Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?” 

In Levitt’s unique attitude toward economics, Dubner discovered a mind that goes off the beaten path, asks interesting questions, and answers them clearly. Dubner’s magazine interview with Levitt turned into a collaboration that produced Freakonomics.

“Many people—including a fair number of his peers—might not recognize Levitt’s work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want. Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (although he is afraid of calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable.” 

Much of the criticism of Freakonomics centers around the non-economic nature of a book on economics, but the authors anticipate this criticism and respond that economics isn’t limited to dry topics that have little appeal to the public at large. Levitt takes that idea one step further by developing research techniques that can tease out answers to questions no one else has thought to ask.

“[T]he modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.”

Pundits sometimes insist that their opinions are facts; politicians may bend the truth to inspire bias that supports their candidacies; researchers can be swayed by conventional beliefs within their specialties. Somewhere within this noise may lie answers to difficult social questions, and it’s the curious individual’s job to pursue those hidden gems of knowledge by asking questions, thinking hard about the data, and learning to separate the chaff of misinformation from the wheat of truth.