Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner see larger photo List Price: $25.95 Our Price: $17.13 Released 12 April, 2005 Hardcover Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

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Customer Review
Enjoyable, but wildly overrated
3/5 Stars
First things first: this *is* an enjoyable read. My criticisms below ought not to obscure that fact.

Will you learn much you didn't already know? That depends - do you occasionally read Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, or the Atlantic? If so, then no, you probably won't run into anything really earth-shattering here. Moreover, you may find the writing almost forcibly amateurish; this is clearly and unmistakeably written at the level of something like Time or Newsweek, a smart move on the part of the authors in terms of sales.

My two problems with the book aren't about its intellectual sophistication, however (and make no mistake, this is brain candy pure and simple, not a serious work). The first problem is one of false advertising. Vast swathes of this book have nothing whatsoever to do with economics, however construed. Indeed, a better title might have been "Freakitistics," because much of the gee-whiz conventional wisdom smack-down is the result of the application of conventional statistical techniques, not economic analysis. To be sure, the latter partakes of the former in large measure, but the book claims to be about economics and it mostly isn't.

My second objection is to the stunningly lazy self-description of the book's basic mission: as we are told over and over again, if "morality" is about the world as we would like it to be, then economics is about the world as it is.

This is, to put it mildly, utter nonsense. First, the authors themselves admit a few times that morality is a large part of economics properly and broadly construed. Second, "morality" is never defined. Third (as noted above), the book isn't focussed on economics all that much anyway.

Fourth and finally, the facile and reflexive assumption that economics (or rather, statistics) is about how things "really" are merely obfuscates and reiterates the worst aspects of what the authors elsewhere claim to be moving beyond. That is the unwarranted conviction of economics as a discipline that it has somehow escaped the bonds of self-interest and relativism that pollute less formal disciplines.

In sum, I do not doubt that the authors are decent human beings, and I have no trouble whatsoever in believing that Levitt is that most rare of all academics, an economist with a heart as well as a brain - that is, sadly, a rather low hurdle to clear. This book could be so much better. I'm hoping that the inevitable follow-up will make good on the large claims made on behalf of this book.

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