“Freakanomics” Rev Ed: (and Other Riddles of Modern Life) (P.S.) by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Read: 3/23/12
Rating: 5/5
The best books inspire great questions that leave me day dreaming about solutions to problems. Dubner and Levitt are like mythbusters for economics, politics, science, or any other field they wish to go after. Their core concept here is questioning everything – especially if it’s considered “common knowledge.” Levitt’s geniues as an economist has been credited to his ability to measure data typically considered outside the realm of economics. This non-traditional, lateral thinking is what I love most about the book. As a reader I start to feel like each new riddle seems more and more beatable – like these unrelated fields can all be approached with a similar toolkit and economics just happens to be the best tool for many of the sticky questions.
My Highlights & Notes:
he approached economics in a notably unorthodox way. He seemed to look at the world not so much as an academic but as a very smart and curious explorer—a documentary filmmaker, perhaps, or a forensic investigator or a bookie whose markets ranged from sports to crime to pop culture.Read more at location 46
“I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.”Read more at location 50
Note: This is the stuff! I feel this way just taking basic econ classes.
As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions.Read more at location 55
he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want.Read more at location 61
Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (although he is afraid of calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable.Read more at location 62
Levitt’s underlying belief: that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.Read more at location 70
Note: I don’t know that this is true but it’s an interesting premise.
“We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,” Clinton said, “or our country is going to be living with chaos.Read more at location 123
Note: Interesting how their predictions were so wrong. Who tracks this stuff?
These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives.Read more at location 136
If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along.Read more at location 137
Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal.Read more at location 154
You depend on her for this information. That, in fact, is why you hired an expert. As the world has grown more specialized, countless such experts have made themselves similarly indispensable.Read more at location 172
In a medical study, it turned out that obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas—suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures.Read more at location 180
Someone who didn’t know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generallyRead more at location 220
It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.Read more at location 256
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.Read more at location 258
in the face of the Internet, their informational advantage is shrinking every day—as evidenced by, among other things, the falling price of coffins and life-insurance premiums.Read more at location 273
Note: What? Edit
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. If you learn to look at data in the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Because there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.Read more at location 275
“Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in the position of a third person, an impartial observer,” Heilbroner wrote, “and in this way to form a notion of the objective…merits of a case.”Read more at location 296
Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.Read more at location 314
The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.Read more at location 315
But most incentives don’t come about organically. Someone—an economist or a politician or a parent—has to invent them.Read more at location 327
a solution to this one: automatic tax withholding from employees’ paychecks.Read more at location 331
Note: Was this really one of Friedman’s contributions? Edit
when people are given a small stipend for donating blood rather than simply being praised for their altruism, they tend to donate less blood. The stipend turned a noble act of charity into a painful way to make a few dollars, and it wasn’t worth it.Read more at location 368
Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary.Read more at location 373
as W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.Read more at location 375
Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.Read more at location 389
teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished.Read more at location 415
If economics is a science primarily concerned with incentives, it is also—fortunately—a science with statistical tools to measure how people respond to those incentives. All you need are some data.Read more at location 436
A dramatic one-year spike in test scores might initially be attributed to a good teacher; but with a dramatic fall to follow, there’s a strong likelihood that the spike was brought about by artificial means.Read more at location 452
this is a less charitable but just as likely answer—she doesn’t know the right answers herself. (With standardized tests, the teacher is typically not given an answer key.) If this is the case, then we have a pretty good clue as to why her students are in need of inflated grades in the first place: they have a bad teacher.Read more at location 520
They weren’t the ones who artificially jacked up their scores; they probably expected to do great in the seventh grade—and then they failed miserably. This may be the cruelest twist yet in high-stakes testing. A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.Read more at location 537
a good teacher’s students carried over all their gains into the next grade.Read more at location 552
The evidence was only strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned. The final outcome of the Chicago study is further testament to the power of incentives: the following year, cheating by teachers fell more than 30 percent.Read more at location 579
Note: Why can they only warn them! That’s ridiculous! Cheating teachers should be charged with fraud. Edit
As Malloy saw it, all his troubles stemmed from the one fight in which he took a dive. Otherwise, he could have had class; he could have been a contender.Read more at location 617
theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected.Read more at location 722
Note: Why do we consider street crime so egregious compared to white collar crime? Surely more people have been damaged from losses related to Enron and Wall St than muggings or thefts. How many people would you have to steal from to reach the level of Wall St. fraud? What’s the average loss from theft? Edit
But white-collar crime presents no obvious victim. From whom, exactly, did the masters of Enron steal? And how can you measure something if you don’t know to whom it happened, or with what frequency, or in what magnitude?Read more at location 724
economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 “Beer on the Beach” study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.Read more at location 731
the same people who routinely steal more than 10 percent of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box—a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft.Read more at location 742
a smaller community tends to exert greater social incentives against crime, the main one being shame.Read more at location 757
(Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)Read more at location 768
“The Ring of Gyges,”Read more at location 777
In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant spelled out for the House of Representatives the true aims of the Ku Klux Klan: “By force and terror, to prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free ballot, to suppress the schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce the colored people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery.”Read more at location 794
In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to full-scale racial segregation.Read more at location 803
D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (originally titled The ClansmanRead more at location 804
Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between the new Klan and the new threat in Europe: “Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini,” he wrote. “Looks to me like it’s the Ku Klux that he is copying.”Read more at location 811
Kennedy would go on to become a self-described “dissident at large,”Read more at location 826
the few anti-hate groups that existed at the time had little leverage or even information about the Klan. “Almost all of the things written on the subject were editorials, not exposés,” Kennedy would later explain. “The writers were against the Klan, all right, but they had precious few inside facts about it.”Read more at location 834
It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)Read more at location 847
Note: This is what children do. Edit
he would ask for a “Mr. Ayak”—“Ayak” being code for “Are You a Klansman?” He would hope to hear this response: “Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai”—code for “A Klansman Am I.”Read more at location 849
Note: Poor choice of code words. Edit
The second is the absence of a correlation between lynchings and Klan membership: there were actually more lynchings of blacks between 1900 and 1909, when the Klan was dormant, than during the 1920s, when the Klan had millions of members—which suggests that the Ku Klux Klan carried out far fewer lynchings than is generally thought.Read more at location 859
The most compelling explanation is that all those early lynchings worked. White racists—whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—had through their actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive scheme that was terribly clear and terribly frightening.Read more at location 868
there are few incentives more powerful than the fear of random violence—which, in essence, is why terrorism is so effective.Read more at location 874
Then there were rackets like the Klan’s Death Benefit Association, which sold insurance policies to Klan members and accepted only cash or personal checks made outRead more at location 882
to the Grand Dragon himself.Read more at location 883
overheated passages from the Klan’s bible, which was called the Kloran.Read more at location 900
the Klan hierarchy as it proceeded from the local to the national level: an Exalted Cyclops and his twelve Terrors; a Great Titan and his twelve Furies; a Grand Dragon and his nine Hydras; and the Imperial Wizard and his fifteen Genii.Read more at location 904
he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.Read more at location 923
Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.Read more at location 951
It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a verity of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a consumer). But information asymmetries everywhere have in fact been gravely wounded by the Internet.Read more at location 959
Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not.Read more at location 962
Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch and Jack Grubman of Salomon Smith Barney wrote glowing research reports of companies they knew to be junk.Read more at location 978
Though extraordinarily diverse, these crimes all have a common trait: they were sins of information. Most of them involved an expert, or a gang of experts, promoting false information or hiding true information;Read more at location 982
For an information crime to reach the surface, something drastic must happen. When it does, the results tend to be pretty revealing.Read more at location 988
If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you’d be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.Read more at location 998
experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear.Read more at location 1007
the agent’s main weapon: the conversion of information into fear.Read more at location 1027
The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that haven’t been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers.Read more at location 1233
“We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.” Economic and social behaviors, Galbraith continued, “are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere,Read more at location 1238
as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.”Read more at location 1241
But Listerine changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. TwitchellRead more at location 1262
Note: Interesting books listed on amazon. Edit
As it happened, J. T. was a college graduate himself, a business major.Read more at location 1348
if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.Read more at location 1384
