Levitt & Dubner's Freakonomics


Interesting, but I really have trouble understanding the immense hype

I'm a few months behind the curve on reading Freakonomics. As of today Freakonomics is still the 5th most blogged about book, according to Technorati.

The book is a pretty quick and undeniably entertaining book. It is fun to set you up with expectations and then utter a gleeful "psych!" while revealing that results or outcomes were actually quite different, in fact often opposite to what the conventional wisdom would have you believe.

But it feels a little unsatisfying to me for a couple of reasons. First of all the structure of the book, perhaps motivated by a desire to not alienate readers, has end notes, but not footnotes. In other words, while you're reading, many declarative statements are made without any supporting references. Then if you have the wherewithal I suppose you can go to the end of the book and read the end notes and hope that your questions are answered. But without that direct mapping of statement to footnote, it's quite a distraction. I read the entire book with a sort of uneasy feeling that I had to take the authors at their word a lot, and I didn't really know them well enough for that!

Second, I know the book proudly proclaims its lack of a "unifying theme", but such a theme would leave you with more substance when the book was done.

Case in point: I hear people talk about Freakonomics in the context of reviewing the book itself and telling anecdotes from it.

But there's no way it has or will have the cultural impact of Malcolm Gladwell's books, as just one example. You walk away from The Tipping Point, and you walk away with a concept you can apply in many other ways. Love the term or hate it, it is now part of our vernacular. Similarly, you walk away from Blink, and you walk away with more than stories, you walk away with the concept of "unconscious bias", and moreover, ideas about how to combat it. It's another term that is making its way into common usage, with Gladwell's book being merely the originating reference point.

A unifying theme serves a purpose. You walk away from Freakonomics with a few stories, and, I suppose, reinforcement for the idea that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. But I frankly don't imagine myself still talking about the book a year down the road.

By all means read it, each individual chapter stands on its own as a good read with a surprising conclusion. But if you're looking for an "a ha" moment, be forewarned...it's not really there.

Buy Freakonomics at Amazon.com

Posted: Fri - December 23, 2005 at 12:26 PM       EmailFeedback

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