Robb on Superfreakonomics

Kinda off topic, but I've been in the kitchen and this is why I'm very skeptic of pretty much all empirical evidence and models brought forth in the global warming debate.

I just finished this book and Robb is spot-on.

Books like this are fun for the little factoids they drop, but like Gladstone does in his like minded books, they wrap entire narratives around their slices of research and call it academic.

That's what I liked about Robb's review the most is that he wasn't afraid to call it dangerous.

Levitt, Gladstone, et al have created a kind of deterministic genre of literature that specializes in this imaginative weaving of story telling around incomplete nuggets of data. They sell big to a public that is lacking in critical thinking skills (recall Posner's review of Blink that it was written for people who do not read) and thus their book sales become "proof" that they're serious people who need to be heard.

(Their credibility turns out to be a vicious circle of false premises supporting false premises.)

But right or wrong, they do influence a great many people, and they do much of it through academia. These types of authors would have been the smarmy bad guys in an Ayn Rand novel.

Russ, I'd love to hear more about your skepticism about their methodology. As a blogger, the line-by-line take down seems to be one of your unique strengths, so I hope you take up the call if you disagree with some specific conclusion in their book.

Robb seems to object more to the style of presentation -- entertaining 'potty' language rather than lofty scholarship -- and some of the conclusions he does not like rather than their methods per se. If this sort of pop economics sullies the reputation of U. Chicago, let Levitt's colleagues make the case. As for the conclusions he dislikes, they don't seem so outlandish. One example: Chemotherapy ineffective? Perhaps false, but certainly plausible; I expect Robin Hanson would agree that the marginal benefit of chemotherapy is zero or negative for many types of cancers.

Empiricism is very useful. But disentangling the line of causality requires more than raw data. It requires UNDERSTANDING. That means context and, yes, some level of theory against which to test that understanding.

Love the analogy of cooking, Russ. Recipe in a book vs. Execution is a brilliant metaphor for the hubris of distance experts vs. the experiential local knowledge of practitioners.

There is also an article by Ariel Rubinstein in the Economists' Voice, Volume 3, Issue 9, Article 7 (year 2006) commenting on Freakonomics.
Of course, Ariel Rubinstein is a die-hard game theorist, thus his comment need to be taken with a grain of salt. But still....

The argument that Freakonomics is not good economic/econometric analysis is not new. There is an article in The New Republic, by Noam Scheiber, critcially evaluating Freakonomics. It is here:
http://www.tnr.com/article/freaks-and-geeks-how...

Manfred

I've admired the idea behind "Freakonomics" of making more people think economically, but I have also been concerned about their easy use of econometrics to prove a prior opinion held by the researcher. Prior opinion: Unwanted children lead to unloved children lead to criminal behaviour. Then do a regression that appears to prove it and write a paper that makes headlines in all the leading newspapers because it confirms journalists' prior opinions. However, numerous research papers have examined the flaws in that original paper and found no connection. A recent paper from NBER summarizes those findings:
"Abortion and Crime: A Review", by Theodore J. Joyce, NBER Working Paper No. 15098, June 2009.

Having read the book and the Solman article, I can only conclude that Mr. Solman hates Levitt, and tries to discredit or ridicule him as much as possible. What a humourless idiot.

The article is by Robb, not Solman. Solman was just my source for the article.

Sorry to Mr. Solman. Seems I can't edit my post though.

I haven't read Superfreakonomics yet, but that was exactly my take on Freakonomics. It was a very interesting and intriguing read, but I wouldn't commit to believing any of it. It was clever, innovative, well argued, thought-provoking, and of course fun to read. That's a contribution in and of itself. Doesn't always make it accurate.

There's another downside to the natural experiment/IV mentality. Not only do few people usually believe it outside of the authors and a small group of followers - but it also drives research in directions that are amenable to natural experiments or IV models. Research should be dictated by what knowledge is important for us to have. It shouldn't be dictated by how it allows us to cleverly identify a model.