Freakonomics

Freakonomics, the new book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, provides its readers a great set of tools in combatting our age of conventional wisdom and punditry. It's funny, subversive, and more than a little disturbing, but its lessons are quite useful.

People who have read James's Historical Baseball Abstract, Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, and Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (which is probably nobody--I'm only two for three) will probably find that Freakonomics combines these three. Like Bill James, Steven Levitt has an uncanny knack for getting at the drivers of any phenomenon, and he is constantly drawing conclusions that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. (With James, these conclusions involve how to evaluate ballplayers; in Freakonomics they have to do with why crime rates rise and fall and how children become successful adults.) Like Axelrod, Levitt draws insightful conclusions about human behavior from piles of numbers. Like The Bell Curve, Freakonomics has occasionally wandered into the sensitive area of race and has been criticized for the methods underlying its conclusions.

Hardcore economists will probably be (and have been) disappointed by the book. The authors often leave aside the details of the methodology that produced their results, and they dwell on topics like correlation and causality and regression analysis, offering definitions that would be appropriate for people who are totally new to these concepts. Oh yeah, and the book's not even about economics.

I've found the book to be an excellent guide in avoiding some of the traps we all fall into. Though I'm familiar with correlation and causality, I (like most people) draw conclusions about causality when they are unwarranted, and Freakonomics helps train readers in thinking through causality more thoroughly. For instance: a child named Jake Williams will do better in life than a child named DeShawn Williams--does that mean that the name a child has matters in his development? Freakonomics shows that this is a pretty complex question.

Freakonomics is likely to follow in the proud footsteps of Good to Great and The Tipping Point, which is to say that it will be read in a lot of airport terminals by a lot men in blue shirts and sport coats for the next few months, only to be collecting dust on a bookshelf a year from now. Like any flavor of the month, you shouldn't use it as the basis for immediately changing the way you view the world, but neither should you forget its many great lessons when the next big thing rolls in.