Findings of the Dismal Science

This is the sort of book we can expect to see a great deal more of in the future. After Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — a study of the way products or ideas move from niche positions to mass markets — economists and journalists have been racking their brains to come up with usefully saleable theories. Each one begins with profiles in New York magazines; the book, largely made up of stories, follows; and then, no doubt, a lucrative career spinning this highly anecdotal material to CEOs.

An amusing book, this one, certainly more so than the works of most practitioners of the Dismal Science. It’s best enjoyed, though, as a series of music-hall turns, tall tales and outrageous paradoxes rather than anything resembling an argument. Professor Levitt turns his attention to a number of different aspects of contemporary American life, generally with the intention of demonstrating that our assumptions are lazy and wrong. Instead, with the aid of some deftly manipulated statistic, he substitutes what, to the reader, will generally seem a bizarre and even grotesque conclusion. Levitt’s book has made a splash among the seminar-hungry business community. But I have to say, the idea of a serious policy-maker acting on some of these conclusions gives me the willies.

Freakonomics covers a peculiar range of subjects. First, a routine account of systems which reward cheating. This is thin stuff; an American programme which promised financial rewards to teachers whose pupils exceeded expectations in (unsupervised) multiple-choice exams was asking for trouble. There is no shortage of examples, in the world, of similar defective systems, where an uninvestigated incentive threatens to damage the entire outcome; it seems rather odd to us, for instance, that the returning officers in American elections have party affiliations. Levitt settles on sumo wrestling; interesting, but obviously chosen for the sake of an attention-grabbing chapter title — ‘What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers have in Common?’