I had low expectations for this Superfreakonomics going in, seeing as how the original mostly annoyed me with its dogmatic empiricality and presumptuous interpretations of humankind's selfish "rationality." Superfreakonomics, while ostensibly similar, ditches both. Ultimately, it reads more like a Malcolm Gladwell book than a popular economics book, except Levitt is competent in his statistical intuition, in contrast Gladwell's tendency to making ridiculous, sweeping assertions at the end of each anecdote he tells.
Emblematic of that fact is the two groups' (Levitt/Dubner versus Gladwell) telling of the Kitty Genovese murder. While Gladwell uses the anecdote as a particularly blunt object to make a banal point on social psychology in Blink, Levitt discusses it in the context of a pretty nuanced argument about behavioral economics. Levitt's chapter, "Unbelievable Stories about Apathy and Altruism," summarized as, "In which people are revealed to be less good than previously thought, but also less bad," really made me think. To me, at least, Levitt gained a lot of credibility in his criticisms of behavioral economics, a carefully developed thesis against the naive assumptions that go into certain psychological experiments. Other chapters aren't quite as strong, but they are a full step above the level of discourse found in Gladwell.
All of this is a shame, given the backlash against the last chapter of the book, in which Levitt talks about global warming. He has been branded as a global warming denier, which is flatly ridiculous, although some of the calmer criticisms are likely warranted. At the same time, the spin that Levitt puts on many things don't fall so far into the realm of deceit that the chapter is worse than any typical polemic; that is, he accentuates the positive and fails to fully acknowledge the negative. A more rigorous discussion would of course be desirable, but many of Levitt's central points about global warming deserve attention, and I would certainly say that other polemics from the opposite direction like An Inconvenient Truth stretch the truth just as much, if not more, than Levitt does.
Furthermore, a tacit dishonesty that has appeared repeatedly in criticism of Levitt is that his (very inexpensive) solutions do not deal with the loss in biodiversity that will take place should carbon dioxide reach the point that it will begin actually poisoning the oceans. I feel like I'm reasonably well informed, but I only heard of this being a problem at all a few months ago. And not to downplay the negative effects of such losses, but they do not have the potential of destruction as does global warming itself. Quite honestly, I don't think I've heard "the" problem of global warming as being framed in such a way, and in comparison, loss in biodiveristy is a tertiary concern. To jump on Levitt because he didn't fully acknowledge it or "fix" it in his solution his remarkably dishonest by those accusing him of dishonesty. Such criticism is also an implicit defeat, since it implies that Levitt did actually solve the whole global warming part of carbon emissions.
This book was very enjoyable, and I hope anyone who leans left of center will not dismiss it outright based on what they heard. Levitt and Dubner beat Gladwell at his own game. Still, I consider the book to be a failure on a certain level, because I don't really think it's economics anymore. It instead falls into the category of popular nonfiction that doesn't really have a category, straddling the line between economics, sociology, psychology, business, and probably another half dozen other designations. I would group Superfreakonomics much more readily with Gladwell or The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (a favorite of mine) or The Long Tail by Chris Anderson or The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb (another favorite) before giving it the popular economics designation. If you heard of Superfreakonomics and want to read it because you want to see economics at work in an entertaining and easily comprehensible way, I wouldn't recommend it. Of the books that are out there which actually do that, I would first recommend The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, which can teach you a lot. Superfreakonomics is excellent for what it is. It's just not really economics.
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