Freakonomics

Since it is “the hottest book this spring”, and since I have long hours to kill on my flight back from CA, I discarded my “never-buy-hardcover-and-wait-for-paperbacks” rule and bought a brand new copy of Freakonomics.

What do I think of it? Well, it sure was entertaining. It’s perfect for airplane reading. I finished half of it that morning in my hotel, and the other half in the airplane. Altogether, for a fast reader it will last you only about 4-5 hours or so.

I remember the feature of Steven Levitt on NYT magazine when it came out. I was so intrigued by what I read that I even told Boyfriend to read it, and later told my parents about it (in a lament about how creative people widen their field while uncreative people (which I strongly suspect that I am) are destined to doing drudge work like perfecting the field and filling out the details. No doubt Levitt is an energetic and imaginative genius. He made economics fascinating to ordinary humanities majors like me again.

But the book, while entertaining, left me unsatisfied in the end. Maybe it was all the hype around it, so I was expecting something much more intricate and rigorous. Right now the book feels a bit lightweight, not just evidenced by the fact that I was able to speed through it in barely one sitting. It still feels more like a particularly long magazine article than a full-fledged book. It’s full of interesting tidbits and little sketches, yet weak on overarching theme, other than “Look! We are asking random freakish questions and answering them in cool, surprising, and smart ways!”

As for the claim about using economics to solve “everyday” problems, that seems a bit over-the-top as well. For one thing, the tools used in this book are hardly limited to economics. They are statistical tools common to all social scientists. No one denies that given the right questions and the right data set (and a lot of ingenuity) we get surprising and illuminating answers. Yet as to the subject that Levitt and Dubner says their book is about – “incentives that drives people to do stuff” (sorry, they put it more elegantly, obviously), the book isn’t really about that at all. If anything, it shows that even absent clear incentives people will still do things out of misconceptions they have about the world, such as in the case of parents who read to their children in the (mistaken) belief that it would affect the academic achievement of their children.

So, after reading the book, I’m left with some interesting tidbits that I could share with friends at a cocktail party or something, (which I proceeded to do on the drive back with Boyfriend), but no real overarching theme and no real change in my perception about the world. Of course this may be too high an expectation for any book, though I have encountered plenty of books in my life that have done so (one of them happened to be Principles of Microeconomics, from Econ 101b). Still, with all the publicity and fame, I expected a little bit more meat. Or at least a longer book.

But still, all in all, an enjoyable read. It just won’t knock your socks off. My socks, and every other article of clothing, stayed on, during the flight.

One positive thing I did take away from the book, however – apparently, I can be much more relaxed about childrearing when the time comes because apparently, most of the things that I’m going to DO as a parent won’t affect my children very much. I can also feel much less resentment towards my own parents for not raising me correctly, since such a concept apparently doesn’t exist. Good to know. Thanks, Steve and Steve!