If ever two writers were likely to suffer from “difficult second book” syndrome, it’s Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the smash hit Freakonomics, which made them the rock stars of the economics world. The reason rock stars find the second album so difficult is that the first one is usually the product of years of hard graft, in bedrooms or garages, and then in dingy clubs in front of a handful of people, trying to discover which songs really work. When the record comes out and it’s a hit, the record company immediately starts wanting a follow-up, so the band has to dust off a few numbers that weren’t quite good enough for the original, plus a few more that they have managed to squeeze out in whatever time is left to them between gigs and groupies. Then the record company has to hype this new collection to death, in the hope that the fans won’t notice.
For Levitt, the professional economist of the Freakonomics duo (Dubner is a magazine writer), the equivalent of the dingy clubs were the academic economic journals in which he tried out his theories in the decade or more before the first book came out. That book was already a selection of his greatest hits and the quality control was assured. Aware that people might wonder if they have been pressured into a follow-up before they were ready, Levitt and Dubner reassure readers in the preface to Superfreakonomics that they deliberately waited four years until they were sure they had enough high-quality material.
Unfortunately, though, those four years have not only seen various imitators start to crowd the field with X-ray economics books of their own, but it also seems to have given Levitt and Dubner time to forget what made their original book so fresh and exciting. The great appeal of Freakonomics lay in Levitt’s ability to mine the data for totally unexpected insights into otherwise baffling problems and Dubner’s skill in turning these discoveries into stories as exciting as detective fiction.
Their ultimate tale of the unexpected was Levitt’s find that crime fell in the US in the early 1990s because abortion had been legalized around 20 years earlier, cutting off a significant supply of potential criminals at source. He only reaches this conclusion after dismantling all the other, potentially more plausible theories (including the “broken windows” theory made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point). Superfreakonomics contains nothing as painstaking or as revelatory as this. Instead, it too often tells us things we might have been expected to work out for ourselves.
For example, one of its five chapters is devoted to the economics of prostitution. Here, the discovery is that prostitutes and their clients are rational beings and the whole business operates according to the laws of supply and demand. But why should anyone be surprised by this? We are told that the price prostitutes in Chicago can charge for oral sex has plummeted over the past 100 years. The explanation is that as oral sex has become more available and acceptable in the wider culture, so prostitutes have been unable to charge a premium for performing a service people can get elsewhere (Levitt and Dubner call this the demise of the “taboo tax”). The trouble is that this is exactly what you would expect if you thought about it for more than a few seconds — more oral sex equals cheaper oral sex. Levitt and Dubner don’t bother to dismantle the competing theories, because there aren’t any.
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