Freakonomics Clones

I have a review of Freakonomics clones in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i11/11b01501.htm:

In the beginning were the Steves--Steve Dubner and Steve Levitt, that is. And Steve Dubner interviewed Steve Levitt, who taught at the University of Chicago and had won the American Economic Association's Clark Medal as the outstanding young economist in his two-year cohort. And Steve Dubner and Steve Levitt begat, or conceived or brought forth, Freakonomics, which sold many copies and populated the land. And the publishers of America looked upon Freakonomics, and saw that it was good.

And the publishers of America said, "Let us commission and publish many books sort-of like Freakonomics, for here is a previously-unexploited market segment, and there is unexpectedly-high demand for books that use economists' reasoning presented in clear prose to investigate and explain curious events and patterns in our social life. And let there be marketing campaigns. And TV appearances. And review copies."

And Basic Books and Robert Frank begat The Economic Naturalist. And the Free Press and Steven Landsburg begat More Sex Is Safer Sex. And Dutton Press and Tyler Cowen begat Discover Your Inner Economist. And they were fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the Earth, and subdued it: and had dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth.

And there was evening and there was morning, another day...

My favorite is Tyler's Discover Your Inner Economist.

Maybe Money Does Make the World Go Round

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In the beginning were the Steves — Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, that is. And Dubner interviewed Levitt, who teaches at the University of Chicago and had won the American Economic Association's Clark Medal as the outstanding young economist in his two-year cohort. And Dubner and Levitt brought forth Freakonomics (William Morrow, 2005), which sold many copies and populated the land. And the publishers of America looked upon Freakonomics and saw that it was good.

And the publishers of America said, "Let us commission and publish many books sort of like Freakonomics, for here is a previously unexploited market segment, books that use economists' reasoning presented in clear prose to investigate and explain curious events and patterns in our lives."

And Basic Books and Robert H. Frank begat The Economic Naturalist (2007). And Free Press and Steven E. Landsburg begat More Sex Is Safer Sex (2007). And Dutton Press and Tyler Cowen begat Discover Your Inner Economist (2007).

If you have not read Freakonomics, read it first. Levitt's ideas and work are justly respected by economists, and he and Dubner have done a very good job of applying economic principles to social patterns involving crime, abortion, drug dealing, parenting, and other matters. I don't think they get every issue right, but they do make every issue they tackle accessibly interesting. And though their discussions are provocative, the provocation is appropriately secondary to the logic.

If you have read Freakonomics and are a liberal, read Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist for elucidating discussion toward the libertarian-conservative end of the spectrum. If you have read Freakonomics and are a conservative, read Frank's The Economic Naturalist for equally admirable discussion toward the social-democratic end. Either way you'll find yourself more intellectually balanced.

Consider, for example, Cowen's discussion of tourists from affluent countries who travel in poor countries and find local guides and beggars waiting outside hotels. For the guides and beggars, waiting for the rare generous tip or gift is better than other available options — but not much better. More generous and well-intentioned visitors do not improve the well-being of local guides so much as they simply multiply their numbers. People who would otherwise be doing something useful wait instead for the relatively big score, and increased generosity becomes a social loss.

So what should an ethical liberal do? Many flint-hearted libertarians anxious to cast scorn on woolly-headed liberals would stop at this point, smugly pointing out that liberal generosity is counterproductive. Cowen goes a step further, and asks what a non-woolly-headed liberal who actually wanted to help would do. He has a simple answer: Get off the beaten track. Find somebody who is both poor — not just looking poorer than they are in the hope of attracting generosity — and busy doing something productive and useful. Give them the money. As Cowen puts it, "If you are going to give, pick the poor person who is expecting it least." That accomplishes the most efficient transfer of wealth.

Frank makes conservatives think about markets as good but flawed social instruments. Over the past couple of decades, the Cornell professor has asked his students to write 500 words on what he terms "economic naturalism": Using a principle of economics taught in the course, he instructs, "pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed." The Economic Naturalist is made up of Frank's own best answers to that question, combined with credited and rewritten contributions from his students.

My favorite comes from Lonnie Fox: Why don't top-ranked private universities charge higher tuitions than lower-ranked ones? Fox's answer is that capable students are both customers for and producers of college educations. A college with a higher-ranked student body will have more challenging classes attractive to high-ranked students. A college is selling not just the services of its faculty and library but the chance to interact with other smart, lively, and curious students. Were Yale to raise its tuition to a level at which it began losing significant numbers of students to cheaper Wesleyan, it would find that some of its appeal to top-ranked students had vanished. "The top-ranked school," Frank argues, "needs its most accomplished students every bit as much as they need it."

