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Updated: 2 Jul 2006 |
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ISBN 0-1410-1901-8
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There is the world as it ought to be, and then there is the world as it is. They are not the same.
Some people deal with this basic fact of life rather easily; some cannot. A few prefer not to even know what the world is really like; if it doesn't suit their belief system, they can not deal with it. These people will not enjoy Freakonomics, because Levitt is a man who follows the trail of evidence wherever it leads, and reports his findings whether they are palatable or not.
Perhaps his most famous claim to fame is to have identified the correlation between liberalising abortion and a lower crime rate. The causal hypothesis is intuitively reasonable: unwanted children - born to the kinds of women who are disproportionately represented among abortion-seekers, the poor and the poorly educated - are more likely to end up adopting a life of crime. In retrospect, one could "easily" have forecast such a correlation using nothing more sophisticated than common sense. Levitt's genius, however, was to have fished the correlation out of all the other statistical noise. And to have the courage, or perhaps simply the ambition, to publish his findings.
Assuming the claim to be true, and I am personally convinced not only that the correlation exists but also that the obvious explanation accounts for the most of it, it does not speak highly of human beings. Levitt himself drew (and, as far as I know, draws) no moral lessons from his observations; he simply reports them. Nevertheless, that has not prevented the histrionic set from attempting to shoot the messenger. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and all that....
But of course Levitt is being a bit cute when he claims to simply be reporting what the stats tell him. Obviously he chooses the topics he researches, chooses them carefully, and it would be naive to suppose he'd hit upon his succession of blockbusters purely by accident. Clearly he chooses to study the more emotive topics quite deliberately, and very likely for the express purpose of furthering his own career. ... Yeah, so?
Yet for all that Levitt's work is economics bent into the shape of reality tv, and some of it is outright voyeurism, the book is riveting and mind-expanding. I couldn't put the thing down.
Recommendation: Highly recommended. Ignore the pointless reproductions of tracts from the New York Times article.
Look and Feel: My edition is the usual matt-finish paperback. There are no diagrams, not even a few graphs - perhaps something of an oversight. Includes useful endnotes and an index.
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