Freakonomics Is A Rip-Off

I was impressed by all the good buzz Freakonomics generated a few months ago, so much so that I posted on it and put it on my reading list.  I finally got around to reading it over the past few days, and my conclusion is: don't.  It's a heavily padded rip-off, and if you've read the extensive reviews, there's little the book will add to your knowledge.  There's no doubt Steven D. Levitt is a talented, iconoclastic economist, but the only rationale for his authorial collaboration with journalist Stephen J. Dubner seems to be opportunistically capitalizing on the interest in Levitt generated by Dubner's 2003 profile of him in the New York Times Magazine (which is quoted extensively between the book's chapters; if you can find the article, you'll probably get 90% of the value of the book.)

I still love Levitt's fundamental idea: a willingness to ask challenging, even shocking questions, backed up by rigorous quantitative analysis, will reveal many hidden truths that are papered over by traditional assumptions and conventional wisdom.  But the book doesn't deliver on the promise of that idea, leavening occasional insights with pages and pages of excursions into random topics bearing just the slightest relevance to the issue at hand.  It felt like Dubner couldn't quite get enough out of Levitt to turn the article into a full-fledged book, so he had to resort to cleaning out his research topic filing cabinet.  My notes are littered with phrases like "a book with A.D.D.," "no depth," "insultingly stupid analogies," and "outrageous padding," and finally, "a total waste."  I don't want my money back, just the time I spent.

freakonomics

Comments

[hunter]

for me it's kind of an even/or. I like Levitt's work and approach so much that i'm willing to ignore that the book is a bit thin on expanding beyond the content of the NYTimes article. For folks though who haven't heard about Levitt prior, the book is a good, quick, non-technical read.

[hunter]

ooops, i meant either/or

[Ed]

I have a lot of respect for Levitt's ideas, and when they break through the surface of "Freakonomics," they're inspiring (not least for having fought through so much filler.) But implicit in the $25.95 I paid for a copy of the book was a promise that I'd get enough of those ideas to merit the outlay of money and time. Not true. Far better to spend $8 on the NYT articles from June 6th and August 3rd, 2003. (Links are to the abstracts--the articles require NYT registration and a $3.95 charge.)

[Your Wife]

A little plug for libraries here...wouldn't it be even better to whip out your San Francisco Public Library card and access the full-text of these articles for free at www.sfpl.org?

I'm not a fan of SFPL's main library, but I really admire SFPL for offering a wide variety of news and scholarly databases to cardholders for free. If you've got a card from SFPL, you shouldn't ever be paying for newspaper content, unless it's a totally obscure or really old article.