Freakonomics

Freakonomics

1 comment August 2nd, 2006

One of the advantages of travel is the opportunity to read. Books don’t require batteries or much space. I recently got a chance to read Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The book is a collection of (mostly) unrelated questions grouped into chapters by their statistical similarity, so you get things like a history of the Klu Klux Klan mixed with biases in home sales. The thread for all of the studies is this: Conventional wisdom is conceived from biased self-interest and rarely reflects what actually happens in the world.

The two most controversial ideas in Freakonomics are:

1. Abortions are most responsible for reduction in crime
2. Parents have no effect on improving their kids’ education

This isn’t an argument to further politicize abortion by making it a crime control policy, or to save resources on schools and parent support by accepting that test scores are predetermined by social class. Rather, it is an opportunity to look at issues like crime and education from a new perspective — under the dispassionate lens of Levitt’s economics — and find the heart of some misconceived problems.

The Freakonomy of crime may credit Roe v. Wade with trimming the 1990s population of a bunch of high-risk youth, but that really just underscores the fact that crime is closely tied to socio-economic circumstance and early childhood experiences lacking unconditional love and support. Education has such a focus on testing outcome today that its role as a means of social mobility is completely undercut. Perhaps the message in Levitt’s numbers is not “Parents don’t matter” but rather “Parents should matter more.”

For a more detailed review of Freakonomics, read my blog.

World Prosperity

Add comment July 18th, 2006

While trying to answer some of my own questions about education, I stumbled across this site. World Prosperity is a non-profit group over a decade old with similar ideas as ours about the accumulation of knowledge. The site is a very nice launchpad for a number of issues, including:

• Education Reform (changing educational goals and process)
• School Reform (changing the structure and politics of public school)
• Education Reform Books (reviews of books on the subject)
• Standardized Testing
• Healthcare Reform
• Terrorism
• Political Reform

Well worth a look, if you want to try to research any of these areas.