David Runciman: Book Review: Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner: The last chapter is not even about an economist – it's devoted to the story of Nathan Myhrvold, who thinks that global warming can be solved by pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to replicate the cooling effects of volcano eruptions. The interesting economic questions here, and the ones you'd expect to engage Levitt, are to do with the unintended side-effects of such a proposal and how it may skew incentives. But, instead, we just get a breathless account of what a ballsy, quirky, out-of-the-box sort of guy Myhrvold is.

If the Freakonomics brand has been reduced to telling stories about people like this, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Malcolm Gladwell does it better (for one thing, he might have been a bit more sceptical)....

[I]n their rather smug preface, the authors say that they believe the second book "is easily better than the first". Can they really think this? Maybe not; after all, as economists they tell us they are fully attuned to the difference between declared preferences (what people say they think) and revealed preferences (what it turns out they really think).

But it's possible that the success of the first book has gone to their heads. That book was the product of creative tension; they admit they first encountered each other in a mood of mutual suspicion, each wondering what the other had to offer. This one seems to have been more of a love-in (in the acknowledgments, Levitt calls Dubner "a brilliant writer and creative genius" and Dubner calls Levitt "a great collaborator and wonderful economics teacher"). A bit more suspicion would not have gone amiss.

It says something that the real puzzle this book leaves you with is wondering about the skewed incentives that led two such talented people to write a book that does so little justice to those talents. Maybe that should be a subject for a third book, if there is one.

Comments

[jon]

Myhrvold was one of the leading lights at Microsoft when they decided to integrate the browser into the OS.

Ten years, one antitrust case and a billion virus and trojans later, I wouldn't listen to Nathan Myhrvold if he told me the sun was going to rise in the east.