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Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have come out with a new bestseller:' Superfreakonomics. The title reminds me of the series of entertaining crime mysteries by Sue Grafton: A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, C is for Corpse-with titles all the way to Z. Which makes me wonder where will the two authors of Superfreakonomics end milking the title?
While the first book Freakonomics was fresh, irreverent, informative, and filled with serious research, the sequel is short of exploitative. Telling and exposing human foibles is fine except when some of the exposition is presented as scientific research; much of it unrigorous.' Despite the fact that economics is still labeled the "dismal science," there's really no advantage in reducing it to irrelevancy. I wonder what Paul Krugman and other Nobel economic prize winners think of this cheap sequel.
Sequels often disappoint and this one is more than a disappointment-it's an undisguised effort to cash in on the success of the first book, which I understand sold over 4 million copies.
The authors pick up a counterintuitive statement and proceed to show the world how foolish people are in believing much nonsense. This is the magic formula. This is their angle. For example they would like to convince you that prostitutes are patriotic. Go figure! They would like to persuade you that taming hurricanes and typhoons is a benign idea; but even sixth graders know about the balance of nature and the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly flapping its wings has far-reaching effects in eco-systems. Yet they seem to like tinkering with geo-engineering.
Blogger Tim Lambert reports the following:
One of the injured parties is Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford University who is quoted (accurately) as saying that "we are being incredibly foolish emitting carbon dioxide." Then Dubner and Levitt add this astonishing claim: "His research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."
That's provocative, but alas, it isn't true. Caldeira, like the vast majority of climate scientists, believes cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions is our only real chance to avoid runaway climate change.
"Carbon dioxide is the right villain," Caldeira wrote on his Web site in reply. He told Joe Romm, the respected climate blogger who broke the story, that he had objected to the "wrong villain" line but Dubner and Levitt didn't correct it; instead, they added the "incredibly foolish" quote, a half step in the right direction. Caldeira gave the same account to me.
And the controversy rages on. When newspapers report incorrect facts, they issue apologies and corrections immediately. Shouldn't Dubner and Levitt issue an apology to Caldeira and possibly insert an errata note in future printings of Superfreakonomics? That would be the sensible thing to do. We shall see.
In Freakonomics they aggravated teachers by commenting on supposedly teacher-led cheating on pupil standardized tests. In the sequel the authors submit that teachers should be paid more. Are they trying to atone for their early sin?
More and more climate science experts are criticizing the book for many misleading statements and the inclusion of discredited arguments. What we have in this book is a hodgepodge of weird facts, many of which are only tangentially related to economic theory.
Freakonomics is not only aimless and disjointed, but also tedious.
