The Guardian view on Freakonomics: quirky, charming and far too ambitious
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Version 0 of 1. It began with a question: what do teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? It ended in a phenomenon. When Freakonomics (and its all-important subtitle: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything) was published 10 years ago, it became much bigger than a bestseller – the book of quirky questions with answers drawn from economics signalled nothing less than a cultural change. It sold millions in the first year alone, was translated into more than 30 languages and got turned into a film. Its authors, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, have spent the following decade writing enough follow-ups to sustain a franchise: Superfreakonomics, Think Like a Freak… the latest, When To Rob a Bank, is out this month and surprises mainly by not having freak in its title. Not a bad harvest for a work of micro-economics, co-written by a university academic. And – here’s where a commercial triumph turns into a cultural turn – soon every publisher felt it needed a Freakonomics equivalent, or 17. Before Levitt and Dubner, the work in America of popularising big ideas had fallen almost solely on the slim shoulders of Malcolm Gladwell. After them, it became a boom industry. Readers have spent most of the past decade surfing a wave of titles proffering social-science research to help navigate life. The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life; Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions… further references are available on your nearest table of three-for-two offers. What accounts for the rise of pop economics? One answer is that Freakonomics is simply a freakishly effective work, turning difficult concepts into fun facts and jaunty prose, and doing so with supreme confidence. On the first page, the book brags that one of its authors is “the most brilliant young economist in America”. Just as baldly, it goes on: “incentives are the cornerstone of modern life… ferreting them out is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime… to online dating.” That was not just boasting by people who needed to sell a book – it reflected a wider overconfidence in economics. It now looks badly dated. Freakonomics was published three years before the banking crash, an event that proved there was a lot more to life than incentive systems. That crisis was partly about duff bonus schemes and the likes – but it was primarily about the grip finance has on politics and therefore on us. It also showed up the confidence of so many mainstream economists as hollow. When Levitt and Dubner tried to tackle big questions such as climate change, their technological fixes were often laughable – and duly laughed at. Writing well about technological subjects is more than a skill; it’s a service to democracy, allowing lay readers to glimpse the decision-making that shapes their lives. But Freakonomics, like the discipline it emerged from, would have benefited from being a little humbler, rather more open to suggestions from other schools of thoughts, and ultimately aware that markets are always a political creation. |