Freakonomics - Q & A

I have not written in a while so here is an extremely long review of one of the books I read recently. Hopefully I will be able to establish a stricter routine soon but for now this is all I can offer. Another week comes to an end.

Freakonomics

Stephen D. Levitt &
Stephen J. Dubner

Penguin

"Freakonomics" is everywhere. No matter what you choose to do, where you choose to go or even when you want to do it. Freakonomics is everywhere, seriously. This argument is further encouraged by the fact that some of the most unexpected and perhaps unlikeliest of people to read books of any sort, have mentioned it to me recently. I was taken aback by their wealth of knowledge, of their insightful understanding of what underpins our existence. I suppose though, in retrospect, that what they had simply referred to on those rainy afternoons was that freakonomics was in fact, everywhere. The book that is. “The advertising campaign had been stunning,” commented one of those individuals. “No matter where you went, there was the book, somewhere making you want to read it,” the other one had chimed in at some point.

Now this is the book rather than that weird story.

“Freakonomics” is already a bestseller and it has been since it first came out as a hardback. The hardback cover was excellent and first drew my attention to it when working at Books Etc. As far as I can remember it was a small city, comprising of a couple of buildings, streets, cars, people, etc. In short, it was a microcosm of the world and the things we do. The book had also been subtitled as ‘A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything’. Brilliant title; it will sell many copies. The design was as though everything was constituted of tiny blocks, like lego, or like information blocks – data. Data is essentially numbers and the idea of having the world explained through them is fascinating. I suppose it served its purpose, the hardcover that is, and only through a different, more accessible and commercial cover, could the book reach a truly wide audience. It still says ‘A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything’, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same.

Anyways, the book is alright. I like this academic journalism that makes difficult and complex ideas very accessible and almost easy. Malcolm Gladwell comes to mind (and is preferred.) Levitt is an economist who graduated from Harvard. He has been hailed with prizes of all sorts, recognized as one of the leading intellectualists of his still very young life. Unlike other economists, however, Levitt is different. He says that he is “not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory.” But for Levitt, “economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.” Dubner on the other hand is a journalist, who once interviewed Levitt in order to write an article about him for the New York Times. In the end the joined their creative powers and, in terms of asking interesting questions and finding answers through numbers, this book certainly succeeds. It is only when I go back to my lifeless ambitions of a world’s microcosm that I feel quite disappointed.

Economics is about incentives. People function through incentives and a lot of their actions depend on them. Hence academics want to be as recognized as possible by fellow peers and ideally history, drug dealers want to make the most amount of money possible to, generally, escape their poor surroundings, and sumo wrestlers want to win as many matches as possible, as the best of them are treated like semi-gods in Japan. However, some incentives create negative responses from humans, cheating and success often being inseparable.

This book, and indeed what distinguishes Levitt from other, more standard stiff collared economics, is the ability to ask unlikely questions. Questions like ‘What do estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan have in common?’, ‘Why do drug dealers live with their mothers?’ and ‘How can your name affect how well you do in life?’ are at the heart of this book. By applying numbers to a set of data. One example is the sudden and inexplicable crime drop in the U.S. in the 1990’s. Nobody could explain its initial rise and even less so its sudden drop. People cited increased police numbers, new schemes, more arrests, new governors and all sorts of things as reasons. The truth was simple as abortion having been made legal 20 years earlier. All the would be criminals were thus not born and combined with other elements, such as a stabilized and improving economy, crime dropped incredibly fast.

Overall the book was interesting although it didn’t cover a lot of new territory. The analysis of the drop in crime rate, seems like old news and some of the other strange questions asked, such as ‘What do sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common?’, whilst being intriguing and fun, don’t offer anything definitive to the reader. The answer to the above question seemed merely to be that by studying numbers, it could be figured out that both sumo wrestlers and teachers cheat and that perhaps they have been offered the wrong incentives. It is useful to think that the right incentives can bring the right results, just imagine fighting things like obesity or perhaps even immigration, but all of that surely is already known for that is exactly why we have economists. “Freakonomics” is a highly entertaining and commercial books, which will help pass some dreary moments on the tube or bus and may even inspire you to try and analyze your surroundings a little bit more, but in other than asking off the wall questions, it doesn’t answer any more pressing matters concerning the world we live in.

M.M.