except for the top cats, they don’t make much money. They had no choice but to live with their mothers. For every big earner, there were hundreds more just scraping along.Read more at location 1434
The top 120 men in the Black Disciples gang represented just 2.2 percent of the full-fledged gang membership but took home well more than half the money.Read more at location 1435
A 1-in-4 chance of being killed! Compare these odds with those for a timber cutter, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United States. Over four years’ time, a timber cutter would stand only a 1-in-200 chance of being killed. Or compare the crack dealer’s odds to those of a death-row inmate in Texas, which executes more prisoners than any other state. In 2003, Texas put to death twenty-four inmates—or just 5 percent of the nearly 500 inmates on its death row during that time. Which means that you stand a greater chance of dying while dealing crack in a Chicago housing project than you do while sitting on death row in Texas.Read more at location 1453
Had they grown up under different circumstances, they might have thought about becoming economists or writers. But in the neighborhood where J. T.’s gang operated, the path to a decent legitimate job was practically invisible.Read more at location 1464
Note: How do we start to solve this? Edit
So if the prize is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance. On the south side of Chicago, people wanting to sell crack vastly outnumbered the available street corners.Read more at location 1472
when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.Read more at location 1474
After six years running his local gang, J. T. was promoted to the board of directors. He was now thirty-four years old. He had won the tournament.Read more at location 1520
This claim would spark a belief that still seethes to this day, especially among urban blacks, that the CIA itself was the chief sponsor of the American crack trade.Read more at location 1547
Note: Interesting. Has this been followed? Edit
“Apparently, it takes a Ph.D. in criminology to doubt that keeping dangerous criminals incarcerated cuts crime.”Read more at location 1697
This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.Read more at location 1759
Soon after the city’s crime turnaround landed Bratton—and not Giuliani—on the cover of Time, Bratton was pushed to resign. He had been police commissioner for just twenty-seven months.Read more at location 1777
a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it.Read more at location 1914
Note: This sounds 99% selfish Edit
the number of babies put up for adoption (which has led to the boom in the adoption of foreign babies).Read more at location 1936
G. K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads.Read more at location 1974
Consider the effort to save the northern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs—that is, the income surrendered by the logging industry and others—would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million per owl.Read more at location 1986
“Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,”Read more at location 2059
The most radical shift of late in the conventional wisdom on parenting has been provoked by one simple question: how much do parents really matter?Read more at location 2110
genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child’s personality and abilities.Read more at location 2116
Judith Rich Harris. The Nurture AssumptionRead more at location 2123
Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author, who in his own book Blank Slate called Harris’s views “mind-boggling” (in a good way).Read more at location 2133
Let’s say that we want to ask the ECLS data a fundamental question about parenting and education: does having a lot of books in your home lead your child to do well in school? Regression analysis can’t quite answer that question, but it can answer a subtly different one: does a child with a lot of books in his home tend to do better than a child with no books? The difference between the first and second questions is the difference between causality (question 1) and correlation (question 2). A regression analysis can demonstrate correlation, but it doesn’t prove cause.Read more at location 2253
Note: Great overview of correlation. Edit
Even fifty years after Brown v. Board, many American schools are virtually segregated. The ECLS project surveyed roughly one thousand schools, taking samples of twenty children from each. In 35 percent of those schools, not a single black child was included in the sample.Read more at location 2285
The typical white child in the ECLS study attends a school that is only 6 percent black; the typical black child, meanwhile, attends a school that is about 60 percent black.Read more at location 2287
Perhaps educators and researchers are wrong to be so hung up on the black-white test score gap; the bad-school/good-school gap may be the more salient issue.Read more at location 2295
poor testing in early childhood isn’t necessarily a great harbinger of future earnings, creativity, or happiness.Read more at location 2310
whether a child’s family is intact doesn’t seem to matter. Just as the earlier-cited studies show that family structure has little impact on a child’s personality, it does not seem to affect his academic abilities either, at least in the early years.Read more at location 2347
(In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world’s best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read on their own by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.)Read more at location 2406
Here’s a likely theory: most parents who buy a lot of children’s books tend to be smart and well educated to begin with.Read more at location 2433
A book is in fact less a cause of intelligence than an indicatorRead more at location 2437
To overgeneralize a bit, the first list describes things that parents are; the second list describes things that parents do. Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn’t seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start or frequently read to or plopped in front of the television.Read more at location 2455
But it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are. In this regard, an overbearing parent is a lot like a political candidate who believes that money wins elections—whereas in truth, all the money in the world can’t get a candidate elected if the voters don’t like him to start with.Read more at location 2464
