- Levitt, Steven D. and Stephen J. Dubner.
Freakonomics.
New York: William Morrow, 2005.
ISBN 0-06-073132-X.
-
Finally—a book about one of my favourite pastimes: mining
real-world data sets for interesting correlations and searching for
evidence of causality—and it's gone and become a best-seller!
Steven Levitt is a University of Chicago economics professor who
excels in asking questions others never think to pose such as,
“If dealing crack is so profitable, why do most drug dealers
live with their mothers?” and “Why do real estate agents
leave their own houses on the market longer than the houses of their
clients?”, then crunches the numbers to answer them, often with
fascinating results. Co-author Stephen Dubner, who has written about
Levitt's work for The New York Times Magazine, explains
Levitt's methodologies in plain language that won't scare away
readers inclined to be intimidated by terms such as “multiple
regression analysis” and “confidence level”.
Topics run the gamut from correlation between the legalisation of
abortion and a drop in the crime rate, cheating in sumo wrestling in
Japan, tournament dynamics in advancement to managerial positions in
the crack cocaine trade, Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan, the
generation-long trajectory of baby names from prestigious to
down-market, and the effects of campaign spending on the outcome of
elections. In each case there are surprises in store, and sufficient
background to understand where the results came from and the process
by which they were obtained. The Internet has been a godsend for this
kind of research: a wealth of public domain data in more or less
machine-readable form awaits analysis by anybody curious about how it
might fit together to explain something. This book is an excellent
way to get your own mind asking such questions.
My only quibble with the book is the title: “Freakonomics: A
Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” The
only thing freaky about Levitt's work is that so few other
professional economists are using the tools of their profession
to ask and answer such interesting and important questions.
And as to “rogue economist”, that's a rather odd
term for somebody with degrees from Harvard and MIT, who
is a full professor in one of the most prestigious departments
of economics in the United States, recipient of the Clark
Medal for best American economist under forty, and author of
dozens of academic publications in the leading journals.
But book titles, after all, are marketing tools, and the way this
book is selling, I guess the title is doing its job quite
well, thank you. A web site
devoted to the book contains additional information and
New York Times columns by the authors containing
additional analyses.
April 2006 