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Freakonomics

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Freakonomics

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.

Entry Filed under: Research

1 Comment Add your own

  • 1. David A Prinz  |  August 4th, 2006 at 2:47 am

    i loved freakonomics. the point of the book is simply that conventional wisdom isn’t to be trusted,

    any conclusions reached by the authors are different from conventional wisdoms because these conclusions are all qualified, and any new data might change them.

    another example, referred to in the introduction of the book, is the whole conventional wisdom about how money influences politics.

    this is an example of another conventional wisdom, it sounds like it might be true.

    but consider this; does the candidate with the most money win because of the money, or did the wining candidate win, and raise the most money, because of their appeal in the first place?

    their data says that money doesn’t matter at all. that the winning candidate could cut his campaign spending in half and only loose about one percent of the vote.

    food for thought.

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