Freakonomics
A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Book Review

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - Buy Now From Amazon

Reviewed by Ken Springer

In the best-selling work Freakonomics, Drs. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have attempted to do for the field of economic analysis what Stephen Hawking successfully pulled off for physics with A Brief History of Time – taking a complex technical field and making it accessible to the lay reader.

Freakonomics has a very simple format. The author takes a socio-economic question and applies statistical analysis to attempt to answer that question. Sounds like a college term paper, right? Sort of.  Levitt and Dubner have the tendency to ask some very interesting, if not unorthodox, questions. The chapters in Freakonomics focus on subjects like the business models and economic incentives that undergird crack dealing in Chicago, the rise and fall of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920’s and several other “edgy” topics. The authors address each of their subjects using statistical data analysis with the findings provided in casual prose instead of traditional academic-speak.

This approach comes not without certain flaws. Firstly, the lay nature of the book leads those with above-average curiosity or backgrounds in stats to desire more exposition on the types of analysis used for each hypothesis. The authors very often simply say "we analyzed the data and reached this conclusion" without going any further. Since none of the math is printed, readers are forced to accept these conclusions as factual when in reality, almost any statistic can be called into question if scrutinized hard enough. I'd be shocked if this book did not spark a feeding frenzy of junior economists with chips on shoulders, bent on discrediting Freakonomics' conclusions. My second gripe is that the book is way too short - it can easily be read in a single afternoon. Each of the book's chapters is very short and concerns itself with a single, isolated topic. This is probably intentional, as most of the chapters were initially published as part of Levitt's regular column in the New York Times magazine.

I'd ask those unfamiliar with Levitt and Dubner's work to forgive the garish title of this book - it can be supposed that a certain amount of shock treatment is required to motivate the average American to plunge into a morass of statistical analysis. This book was hyped to death on the blogosphere and in the popular press at the time of its release, sending book sales and Levitt's speaker fees into the stratosphere. In fact, about a third of the book itself is spent notifying the reader of Levitt's clout as a researcher and educator. At times the back-patting and academic name-dropping grow tiresome (especially in the later chapters), but a lot of these accolades are deserved by the authors. We should be praising Levitt and Dubner for their work. The authors' crowning achievement isn't so much in answering difficult questions, but rather taking a (traditionally) very boring academic field and making it interesting. That feat is the truly "freaky" part about Freakonomics.