My second favorite contribution to the book is by Thomas Gellert, on the demise of Caspian Sea sturgeon since the collapse of the Soviet Union starting in 1989. Before then, only two political jurisdictions bordered the Caspian Sea: Iran and the U.S.S.R. Now Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan all border it and have been unable to negotiate fishing limits. The Caspian sturgeon population, and thus the world production of Beluga caviar, has suffered as a result.

The pop-econ genre's defect is oversimplification. Too often case studies read like just-so stories, things that might be true but that might not. The Economic Naturalist makes sense of the world, but so did Lamarck, who argued that giraffes' long necks spring from generations of giraffes each trying very hard to stretch their own individual necks to reach higher leaves, and then passing those stretched necks down to descendants. Ashees Jain may have been a good student at Cornell, but do we really want to say that the reason for the absence of top-ranked for-profit universities is that gifts to nonprofit universities are tax deductible while tuition payments to both nonprofits and for-profits are not? Surely there is more to it than that. Or take Fox's tuition explanation. We here at Berkeley charge one-third the tuition of Stanford. Our students like a place where their peers don't regard themselves as rich. We lose students who believe that the extra $80,000 is well worth paying to get Stanford's smaller class sizes and better physical plant.

Oversimplification might be a price worth paying for the pleasures of an economic window on the world. Provocation for provocation's sake, however, is not.

Which brings us to Landsburg's book, the weakest of the batch. Landsburg, of the University of Rochester, works hard too hard — at being counterintuitive and shocking. Is it true that, as far as AIDS is concerned, "more sex is safer sex"? Probably not. Not only would the chaste have to become more adventurous, but they would have to become more adventurous in a way that sufficiently reduces the sexual contact that the already adventurous have with each other. That is, the key is not more sex but the shift from very risky to only somewhat risky sex — not quite what the title advertises.

I also refuse to believe Landsburg is serious in his argument that Americans should not care about the looting of Baghdad's museums. Landsburg claims that "water in the aggregate is priceless. ... But ... we don't cry every time someone spills a bucket of water. ... Likewise, antiquities in the aggregate enrich our lives ... but ... we don't have to cry every time someone loots a museum." We cry over destruction or loss when the things that are destroyed or lost are valuable. A bucket of water isn't valuable, so we don't cry over it — unless we're in the desert, where it is valuable, and then we do. If I thought Landsburg was sincere in his proposition, I would have to reach certain judgments about him that I would rather not.

You could read his book if you have read the others and are insatiably hungry for more.

Or you could wait — another's bound to come along soon. Economics dictates it, as some economist will no doubt elucidate for us in enjoyable if unnuanced fashion.

Comments

[david]

I might consider adding Ian Ayers' "Super Crunchers" to that list. I liked the book, other than the rather amusing recurrence of the term "super crunchers"

[Ken Houghton]

I've argued before that Diane Coyle's SEX, DRUGS, AND ECONOMICS (2002) is the book Freakonomics (2005) should have been. And that's ignoring Charles Wheelan's NAKED ECONOMICS (2004?), who also predates and surpasses the Levitt hagiography--though perhaps not for NYT readers who want to be reassured that John Lott is an economist and Paul Krugman a political columnist.

[Jack Needleman]

John Lott is at it again (whatever "it" is in his case). He has a new book "Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't." The cover proclaims this "A rebuttal to Freakonomics and more."

[Slocum]

"Find somebody who is both poor — not just looking poorer than they are in the hope of attracting generosity — and busy doing something productive and useful. Give them the money."

Wouldn't it be better to find somebody who is poor and willing to do something productive and useful for the money? The problem I have with local "guides" is they're offering a service that is not useful or wanted and where, often, the only reason to hire a guide is to keep the other potential guides away.

In the Caribbean, we once convinced a vendor trying to sell us cheap T-Shirts that we did not want to get us some fresh fish to cook for dinner. It turned out he was handy with a spear gun, made more money than with t-shirts, and the fish was delicious.

"For the guides and beggars, waiting for the rare generous tip or gift is better than other available options — but not much better. More generous and well-intentioned visitors do not improve the well-being of local guides so much as they simply multiply their numbers."

I suppose that's true, but that's inevitably going to be the case with low-skilled jobs with a negligible cost of entry. Rather than just hand out money at random to people not expecting it, wouldn't it be better to try to reward locals who've taken the trouble to move up the skill ladder and produce more valuable goods and services? Such more valuable jobs are not going to be swamped by new entrants precisely because they require skills.

