Freakonomics: Scholarship in the Service of Storytelling

Abstract

Freakonomics: Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is certainly popular. Indeed, my search for something comparable took me back more than 120 years.1 Even with the uncertainty about what constitutes a seller, it is clear that the book has reached a huge audience, especially for a book about economics. As I write this, it has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 46 weeks, and having started on the Publisher's Weekly Hardcover Nonfiction best-seller list in the 12th position on April 25, 2005, it has hovered in the top ten thereafter. Moreover, as reported on the Freakonomics web site, the book has garnered a large international audience, and the book is on various best of lists. Levitt and Dubner have sought a broad and diverse audience for their collection stories: Levitt has been on 700 Club (a talk show by conservative businessman and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson) and Daily Show with Jon Stewart (a center'left parody the news and news reporting) among other places. Both the authors write a column for the New York Times Magazine as well as participate in an active blog (just navigate from the book?s web site to the URL http://www.freakonomics.com, where, among other things, they respond to a large number readers' inquiries2). The book comes complete with more than 20(!) pages references and citations as diverse as a radio talk show caller's unverified claim that her niece was named Shithead (pronounced SHUH-teed) as well as Kenneth Arrow's A Theory Discrimination and includes a two-and-a-half page tabulation average years mother?s education by child's first name. The extensive footnotes should not mislead: Freakonomics does not take its subjects very seriously. In Freakonomics, scholarship and the scholarship others are put in the service telling a good story rather than the other way around. Indeed, if the many reviews the book are any guide, many find the book entertaining even if they felt that Levitt's only real message is to encourage confrontational questions (Berg, 2005). One reviewer found the stories so compelling that he went so far as to suggest that Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae (Landsburg, 2005).