Blink Again

FREAKONOMICS: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Morrow, 242 pp.

In 2003, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Steven Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His work was both honored by his peers -- he had won a medal given to the best economist under 40 -- and curiously marginal to his profession's normal concerns. In particular, he seemed to have a knack for asking questions that turned standard ideas about economic rationality on their head.

It is common sense, for example, to think that a Realtor and a client have the same interest in selling a house; namely, getting the best price. The more it sells for, the larger the commission. Right? But Levitt noticed that Realtors selling their own houses tended to leave them on the market longer - and to sell them at a higher price - than they did for clients. A closer look at the situation revealed the reason. Beyond a certain point, the percentage earned by commission was too small an incentive to make up for the work involved in showing a house.

Levitt's other work explored a collage of odd topics. He developed a statistical method to flush out cheating on standardized tests. He tried to figure out why so many crack dealers lived with their mothers. (In short, the business is profitable only for the kingpins; street vendors earn roughly minimum wage.) And in his most controversial paper, he tried to account for the sharp downturn of violent crime in the 1990s, often attributed to the economic boom. Instead, Levitt said, it was a side effect of Roe v. Wade, which had reduced the number of poor, unwanted kids likely to grow up into thugs.

An engrossing article, it stressed, as such profiles usually do, personality more than theory. The author, Stephen Dubner, also writes for The New Yorker. He portrayed Levitt as a noticeably, if not floridly, eccentric fellow, admired by his colleagues yet also something of an enigma. And it left the reader feeling puzzled as well, for it wasn't quite clear how Levitt's different projects held together. Was there a method to the quirkiness?

Now we have an answer, of sorts, in Freakonomics, a book that combines Levitt's ideas with Dubner's prose. Due credit should also be given to a third party, Malcolm Gladwell, who provides a blurb appearing on both the front and back covers. And he might as well have a trademark on every page in between: The familiar Gladwell manner -- a kind of breezy drifting from one entertaining anecdote to the next, floating effortlessly past references to contemporary social-science research -- gets recycled here into what can only be called a style of evasive lucidity.

Any 10 pages of Freakonomics would be the equivalent of a really good newspaper article explaining, say, how to analyze the results of the sumo playoffs in Japan in order to determine whether some wrestlers took a fall. Or how the revelation of secret passwords on a radio program damaged the Ku Klux Klan's ability to collect the dues that made the Invisible Empire a successful business. Or the rise and fall of popular baby names.

But as each idiosyncratic inquiry gives way to the next, no logical pattern takes shape. A reasonably bright 12-year-old might feel condescended to by some accounts of the analytical tools that Levitt uses. One of the most important, the statistical method called regression analysis, is explained only two thirds of the way through the book. The writing is so smooth that it seldom gives traction to anything worth calling a concept, at least beyond the notion that the conventional wisdom is often wrong (itself a piece of conventional wisdom).

My sense is that Levitt does have an idea, which goes something like this. The market is (as one school of economics has it) a rational system in which price serves as a signal allowing the exchange of information about the availability and best allotment of resources. But other kinds of information are also part of the market -- and some forms of information are scarce, hence valuable. Thus, there is an incentive to keep that information scarce. Someone armed with the right insights, however, could account for seemingly irrational aspects of the system by finding the regularities beneath the surface.

Elements of this idea are dispersed throughout the text like bits of marshmallow embedded in a gelatin dessert. And the effect on mental nutrition is comparable.

Oddly enough, Freakonomics comes without an endorsement by Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago who is Levitt's colleague and friend. The only blurbs are by Gladwell ("prepare to be dazzled") and a National Public Radio host named Kurt Andersen ("bracing fun of the highest order").