A Wealth of Notions

I will admit that I rolled my eyes. Behold the Freakonomist! "Politically incorrect in the best, most essential way," the blurb said. The work of an allegedly "rogue economist," who goes out of his way in the first few pages to say he is "afraid of calculus" and does not know how to do the ory. Amazing! Incidentally, this particular rogue trained at Harvard and MIT, was at the Harvard Society of Fellows, won the John Bates Clark medal and teaches at the University of Chicago. Moreover, since the book's publication in 2005, Freakonomics has become an enormous best seller, enjoying widespread media coverage, a widely-linked website, and a regular column in the New York Times. All of which makes Steven Levitt an interesting kind of maverick. If only my own fear of calculus had pro pelled me towards the same peripheries. But there is little point in carping. Steven Levitt does very high-quality work that is reliably provocative, almost always in a productive sort of way. The packaging of the book?the silly title, the effort to distance the contents from the everyday work of the dismal science, the song-and-dance to make Levitt himself seem a little, well, freakish?is mostly the result of getting a journalist and a marketing department on board. It may also be a consequence of turn ing out the goods a little too fast. The book itself is a bit thin. Yet the underlying material matters both because it is substantively interesting and because it exemplifies a kind of applied economics that is becoming increasingly prevalent. Levitt is less freak and more foreshadow, an exam ple of what the future may hold not just for the practice of economics, but for social science more generally. Sociologists should pay attention to the substance of what he is doing, and then ask whether we think we have something better to offer in response.