Freakonomics

The pressure to give this book rave reviews is enormous. Everyone seems to love it (the Freakonomics website will lead you to plenty of positive reviews), and Steven Levitt is an undeniably brilliant economist — my hat's off to anyone who wins the John Bates Clark Medal. But this is not a brilliant book. And not just because the title is stupid. In the search for dazzling insights, the authors overreach. It reads like a journalist describing the work of a scholar ... which is exactly what it is.

The chapter entitled "What Makes a Perfect Parent?" will serve nicely to illustrate my complaint about the book, but the problems are not confined to this chapter. The authors begin the chapter by chiding parents who do not allow their children to play with friends whose homes have guns, while allowing the same children to play at homes with swimming pools. More children are killed in swimming pools than in gun accidents, so these parents are irrational. Fair enough, though criticizing people for being horrible at risk assessment is an old game and one not limited to parents.

The question the authors really want to answer, they claim, is this: "how much to parents really matter?" And they begin with this stage-setting thought:

Clearly, bad parenting matters a great deal. As the link between abortion and crime makes clear, unwanted children — who are disproportionately subject to neglect and abuse — have worse outcomes than children who were eagerly welcomed by their parents. But how much can those eager parents actually accomplish for their children's sake?

If neglect and abuse leads to bad results, then attentive, caring parents must matter a great deal. How much can such parents accomplish? I would think the answer should be: a tremendous amount. But this isn't the answer the authors are seeking. They want to find "the hidden side of everything," and such an obvious conclusion is not interesting. So, just after telling us that experts of all kinds exaggerate their claims because "an expert whose argument reeks of restraint and nuance often doesn't get much attention," the author press on with the implausible claim that parenting really doesn't matter all that much.

How do they support this claim? Here they find the sledding a bit rough. They begin with a provocatice comparison between two boys, one from a model white family in the Chicago suburbs and the other from a dysfunctional and abusive black family in Daytona Beach, Florida. That last fact suggests that these are real people, but we don't find out until the epilogue that the black boy grew up to be Levitt's co-author (Roland G. Fryer, Jr.) while the white boy grew up to be Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. How ironic that a book claiming to be about data rests one of its main claims on anecdote.

Article Author: D. Gordon Smith

Visit D. Gordon Smith's author page — D. Gordon Smith's Blog