awkward to get the same anecdotes delivered in a different tone, sometimes with ancillary information that might have had more effect earlier in the book.


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