Having a moral compass just gets in the way of being smart

Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy.

Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock band called the Right Profile. But he didn’t like the rock’n’roll lifestyle; he was a bookish type. So he became a journalist, got a job at the New York Times, and found himself interviewing a go-ahead Harvard economist who had written interesting stuff on the crack cocaine economy, among many other fascinating things. This, of course, was Levitt.

Dubner made a suggestion: why not write a book together, based on Levitt’s work? The result was the bestseller Freakonomics, and its sequel, Superfreakonomics. The two books were immensely popular, and also very good. In them, Levitt and Dubner told us the ugly truth about how life in the western world worked — or, as they put it, ‘the hidden side of everything’.