Freak-Freakonomics
Ot the hundreds of articles I’ve written in my three and a half decades as a political scientist, some have been theoretically rigorous, some have been empirically rigorous, and a few have even been both. Some others have been quirky, cute, off-beat, funny, or even bizarre — lightweight but, well, fun. On those occasions when one of my articles has gotten much play in the media, it’s invariably been the latter, not the former, type of article — on the political implications of baldness, say, or the economics of big-time college football or the stupidity, ugliness, and immorality of Democrats — that’s made a splash. The media just love this kind of stuff, and the public seems to eat it up (at least by comparison with mainstream political science, which seems to get ignored by everyone except mainstream political scientists).
So I’m not at all surprised that, of all the articles and books that our colleagues in the dismal science of economics have produced in recent years, one above all others has commanded media and public attention. I’m speaking, of course, of the enormously popular Freakonomics (more than three million copies sold!).
If you’ve never gotten around to reading Freakonomics, you probably should — if for no other reason than to try to figure out for yourself what all the fuss is about. It won’t take you long to get a sense of the book; it’s not all that long, and its chapters, though pretty much self-contained, tell and re-tell the same story, which goes more or less like this: Here’s a topic that economists haven’t previously studied. Here’s a pinch of economic theory and a dash of data. Aha: truth is revealed — another victory for economics!
So what’s my point? It’s not to contribute yet another review to the long list that began to accumulate as soon as Freakonomics was published, in mainstream media outlets, here and here and here, and, more to my taste, in the blogosphere, e.g., a “seminar” (here) over at Crooked Timber and a long series of posts over at Marginal Revolution (here).
Rather, I simply want to call to your attention something I missed when it was published electronically a year and a half ago in The Economist’s Voice, here: Ariel Rubenstein’s hilarious send-up/critique of Freakonomics. If, like me, you missed the Rubenstein piece, be sure to take a look. I think it’ll both bring some smiles of recognition to your face and cause you to think about some issues that are well worth pondering. It may be review material for many of you, but I think you’ll find that it bears re-reading. Although Freakonomics contains some clever stuff, I’ve never really been a fan of it, and Rubenstein helped me understand why.
Comments
There's an ungated copy on Rubinstein's home page:
http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/papers/freak.pdf
Posted by: Cosma Shalizi | February 28, 2008 08:25 AM
Yes. Precisely.
Take a look also at Noam Scheiber's atricle in the New Republic from about a year ago (April 2, 2007), where he discusses how Freakonomics/Osterizing demonstrates the intellectual impoversihment of the discipline, as demonstrated by my own institution's venerable department?
From the article:
Many young economists began shunning big questions altogether. Jim Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning labor economist at the University of Chicago, illustrates the point with a story. A few years ago, he struck up a conversation with a promising assistant professor. Before long, Heckman began to gripe that economists lacked a comprehensive measure of all the obstacles a child might face in life--education, nutrition, family environment, and so on. There was no way to tell if childhood disadvantages were getting better or worse.
He encouraged the young economist to produce such a measure. "You're absolutely right. It's paramount, of first-order importance," the woman replied. But there was zero chance she'd pursue it. "It would take years to do," she explained apologetically. The woman had clearly made the right career decision: No one coming up for tenure could afford that kind of time while her colleagues published a stream of small-bore papers. On the other hand, says Heckman, "How long did it take Madame Curie to purify radium? Two or three years? If she was somehow told, like the grad students in our program, 'If you can't solve the problem in a week or a month, drop it,' a lot of big problems would have been dropped."...
Perhaps the most infamous example is a paper written by a recent Harvard Ph.D. named Emily Oster. While still an undergraduate, Oster had become fascinated by the so-called "missing women" problem--the hypothesis, attributed to Amartya Sen, that gender discrimination in Asia has created a vast shortage of women. In some cases parents abort daughters, in some cases they commit infanticide, in some cases they simply don't care for their daughters as diligently as they should. Whatever the cause, Sen has suggested there could be as many as 100 million "missing women" in countries like China, India, and Pakistan.
Years later, while wrapping up her Ph.D., Oster stumbled onto a seemingly unrelated fact: a small medical literature suggesting that women with hepatitis B were far more likely to give birth to boys. What followed was a series of sophisticated natural experiments, the upshot of which was to demonstrate that 100 million women hadn't gone missing after all. Instead, unusually high rates of hepatitis B had arranged it so that Asian mothers were producing far more boys than nature's track record would suggest.
It was a fabulously compelling result, one that partially absolved whole societies of lurid crimes against their children. It was also a vindication of the Freakonomics worldview. Levitt published Oster's paper in the Journal of Political Economy. He and his Freakonomics co-author, Stephen Dubner, took to the pages of Slate to breathlessly retell her "economics detective story." And then, just as suddenly, it all fell apart. A snot-nosed grad student from Berkeley pointed out that hepatitis B couldn't possibly explain the missing women problem. It turned out Asian women gave birth to daughters at the same rate as women everywhere else, at least during their first pregnancy. It was only during subsequent births that the ratios changed. Either a bunch of Asian women were running out to get hepatitis B in between their first and second pregnancies, or, as Sen feared, people were taking dramatic steps to avoid ending up with two girls. ...
All of which may just be garden-variety academic squabbling, except that Heckman does raise a valid point. One of the statements Levitt has become famous for since Freakonomics is his observation that "economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions." What is one to make of a discipline that heaps scorn on its own raison d'etre?
Posted by: Nathan P. | February 28, 2008 10:56 AM