freakonomics

Many economists don’t care whether sumo wrestling is fixed, or whether drug dealers prefer to live with their mothers. It is their loss.


WHAT a shame about that title. “Freakonomics” is bound to dampen the spirits of any intelligent reader, suggesting an airport-ready, dumbed-down romp—the back cover would inevitably call it a romp—through the bogus theories of some semi-literate phoney economist. But that is not this book at all. Steven Levitt is no “rogue economist”, still less a phoney one; and his book, praise be, does not try to explore “the hidden side of everything”. Far more intelligent, modest and orthodox than it pretends, the book is a delight; it educates, surprises and amuses. It shows, in fact, what plain old-fashioned economics can do in the hands of a boundlessly curious and superbly skilled practitioner.
Mr Levitt is a professor at the University of Chicago, and a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association every two years to the best economist under 40. Not many rogue economists achieve either distinction. Stephen Dubner, Mr Levitt’s co-author, is a contributor to the New York Times magazine, and presumably responsible for the book’s frequently tiresome breathlessness. And it might be Mr Dubner’s fault that the book often veers without due process between being about Mr Levitt and being by him, which is jarring. But the material triumphs over these flaws of style. Indeed, the material is quite fascinating.
Mr Levitt’s speciality is to spot interesting questions that arise in apparently unrelated fields—questions that it may not even have occurred to anyone else to ask—and then answer them with dazzling ingenuity. The man’s curiosity is unbounded in two complementary senses. He finds intriguing anomalies in extraordinarily arcane places—for instance, in sumo wrestling and in alternative spellings of the name Jasmine, to name just two topics examined in this book. And then he digs for explanations with total disregard for the demands of political correctness. You might say that he rejoices in being politically incorrect, except that he seems not to care much one way or the other.
One of his best-known, and in some quarters notorious, findings concerns America’s falling crime-rate during the 1990s. Towards the end of that decade, confounding the expectations of most analysts, the teenage murder rate fell by more than 50% in the space of five years; by 2000, the book notes, the overall murder rate was at its lowest for 35 years. Other kinds of crime fell too. Why? Some gave the credit to economic growth; others to gun control; still others to new methods of policing, or to greater reliance on imprisonment, or to increasing use of the death penalty, or to the ageing of the population.
Mr Levitt goes carefully through these various explanations, checking them against the evidence. He finds that some of them do offer a partial explanation (more jail time, for instance), whereas others do not (greater use of the death penalty, new policing methods). But the most intriguing finding was that one of the most powerful explanations had not even been broached. That explanation was abortion.
The reasoning is simple enough. In January 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion legal throughout the United States, where previously it had been available in only five states. In 1974, roughly 750,000 women had abortions in America; by 1980, the number was 1.6m (one abortion for every 2.3 live births). “What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v Wade?” the book asks. “Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three...In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives...In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall.”
The theory is the easy part, once you dare to articulate it. Testing it is quite another matter. But the book moves methodically and persuasively through the statistical evidence. It turns out, for instance, that crime started falling earlier in the states that legalised abortion before Roe v Wade; that the states with the highest abortion rates saw the biggest drops in crime (even controlling for other factors); that there was no link between abortion rates and crime before the late 1980s (when unborn criminals, as it were, first began to affect the figures); and that a similar association of crime and abortion has been found in other countries.
The book ranges over cheating teachers, corrupt sumo wrestlers and lying on-line daters. It asks, among other things, whether Trent Lott is more racist than the typical contestant on “The Weakest Link”. It examines parallels between estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan. It asks why drug dealers tend to live with their mothers. Always it finds questions that are mischievously intriguing in themselves but that also shed light on broader matters as well—and then it finds ingenious ways of answering them.
“Freakonomics” looks in particular detail at racial aspects of parenting, which is where those variant spellings of Jasmine (or Jazmyne, or Jazzmin, and so on) come in. Examining the data, Mr Levitt tabulates the “blackest” names (Imani tops the list for girls, DeShawn for boys) and the “whitest” (Molly and Jake). Using all his ingenuity in finding and exploring data, he then examines whether being given a distinctively black or white name affects one’s prospects in life. Does it? Surprisingly, perhaps, no. A boy named Jake will tend to do better than one called DeShawn, but that is because he is less likely to have been raised in a low-income, low-education, single-parent household, and not because the name itself confers any advantage.
So much for boys’ names; what about book titles? Does a stupid title herald a worse-than-average book? Probably—if only because books with bad titles tend to be written by intellectually disadvantaged authors. But if a really clever author were to write a book and give it a really stupid title, it might turn out as well as this one.
By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
William Morrow; 256 pages; $25.95. To be published in Britain by Penguin/Allen Lane in July


[from the Economist]

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