Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner
#57 in my book challenge for the year was Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It was a fast, flashy read that at first blush was quite clever. A little distance made it less brilliant, but still worthwhile and enjoyable. The Guardian has an amusing digested read of Freakonomics. Levitt is an unconventional economist who tackles puzzles that interest him rather than financials. He targets conventional wisdom, and notes that something becomes convention because it’s convenient and easy to believe, while not always true. Among the objects of his scrutiny are drug dealers, schoolteachers, and worried parents. Some of the comparisons he draws are overly extreme, as when he compares real estate agents to Ku Klux Klan members.
One of Levitt’s most contested points was that the unexpected crime drop of the 80’s was due to the aftereffect of Roe v. Wade. The pool of potential criminals was smaller because they had not been born. The authors wait until the end of the chapter, though, to say (in somewhat murky prose) that abortion is not effective crime control. They did point out, though, what many tracts on abortion don’t, which is that abortion is largely an issue for poor, minority women. Financially secure white women will always have access to safer abortions, whether they’re legal or not. One of the numbers they did not mention, though, is that when abortion is illegal, more women (usually poor, minority women) die.
I appreciated the chapters on effective parenting. They discovered that there was no correlation between success in school and reading to a child every day, the amount of TV kids watch, or how often children are taken to museums. There is, however, strong correlation with the age and education of the mother and number of books in the home. Interestingly, they did not define what they considered success in school. There was a murky bit when they argued that school choice didn’t matter–students who applied in a lottery for a different school did the same whether they went to that school or their local one. But another section argued that young children at poorer, mostly minority schools did worse than counterparts at wealthier, whiter schools. This may have been a distinction in age–young children versus high schoolers, but that wasn’t made clear.