Freakonomics critiqued

Dan Davies’ critique (in four parts so far: 1, 2, 3 and 4) of Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics is well worth a read.

The problem comes in when someone attempts to present their view of a question as if it is the final indisputable answer. A lot of the things in Freakonomics are things that I wouldn’t make too much of a fuss about if the authors were just advancing them as their view of one way of explaining the facts. But they don’t do that; at key points in the book, they keep claiming that they’re reporting the facts when they’re clearly (to me at least) reporting a particular spin on the facts. This is the pop-science approach to social questions, because it’s trying to combine the authority of a scientific investigation with the unequivocal certainty of a theoretical pronouncement. What Levitt and Dubner are doing is exactly the same thing that Thomas Friedman does; telling a bunch of stories and then explaining how these stories fit into their view of the world. However, in the case of Friedman it’s always obvious that someone else could tell entirely different stories about the same kinds of people and events and fit them into an entirely different worldview. Because of the way that Freakonomics has pitched itself at the pop-science crowd (constantly banging on about Levitt’s John Bates Clark medal and referring to all the statistical analyses; for fans of cringeworthy exegesis, page 161 of the American edition contains what I strongly believe to be the worst description of the linear regression model ever committed to print), however, they are always either implying or outright saying that their stories are the only ones consistent with the facts, so we can either fit their stylized facts into our own worldview or (preferably) drop ours and buy theirs. As you can tell, I don’t like this.

The pop-science approach to economics is dangerous and irritating in itself (Krugman’s “Pop Internationalism” refers). But when combined with the panache of a seasoned magazine journalist, it becomes downright sloppy. What actually set me off on this trail the initial clue that there was something very wrong about Freakonomics was a throwaway remark, presumably inserted by Dubner and certainly unsupported by any of Levitt’s work, to the effect that “the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect”. This remark is asinine. What on earth are they talking about? There is probably a reasonable working definition of a “typical architect” (though I can think of about five different types of architect off the top of my head), but what is a “typical prostitute”? Do they mean per hour or on an average annual earnings basis? Is there any data to back this up (the only study I could find put average earnings for street prostitutes in Los Angeles, who are about as “typical” as any other prostitutes at $23485 in 1991, which seems low for an architect)? Fair enough, this is really just a throwaway remark aimed at illustrating a point about labour market theory, but surely the whole freakonomicsing selling point of this book was meant to be that the authors didn’t make lazy assumptions and throwaway remarks but checked things against the data. I’m sorry, but if a bloke says “of course, prostitutes make a mint, they do, they earn much more than you or I”, then in my estimation it is going to count very much against his subsequent claim to never take things on trust or to tirelessly question conventional wisdom. And once you start looking at Freakonomics with a critical eye and the view that some of the facts in it might not have been checked all that well, you find a lot of other things start shimmering and vibrating with the temper of a fact at bay.

When I read Freakonomics I was impressed with the storytelling but wished the authors had spent more time explaining how their data justified the conclusions they’d arrived at instead of just assuring us that it did. Davies has put the time in, and I’m grateful for the effort.

[Via The Sharpener]