I’d like to thank those who showed up last week to the book club gathering. I enjoyed the discussion and hope others did, too. The next book will be What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which we’ll take up in a couple of weeks, Thursday, July 21, same time and place. For August, we picked Guns, Germs and Steel.
As for Freakonomics itself, the reaction was a bit mixed. I tended to look positively at the author’s project of extending economic thinking into matters of sociology. Even when they fall short, they push our thinking in useful ways. For instance, I particularly liked their analysis of internet dating websites; if the conclusions are not earthshattering, they provide empirical backing to what people often assume, and it deserved more than the four pages it got. At its best, their empirically-driven interrogations are very much in the spirit of Durkheim’s Suicide.
Nonetheless, Levitt and Dubner do fall short on several counts. We all were curious about the fuller treatment that Steven Levitt’s academic essays, presumably, would have given the topics of the individual chapters. At other times, the problem seemed to be a breezy belief that since numbers cannot lie, then the numbers they’re examining are the revelation of the matter. Take, for instance, the chapter on real estate agents; for authors who painstakingly point out that correlation does not equal causation, they do not seem to give alternate reasons for real estate brokers’ behavior any real consideration. Like with Steve Landsburg’s discussion of vine tomatoes, sometimes not knowing much about the object at hand can give you the distance to look at it fresh and to impose a counter-intuitive explanation, but it also closes you off to conventional explanations that you at least should be able to discount.
This tension played out in the discussion of the KKK. The authors cite the anecdote of an infiltrator who is able to bring down the secret society by exposing their secrets. It’s a great story — and I don’t doubt that it’s true — but when I open a conventional history book (like James Patterson’s America in the Twentieth Century), I’ll read that the biggest reason for the second Klan’s demise were a series of political scandals in Indiana. Someone at the very least has the wrong emphasis, and I can’t help but suspect that it’s Levitt and Dubner who are putting undue emphasis on the anecdote since it so clearly emphasizes their point about information.
ADDENDUM: Go check out John’s critique. He raises some of the points we discussed, and which I’m not doing justice in my summary above.
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