A hard look at the facts

It's Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner's focus on the numbers that makes Freakonomics so
compelling, says Nicholas Lezard

Freakonomics, by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

We do not tend to read books about economics, or statistics. But we do like detective stories; and
we like them too when they come from an unusual angle. So how much more unusual can you
get - while staying within the bounds of plausibility - than an economist who examines the
causes of things by going through piles and piles of numbers? The result, as proclaimed in the
pages of the Evening Standard and thence on the front cover of this book, is "non-stop fun". If
this is not the first work of economics to gather such praise then I will be, to put it mildly, most
surprised.

Steven D Levitt, who has done the economic thinking behind the text (which was largely written
by his collaborator, Stephen J Dubner of the New York Times), is himself winningly dismissive
about his own abilities as an economist. But, as Dubner said in a profile of him in 2003, "he has
merely distilled the so-called dismal science into its most primal aim: explaining how people get
what they want".

You may recall reading about one of his most startling discoveries. Some would dispute that it is
a discovery at all, and others still would like to condemn him to eternal hellfire for even
suggesting such a thing. Levitt noticed, along with a lot of nervous Americans, that all the
experts had predicted a massive surge in teenage crime during the 1990s. Depending on whether
you accepted the optimistic or the pessimistic forecasts, it was going to rise somewhere between
15 and 100 per cent between 1995 and 2005.

What actually happened was that it fell, and kept on falling (2,245 murders in New York in
1990; 596 in 2003). Various agencies - typically the politicians and the police - patted
themselves on the back. What they did not pat on the back, though, were the abortion clinics, and
the outcome of Roe v Wade in 1970 which legalised abortion throughout the country within
three years. The kind of people who needed the most help from this legislation - young,
unmarried, poor, desperate women - would have been, in all likelihood, the kind most likely to
give birth to the kind of boys most likely to get caught up in crime. "It wasn't gun control or a
strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was,
among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk."
So this is a book that is happy to take a hard look at facts: it is only interested in the numbers,
and not in how we might prefer to interpret them. There is something very appealing about this:
the minute examination of circumstances, the world boiled down to actuarial tables. This is why
Levitt can give his chapters such titles as "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real Estate
Agents?" and "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?" (The answers, broadly
speaking, are: because they have access to information you don't, and because drug dealers at the
bottom of the supply chain are paid abysmally.)

A lot of his fascination is with the bottom end of society, which largely means he is paddling in
the waters of racial tension. Just look at the chapter on children's names, and marvel at what's
going on over the Atlantic. Over there, someone has been christened "Shithead". It's pronounced
"shuh-TEED" but I don't think that's much help. What Levitt wants to know is whether having a
"black" name or a "white" name helps or hinders your prospects. In another chapter, he addresses
the question of how parenting influences children (the numbers tell us that it doesn't matter how
much TV the child watches, or even if the parents are together; and as for going to museums
regularly, save yourselves the bother). These are questions that affect many of us, and you can
begin to see why Freakonomics has been such a success.

As to whether the book will change the way we look at the world, of course we can't be sure. But
it will change it for a while: it'll stop you trusting too much to your prejudices, or the easy option
of open-and-shut thinking. Such as: "Economics is boring."