Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

When it first came out, I added Freakonomics to my “to read” list, but I never got around to it. Recently, the book was featured on Beauty and the Geek (the beauties had to read it and then interview the author, Steven Levitt). So I figured, if it’s good enough for them, it’s a solid part of pop-culture, so I should at least take a look at it. :-)

Unfortunately, like most of the books that are on the top 10 lists for non-fiction or business, the book had some interesting anecdotes, but not that much substance. A lot of the stuff really boiled down to common sense; which is disappointing because the book is supposed to answer lots of life’s mysteries by asking the right questions and drawing connections.

Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) endorses this book and is quoted on the cover saying, “Prepare to be dazzled.” While it must have really helped Freakonomics sales by getting Gladwell’s fan-base to buy this book, after reading through it, I was left undazzled. And I had spent so much time preparing for “dazzlement”. :-)

One of the big things that bothered me about the book was the ridiculous amount of self-promotion. Every chapter started with an excerpt of an article lavishly praising Levitt. Technically these parts were written by the co-author, but hiring someone to sing praises about you is just silly. Plus, I’m already reading the book, there’s no need to continually sell yourself, unless you’re afraid that your content won’t stand on it’s own.

Levitt asserts that he uses advanced statistics (regression analysis) to separate out all the variables; this process, he says, allows him to bypass the old adage, “Correlation doesn’t imply causation”, to actually finding the causes. For example, he asserts:

If you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

I’m not doubting his analysis, I’m sure that if you do run the numbers to model all the occurrences of a child being in the same house with a pool and a gun, the pool is more dangerous. But that being said, a truer comparison would be with the instances where the child is using with both.

I would venture a guess that in Levitt’s data set, the child was using the pool orders of magnitude more often than the child was using the gun. So Levitt’s analysis is comparing the “risk of a child using a swimming pool” vs “the risk of a child being in a house that happens to have guns.” It’s slightly disingenuous because the conclusion implies the comparsion of usage between the two.

In any event, it’s still remarkably enlightening data that directly challenges most people’s conceptions of guns. After all, most parents would be perfectly happy with their kids swimming at a friend’s house, but would be uneasy about sending their kids to friend’s house where their parents have guns locked up.

One thing Levitt discussed was the role of hype and emotional manipulation, rather than using logic and reason, to convince people of something (which fits in nicely with my last post on Global Warming):

An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. His best chance of doing so is to engage the public’s emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument. And as emotions go, one of them — fear — is more potent than the rest. The superpredator, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, mad-cow disease, crib death: how can we fail to heed the expert’s advice on these horrors when, like that mean uncle, telling too-scary stories to too-young children, he has reduced us to quivers.

Fear is a powerful force; fear of the imminent and uncontrollable is even worse. That’s why people are more scared on airplanes then when driving cars (lack of control in the airplane). It’s also why people are more scared of terrorism than a much more probable future death from heart disease.

Levitt’s big idea in the book, the idea that got him on all the talk shows to advertise his book, was his claim that the legalization of abortion caused a drop in crime 20 years later, since all the unwanted babies would have likely been criminals. All I can say is “Bah!”. His data supporting his assertion was lacking at best; his footnotes often referred to his own works or other pop-nonfiction.

Plus regression analysis isn’t without it’s own limitations. Unless Levitt’s model can predict trends in data other than the data used to create it, it is of limited value. And nowhere in the book am I led to believe that’s the case.

Also the book is full of pseudo-intellectualism. For example, when discussing the moral outcry on his conclusion about crime and abortion, he says,

If morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Huh? That doesn’t even mean anything! Especially since his so-called “economics” at times depend on faith as much as morality does.

The book also had a discussion about raising children and if smart parents will have smart kids. The whole discussion is full of interesting correlations. Kids with lots of book at home tend to do better school. But is this because of the books themselves, or because parents with books at home are more likely to value education? Or is it because if you have books you’re likely more wealthy and thus have access to better education?

Ultimately it’s hard to tell. It’s like an old post I wrote about home-schooling: are home-schooled kids doing better at tests because of the home-schooling or is it that they tend to be part of the set of kids that are more likely to have parents that value education?

Anyway, Freakonomics is a quick read and has some interesting stories in it. I’d say to get it from the library. Don’t buy it; it’s not that thought-provoking and the shameless self-promotion will make you a little ill.