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162 freakonomist cheap shots jane fonda y ou don’t often see academic economists blaming liberal movie stars for climate change, but that’s what University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt did in one of his syndicated columns, coauthored with journalist Stephen J. Dubner. (Their first book, the best-selling Freakonomics, was subtitled “a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything,” so it seems that economist Levitt had the major hand in picking the subjects that the pair has taken up, including going after Fonda.) Their joint book offers Levitt’s analyses of an impressive array of subjects: how data can be used to identify teachers who cheat; how data can be used to show that the drop in the Us crime rate in the 1980s had less to do with conservative get-tough-oncrime policies than with the reproductive freedom women got under Roe v. Wade in 1973 (which meant fewer teen moms, fewer unwanted babies, and eventually fewer badly parented adolescent males); how data can be used to answer the question, “Do parents really matter?”; how data can be used to show that your realtor doesn’t really have your best interests at heart. You see the pattern. If the authors themselves say, “There is no unifying theme to Freakonomics,” they do allow that there’s “a common thread”: “It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world”—using data to test hypotheses about people’s behavior within the incentive systems they face, even if those responses are sometimes counterintuitive and unexpected. For instance: people are supposed to respond to price incentives, right? But an Israeli daycare center that instituted a $3 penalty for late pickup of children was dismayed to find that the problem simply got worse. No wonder, Freakonomics says; by substituting a cash incentive for a moral one, the policy allowed people to buy off their guilt on the cheap. Interestingly, the effect wasn’t reversed when the penalty was freakonomist cheap shots jane fonda 163 rescinded; once the must-avoid-guilt motivation was snuffed out, it stayed out. (Levitt and Dubner don’t make the connection, but there’s a cautionary lesson here for those of us interested in achieving sustainability by putting monetary prices on unpriced ecosystem services. Currently , guilt is a factor in leading some people to reduce their ecological footprint. If the effects of conscience disappear when a system of price motivation is implemented, we’d better get the prices right.) If you think like a Freakonomist, “you might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin to look for hints that things aren’t quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it . . . to arrive at a glimmering new idea.” And it turns out that if you think like a Freakonomist, you might package your result with an attention-getting headline that makes an unsupported inferential leap, like the one Levitt and Dubner took when they suggested Jane Fonda is responsible for climate change. Levitt is a recipient of the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the most influential economist under the age of forty; he’s also director of the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago ’s Booth School of Business. Freakonomics has plenty of new glimmering new ideas—many of which are rooted in conservative, Chicago school economic theory. The book presents Levitt as cultivating the conceptual ground staked out by Nobel laureate Gary Becker, “the original Freakonomist,” who started his career tackling subjects that weren’t seen as part of the discipline as it was then practiced: “crime and punishment, drug addiction, the allocation of time, and the costs and benefits of marriage , child rearing, and divorce.” It’s all a matter of asking the right questions of the right data; and—heretical thought in an arithmomorphic discipline dominated by econometricians—“an approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question.” Economics as practiced needs this kind of heresy. Freakonomics wants the discipline to tackle even such nontraditional questions as “how people . . . choose someone to love and marry, someone perhaps to hate and even kill.” The book’s conversational, accessible style and its engaging “did you ever think of this?” subject matters helped to make it a best seller, and that helped get the pair of coauthors a regular (if short-running) column...

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