TDL Book Reviews: Freakonomics
Freakonomics: A Rouge Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner can be summed up thusly: It’s that book that claimed abortion reduced crime… and oh did the talking heads flip out.
I’m not sure what other motivation one would need to check this book out. Surprisingly, this was on my bookshelf and not on by BookFlix list. Ms. L has a tendency to buy books of half.com. Why, I have no idea. I think she likes clutter.
Steven Levitt is introduced as “the most brilliant economist in the country.” He also admits in the opening pages that he’s really not good at economics. Instead, he uses statistics and financial models to try and solve the regular riddles of every day life. For example: If no expert was able to forcibly prove why crime dropped, why did it? Why do the homes of real estate agents always sell for more than their clients’ homes? How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents? How much does a name hinder your child’s future?
The book is broken out into six chapters, with each chapter addressing a different mystery. Chapters one and two are more table setting than ground-breaking. The first chapter addresses people’s tendency to cheat and studies how it can be prevented. How one can strike the correct balance of social, moral, and economic incentives to stop people from cheating. The second chapter, “How Is The Ku Klux Clan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents?” addresses the theory of information imbalance. That is: when you go to a realtor, especially before the dawn of the Internet, he had you at a complete and total disadvantage. He knows what houses in the area are really worth. He knows what the seller really wants. He probably has a pretty good idea of the trends in the neighborhood. But he doesn’t have to tell you. How were they like the KKK? It delves into the story of a guy who joined the KKK simply to find out their secrets. Information imbalance again: once everyone knew everything about the inner workings of the group, it lost a lot of its power.
These two chapters set-up the tools he’ll use for the rest of the book. They show the way that Levitt collects his data and the questions that he poses to assess the problem. The third chapter, “Why Do So Many Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers?”, is an attack on the idea of “conventional wisdom.” He brings up instances of experts who create numbers and statistics and the idea that if something is repeated enough times and confirmed enough by the media, it becomes the truth. Together with information gathering and the vivisection of conventional wisdom, he gives some new insight into old arguments.
As for the abortion and crime association? It’s not that crazy. He begins with a history lesson. The ruler of Romania, declaring his country would be a bastion of New Communism, changed his country’s abortion policy from anything goes to completely illegal along with contraception. He then proceeded to neglect agriculture for manufacturing. All the children who were born were born to families who couldn’t afford them. When people are poor, they resort to crime. The very children who likely would have never been born in Romania were the ones whom eventually brought the ruler in front of a firing squad. So what Levitt did was to compare the abortion rates to the crime rate and discovered their was a correlation. In states like New York and California, where abortion was legal before Roe vs. Wade came along, crime rates dropped sooner than in states which didn’t allow abortion. Certainly a controversial topic but also one that is built on attacking conventional wisdom… that is, the 8 general explanations that people try to pass off as the true explanation.
The final two chapters kind of lost me. It goes off into questions about parenting. It addresses the things a parent does to encourage their children to learn and, surprisingly, it turns out that you can buy your kids all the books you want, but if you don’t actually read them they don’t help. It then goes off into a fun chapter about baby names and how some of the more interesting names in the African-American community may hinder a child more than help it. It goes through naming trends and mentions some doozies: including Temptress (Incorrectly after Tempestt Bledsoe), Amcher (named for the first thing the mother saw after birth), Shithead (pronounced shuh-TEED), brothers Winner and Loser, and brothers OrangeJello (a-RON-zhello) and LemonJello (la-MON-zhello). It sadly does not mention lil Apple Paltrow, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, or Suri Cruise.
This book is definitely to be read with an open mind. If you are completely and totally anti-abortion and that’s the only thing you’re reading for, you’ll certainly hate it. The reader gets a decent look at ways to solve problems by thinking outside the box; something most people in this country are so morbidly lacking.
Solid recommendation. Instead of returning it to the library, I will now set it back on the shelf to collect dust for all eternity.