Good and bad

I was really looking forward to reading 'Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything' by Stephen Levitt, and perhaps crucially a sycophantic journalist called Stephen Dubner. And no, I'm not going to put an Amazon link in to the book, if you must buy the overrated tosh don't do it from those gouging scumbags. Unfortunately the book turned out to be largely trite and obvious. My suspiciouns were aroused when they spent considerable time in the introduction explaining why estate agents might not always be looking for the best price for your house if they were selling it and then spending quite a lot more space congratulating themselves on being able to reach such counterintuitive results by parsing the data. If you hadn't copped that estate agents are more concerned with a quick sale than the couple of percent they might make on hanging in there for a couple of weeks and the odd ten thousand you might possibly benefit from this book. Grown adults need not hang around. To be fair the chapter on the effect legalising abortion had on crime in the US (and elsewhere) was interesting.The reason I got the book was the chapter on the economic effect of the name you gave your child. I've long been idly interested in the naming of children, particularly among minority ethnic groups, and particularly with regard to the greater naming diversity and the greater likelihood of an ethnically distinct name being given to girls so it was nice to have someone grep the data on it.

But much of the book was so trite it was beyond belief. Teachers will lie, apparantly, if they are given bonuses if their class perform well in easily fakeable tests. Wow. Drug dealers live with their mas and don't make much money (as a gamble on rising through the ranks and making money that most of them never get to) whoopeedoo Stephen: I've lived in one hood or another all my adult life and that is simply a truism. Levitt may have had access to really good source material (and the story of the sociologist who got it is interesting) but to present this truism as if it were a radical rethink is so disingenuous as to really stick in my craw. We have access to academic journals Stephens: we can tell when you're telling porky pies. Sumo wrestlers, he believes he has proven, cheat as a matter of norm. Hmmm. It's actually a lot more complicated than that in high level sports. I remember in the last European championship when Denmark and Sweden needed a hugely unlikely three all draw or something for both to go through. As Liam Brady said, the bookies are making it odds on: it will happen. He was asked would they be cheating and he said. I don't need to think about that, the result will happen if the bookies say it will. I watched the match and it was a genuinely full blooded, hard fought, desparate clearances, unexpected forward play thriller. Three all of course. I swear they weren't cheating. It's a lot more subtle than that.

Anyway, this wouldn't annoy me except that a substantial part of the book is devoted to pages, usually quoted from elsewhere, about what a wonderful maverick genius Stephen Levitt is. 'Levitt fits in everywhere and nowhere. 'He is a noetic* butterfly that no one has pinned down... but who is claimed by all. He has come to be acknowledged as the master of the simple , clever solution. He is the guy who, in the slapstick scenario, sees all the engineers futzing with a broken machine - and then realises no one has thought to plug it in'. Let's get this straight: rogue from what? He's a bog standard social scientist. And a chronic and disgusting self congratulator. I'll blame the journalist maybe, and then the editor for allowing this cack out. But the bottom line is you have to take the blame for your own disgusting and unjustified hubris Levitt.

Learn some humility and ditch the coauthor. You should be ashamed of yourself.



* Of, relating to, originating in, or apprehended by the intellect. [Greek notikos, from nosis, understanding. See noesis.] I had to look it up. Intellectual would suffice just as well but it would make the author of that piece not appear smarter than you or I. This is what I call the Tom Wolfe approach to vocabulary: the only thing I'm communicating with it is how smart I am. And Tom, hilariously, sometimes makes mistakes, because he genuinely does swallow a dictionary (or more accurately an architectural/archeological survey glossary) and regurtitate it without knowing what he is saying in from Bauhaus to our house.