Bingo 25: On the air
I first heard of Freakonomics as an NPR show; I think the radio (aka air-waves) form fits this concept better than the written.
Firstly, every chapter in the book opens with some reference to the brilliance of the economist author (the other author is a journalist); granted Steven Levitt does seem pretty unconventional as an economist and I do think his novel approach leads to really interesting insights. However, the repeated reminders of his brilliance start to get irritating.
The main general principle Levitt establishes has to do with his definition of what economics does or can do; he says that morality is how we want the world to be, while economics is how the world really is. Conceptually, this does lead to some observations I doubt a traditional economic analysis would notice, but it also seems a little oversimplified in the philosophical sense, to the tune of “{my discipline} can solve all your questions or problems if you use it my way”.
The radio version of the show manages to hold on to the explaining and making of connections that might otherwise be hard to see, but does so is a less meandering and more complete kind of way. In the book, you might take the chapter theme of cheating (aka study of incentive, and isn’t that what economics really is, according to the chapter intro), and go from a study of late pick up policy at an Israeli daycare to a cheating scandal in the Chicago school system in the aftermath of high stakes testing introduced by No Child Left Behind (the teachers being the cheaters, not the students) to sumo wrestling to a guy who left his corporate job to sell bagels in NYC. Each individual story is interesting in the actual narrative and analysis, but in the book, there are so many unanswered questions. Like the bagel selling guy; did he actually go about intentionally gathering data and analyzing it, or is that an after the fact thing? What happened with the bagel business? There is virtually no direct content cited from the bagel guy, so where is the information coming from in the first place? I get that this is a popular science kind of book, but that’s all the more reason to be more complete in your narratives, and in some of the analysis as well. There is an extensive citation section at the end, but there’s no indication in the actual chapters of sources; not using footnotes or indicators of that sort might have been done to not scare readers off, but seriously, if you’re picking up a book with the subtitle “a rogue economist explain the hidden side of everything”, I doubt that’s going to be too much of a deterrent.