adopted children test relatively poorly in school; any influence the adoptive parents might exert is seemingly outweighed by the force of genetics. But, Sacerdote found, the parents were not powerless forever. By the time the adopted children became adults, they had veered sharply from the destiny that IQ alone might have predicted. Compared to similar children who were not put up for adoption, the adoptees were far more likely to attend college, to have a well-paid job, and to wait until they were out of their teens before getting married. It was the influence of the adoptive parents, Sacerdote concluded, that made the difference.Read more at location 2471
in his life, he found he liked them. After graduate workRead more at location 2521
Note: What was the focus of his graduate work? Edit
I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong, and I want to devote my life to this.”Read more at location 2525
Note: This goes along with Bret Victors life structure. Edit
Fryer came to wonder: is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it?Read more at location 2531
most significantly, her own date of birth. This last fact made it possible to identify the hundreds of thousands of California mothers who had themselves been born in California and then to link them to their own birth records. Now a new and extremely potent story emerged from the data: it was possible to track the life outcome of any individual woman. This is the sort of data chain that researchers dream about,Read more at location 2631
His name is an indicator—not a cause—of his outcome. Just as a child with no books in his home isn’t likely to test well in school, a boy named
DeShawn isn’t likely to do as well in life.Read more at location 2644
Most Common High-End White Boy Names 1. BenjaminRead more at location 2700
Note: From Freakanomics Edit
Most Common White Boy Names Among High-Education Parents 1. BenjaminRead more at location 2718
A caution to prospective parents who are shopping for a “smart” name: remember that such a name won’t make your child smart; it will, however, give her the same name as other smart kids—at least for a while.Read more at location 2771
Eleanora (15.80)Read more at location 2786
MacGregor (16.10)Read more at location 2798
There is a clear pattern at play: once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Amber and Heather started out as high-end names, as did Stephanie and Brittany. For every high-end baby named Stephanie or Brittany, another five lower-income girls received those names within ten years.Read more at location 2868
Parents are reluctant to poach a name from someone too near—family members or close friends—but many parents, whether they realize it or not, like the sound of names that sound “successful.”Read more at location 2881
AnsleyRead more at location 2897
AveryRead more at location 2898
EleanoraRead more at location 2899
FlanneryRead more at location 2901
there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world.Read more at location 2928
if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.Read more at location 2937
The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions.Read more at location 2938
“I gave up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn’t know,” he says. “I mean, I just—I just don’t know very much about the field of economics. I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.”Read more at location 2976
He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else had found.Read more at location 2988
“Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science,” says Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. “He represents something that everyone thinks they will be when they go to grad school in econ, but usually they have the creative spark bored out of them by endless math—namely, a kind of intellectual detective trying to figure stuff out.”Read more at location 2995
Behavioral economists have called into doubt the very notion of “homo economicus,” the supposedly rational decision-maker in each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into bordering disciplines—psychology, criminology, sociology, even neurology—with the intent of rescuing their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical models.Read more at location 3003
“Steve isn’t really a behavioral economist, but they’d be happy to have him,” says Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. “He’s not really an old price-theory guy, but these Chicago guys are happy to claim him. He’s not really a Cambridge guy”—although Levitt went to Harvard and then M.I.T.—“but they’d love him to come back.”Read more at location 3009
A syllogism, after all, can be a magic trick: All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.Read more at location 3041
“The first step in analyzing suspicious strings is to estimate the probability each child would give a particular answer on each question,” he wrote. “This estimation is done using a multinomial logit framework with past test scores, demographics and socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables.”Read more at location 3071
Other grad students stayed up all night working on problem sets, trying to make good grades. He stayed up researching and writing. “My view was that the way you succeed in this profession is you write great papers,” he says. “So I just started.”Read more at location 3094
Sometimes he would begin with a question. Sometimes it was a set of data that caught his eye.Read more at location 3096
He completed his Ph.D. in three years, but because of his priorities, he says, he was “invisible” to the faculty, “a real zero.” Then he stumbled upon what he now calls the turning point in his career.Read more at location 3110
Nozick turned to the other fellows: “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine.”Read more at location 3127
To Levitt, Becker is the most influential economist of the past fifty years.Read more at location 3133
Be honest about your weaknesses. Has there ever been a prizewinning scholar as honest about his weaknesses as Steven Levitt? He doesn’t understand economics, he claims, or math.Read more at location 3177
Further Learning
- Steven Levitt’s University of Chicago page - http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Freakonomics.html
- Steven Levitt’s TED Talk on Crack Economics – http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html
- Steven Levitt’s TED Talk on child carseats - http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.html
Related articles
- Freakonomics: Did It Go Right or Wrong? (3quarksdaily.com)
- A kaleidoscope of responses to Dubner’s criticisms of our criticisms of Freaknomics (andrewgelman.com)
