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.
They also seem to have fallen into the trap of spending too much time with their fans. A significant chunk of this chapter is spent telling us about “Allie,” a nice, intelligent, well-paid prostitute who also happens to be a fan of the original book (which is how Levitt and Dubner got to know her). It turns out that Allie is quite a shrewd businesswoman, who does quite well out of her business. This is only surprising if you think that prostitutes are incapable of behaving intelligently. It’s also just one person’s story. The genius of the original book lay in its ability to turn hard data into stories as interesting as the best anecdotes. This book treats mildly interesting anecdotes as though they were substitutes for hard data.
The real problem is that there is too much of people like Allie and too little of Levitt. We hear something of his latest research — about how drink-walking is more dangerous than drink-driving, or why children’s car seats may be no safer than seatbelts. But we don’t hear nearly enough and too many questions are left unanswered; for instance, whether more people die walking home drunk because they are simply so much drunker than people who still think they can drive.
When the car-seat evidence proves inconclusive, Levitt and Dubner take a seat to a safety lab to see what happens under crash conditions. But why should economists be any better at understanding what actually happens in a simulated car crash than scientists or engineers? They aren’t and Levitt and Dubner more or less admit as much before moving on.
So, instead, most of the book is taken up with stories about what other economists have been up to. This means it’s essentially Dubner’s book and it reads like a series of magazine articles. The last chapter is not even about an economist — it’s devoted to the story of Nathan Myhrvold, who thinks that global warming can be solved by pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to replicate the cooling effects of volcano eruptions. The interesting economic questions here, and the ones you’d expect to engage Levitt, are to do with the unintended side effects of such a proposal and how it may skew incentives. But, instead, we just get a breathless account of what a ballsy, quirky, out-of-the-box sort of guy Myhrvold is.
If the Freakonomics brand has been reduced to telling stories about people like this, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Malcolm Gladwell does it better (for one thing, he might have been a bit more skeptical). Earlier on, Levitt and Dubner are reduced to telling a story that Gladwell already has told far better in his recent book, Outliers, about why people born early in the year are more likely to succeed at sports. In a footnote, they admit they had planned a whole chapter on this, until Gladwell and others got there first. But the fact they still include a few pages rather than cutting it altogether suggests they didn’t really have enough fresh material for a second book after all.
Superfreakonomics is not a bad book, but it’s not a patch on the first — it has very little of the charm or the originality. Yet in their rather smug preface, the authors say that they believe the second book “is easily better than the first.” Can they really think this? Maybe not; after all, as economists they tell us they are fully attuned to the difference between declared preferences (what people say they think) and revealed preferences (what it turns out they really think).
But it’s possible that the success of the first book has gone to their heads. That book was the product of creative tension; they admit they first encountered each other in a mood of mutual suspicion, each wondering what the other had to offer. This one seems to have been more of a love-in (in the acknowledgments, Levitt calls Dubner “a brilliant writer and creative genius” and Dubner calls Levitt “a great collaborator and wonderful economics teacher”). A bit more suspicion would not have gone amiss.
It says something that the real puzzle this book leaves you with is wondering about the skewed incentives that led two such talented people to write a book that does so little justice to those talents. Maybe that should be a subject for a third book, if there is one.
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