[Barry]

Daniel Davies review Freaknomics:

Part 1:
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2005/11/long-awaited-freakonomics-post-this-is.html

Part 2:
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2006/03/freakonomics-review-part-2-heterodox.html

Part 3:
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/01/this-has-been-so-absurdly-trailed-it.html

Part 4:
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2007/09/freakiology-yes-folks-its-part-4-of.html

It's a very interesting review, and Levitt doesn't come out loking good.

[Ken Houghton]

Thank you, Barry. I had thought the third part of that series was the last, and am thrilled to have been mistaken:

"Levitt is a Beckerite, a particularly virulent subspecies of economist prevalent at the University of Chicago and specialising in applying economic analysis to other areas of human behaviour. Most other Beckerites haven't made much of an impression on the field, mainly because they are in general really quite nasty people. Levitt had one unusual property, which was that despite being a Beckerite, he wasn't an asshole and was therefore able to create a career by coauthoring Beckerite papers with people who had important skills that he didn't, therefore lifting them far above the run of the mill of Beckerites. For example, he managed to get Ian Ayres to do his calculus for him, John Donohue to do his statistics for him, Suhdir Venkatesh to do his primary research for him and so on. This got him a degree of academic fame, but John Bates Clark medals ain't going to buy the Jacuzzi. One day, however, he met this magazine journalist called Steve Dubner, and realised that he could pull the same trick of coauthoring. Dubner did his job of hyping Levitt's research to a parodic degree, and a popademic sensation was born!"

Next: the Medal of Freedom, along with Eric Rudolph--oops, Henry Hyde.

[Keith]

Of course, Steven Landsburg was doing Freakonomics style books 10 years before Freakonomics. "The Armchair Economist" was published in 1995.

I know acknowledging Landsburg's virtues is kinda dicey in these here parts, but the simple fact remains that he and David Friedman ("Hidden Order" in 1997) pioneered this genre.

[Hidden Order is wonderful]

[kid bitzer]

landsburg on antiquities--
christ, what a parody of bad econ reasoning.

i don't cry over this spilled water, because the next bucket of water is qualitatively identical to it. this has to do with a property called "fungibility", but i guess we cannot expect an economist to be familiar with that concept.

water is fungible and wheat is fungible so antiquities are fungible?
every collective noun names a collection of fungible things?

i mean, sure, the category of landsburgs in general enriches our life, but surely we wouldn't care if one or two landsburgs here or there were killed off.

[ron]

i would care if cayley landsburg was killed off, she is adorable. :D

[anon]

The Winner's Curse by Richard Thaler is truly the book "Freakonomics" could have been. Each chapter is inspired by one or more of his classic Anomalies columns. A bit slower going, but enormously more insightful and nuanced. Very highly recommended.

[Barry]

"Thank you, Barry. I had thought the third part of that series was the last, and am thrilled to have been mistaken:"

You're welcome. And in part 4, he was talking about a part 5.

[sm]

"I also refuse to believe Landsburg is serious in his argument that Americans should not care about the looting of Baghdad's museums."

Why not? Equally contemptible and immoral things are said by government leaders and intellectuals everyday, and as time goes on we find that their motivations and sense of responsibility are even worse than they seemed at first.

[Bruce]

My favorite of the genre is The Undercover Economist, written by Tim Harford, who writes a column of the same name for the Financial Times.

I completely agree about Steven Landsburg. In the Armchair Economist he throws out cute, counterintuitive arguments based on extreme simplifications of problems, then attacks anyone who doesn't support his surprising conclusions.

[Jeff Smith]

The book that started me on the road to being an economist back in the 1970s was by Doug North and Robert Thomas and was called "Abortion, Baseball and Weed". It presented 10 pages discussions of how economists would think about a variety of public policy issues. Reading it was a sort of "road to Damascus" experience for me - I truly felt like what had previously been unclear was now clear. Reading that book also was when I first realized that most voices in many public policy debates are either confused or lying out of self-interest.

In any case, the point is that the genre goes a long way back indeed.

I was surprised DeLong did not reference the enormously entertaining review of Freakonomics by my colleague John DiNardo. You want to read the first version, which you can find on his web page at Michigan, not the final version that is coming out in the JEL. The final version has been put on a diet, shaved, washed and dressed in a suit, which, in this case, is not an improvement.

Jeff

[Frank]

I think Ayres's book is a bit like Landsburg's--it analyzes economics from a quite individualistic perspective without fully addressing whether the strategies it discusses are good for society.

Anyway, I review Ayres here:

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/09/are_humans_atom.html

and bash Landsburg here:

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/09/opportunistic_e.html

[Bruce Ferguson]

http://www.aldaily.com/

[David]

I love how logical and statistical reasoning, which is common to all the social sciences (and non-sciences), is now considered "economics"

[jimmie]

so what do people think of dsqaured's review? a bit ott perhaps