Freakonomics – Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

The authors of Freakonomics met when journalist Stephen J Dubner profiled ‘rogue economist’ Steven D Levitt for the New York Times. When the article went viral (or whatever the 2003 equivalent of viral was), publishers came a-calling. Levitt didn’t have much interest in writing a book himself, but he was open to the idea of collaborating with a writer he trusted to produce one. The original profile that started it all is included in this ‘revised and expanded edition’ of the best-selling economics book of the 21st century (so far).

Levitt and Dubner emphasise from the very beginning that they offer “no unifying theme” for Freakonomics, but I humbly disagree. It roughly boils down to applying the principles of economics to social phenomena outside the scope of property and finance. We can use concepts like competitive advantage and opportunity cost to understand why things happen the way they do in the world around us.

It’s a good idea (if not a particularly revolutionary one for readers 20 years after publication)… I just don’t think Levitt and Dubner apply it very well.

Presumably in the hopes of sparking controversy (and increasing book sales), Levitt and Dubner seem to go for ‘big impact’ examples of this approach – namely, race, abortion, and guns. Unfortunately, the only way they can make the application of economic principles to these thorny and complex issues palatable for a mainstream non-fiction book like Freakonomics is to simplify them beyond all recognition, strip away all nuance, and reduce their conclusions to the equivalent of clickbait headlines.

By way of example, let’s look at one of the most contentious propositions in Freakonomics: that the legalisation of abortion across the United States through the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade in the 1970s led to a marked drop in crime in the 1990s, defying all expectations. Levitt and Dubner do their best to show their work, claiming to account for how incarceration rates would have affected crime, how policing trends would have moved the needle, and so on. They conclude that only the termination of pregnancies that would have led to the birth of future criminals could account for the marked decrease in crime.

However, they completely discount (as in, don’t even mention) other crucial components of this equation. For instance: how are we defining “crime”? Levitt and Dubner seem to assume that every reader will agree that ‘crime’ mostly looks like angry teenagers mugging unsuspecting victims on the street with a weapon, but only a very small percentage of crimes (even reported crimes) look like that. Would Roe v Wade really have impacted the rates of tax evasion? Littering? Wage theft?

Or, on the other side of the equation, Levitt and Dubner don’t account for the difficulty in confirming the actual increase in the rate of abortions performed after Roe v Wade. There are no verifiable records of the number of illegal abortions performed before this watershed, but Levitt and Dubner don’t even seem to acknowledge that abortions ever happened outside of state-sanctioned medical facilities. This goes along with other major societal shifts around that time that don’t even get a look in – like the introduction of no-fault divorce, the Vietnam War, and the development of personal computers.

That’s just one example, but it leads me to my other big issue with Freakonomics: Levitt and Dubner appear to have pretty significant personal biases and blind-spots that colour the questions they ask of the data, let alone the conclusions they draw from it. They repeatedly emphasise, in the above example, that the “vast majority” of abortions are performed for pregnant people who are young, single, and poor, when not all of the data reflects that (setting aside the difficulty of determining the accuracy of data collected about abortions to begin with). It’s just a stereotype that they’re happy to lean into for the purposes of supporting their hypothesis.

They go on to make some regrettable assumptions about sex workers in Chapter 3, too, that really show their privilege. “The numbers don’t lie”, they hasten to assure the reader, while completely ignoring the subjectivity of the person calculating those numbers to begin with.

I don’t want to interrogate every issue that could be taken with Freakonomics – partly, because I’m not an economist and plenty of people who are economists and experts in the field have already done just that, and also because, as I said earlier, the idea of applying economic principles to social phenomena is a good one. Levitt should be applauded for thinking in that direction, at least. It’s just a shame that the idea was executed so poorly and with so little intellectual rigour, given the subsequent popularity of the book. Not only did Freakonomics sell millions of copies, it grew into a whole brand and multi-media franchise, with films, radio shows, blogs, and all manner of content. I can only hope that the millions of readers out there have taken Levitt and Dubner’s actual conclusions with a grain of salt, as I have.

Read Freakonomics on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Freakonomics:

• “It is just a guys view on some stuff in society…waste of time.” – Timothy Clancy
• “Take for example the idea that crime rates began dropping dramatically 20 or so years after abortion was legalized in the US. If you understand the implied causal relationship in that idea then this book probably isn’t for you. If you understand the implied level of condescension in stretching that sentence into 5 pages then this book definitely isn’t for you.” – E.V. Swift
• “The author states that people will cheat to gain advantage, and this does appear to be true.” – Martin Gollery