Freakonomics

I'm going to do much more writing this year. I am also going to do more reading. I hope that these two statements would be true, even if I wasn't writing my dissertation this year. On this blog, I want to write up thoughts about what I'm reading, things that might show up in my dissertation, and things that have nothing at all to do with my dissertation.

Speaking of my dissertation, I'm defending my prospectus next Wednesday afternoon, so a week from now, I plan to be ABD (All But Dissertation)!

The first write-up of the year is Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics. This book originally came out in October 2006, but was a gift this year for Christmas twice.* I thoroughly enjoyed the book, as the writers search to question conventional wisdom on a range of topics. They are great writers, writing in a fun, accessible way, while dealing with topics that are normally considered unaccessible by non-academics.

They state that conventional wisdom (according to a guy named Galbraith) "must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting." If you look closely at that definition, the word "true" is nowhere to be found. It was interesting to watch them address some of our ideas (like a house with a gun is more dangerous than a house with a pool) and show how conventional wisdom is not based on facts as much as it is on risk avoidance. Risk is defined as "hazard + outrage", in that when we think of risk, we're not just thinking about the hazard involved, but also the outrage that is felt if that event were to occur. So when we think about a child drowning in a pool, we feel sad, but not necessarily outraged. However, when we think about a child dying in a gun accident, the horror drastically increases the outrage we feel. So even though a child is 100 times more likely to drown in a pool (about 1 in 10,000 chance) than in a gun accident (about 1 in a million), we work much harder to increase gun safety and feel much more leery about sending children to a house with a gun than we do to institute things that would drive down the number of children who drown in a pool each year. The authors argue not that taking a stand against guns in houses is wrong, but rather, the reasons most people hold for taking such a stand are misguided.

The authors are very careful to discuss the difference between a strong correlation and causation, and tend to stick to strong correlations more often than not. However, time and time again we see that conventional wisdom, while it may feel good, is not always true.

I'm wondering how (or if) this book could fit into an Introduction to Philosophy class. I'm presently looking at using David Dark's The Sacredness of Questioning Everything in a class next spring as a way of encouraging students to realize that we must be willing to ask questions, even questions that may initially seem ridiculous, if we are going to arrive at truth (and that we should always work to arrive at truth). It seems like Freakonomics would be a book that could do a similar job.

Regardless, Freakonomics is a great book that I would recommend to most anyone! The authors published a sequel (Superfreakonomics) that came out this past fall (and which I ordered for myself on Amazon.com today for $12). If you want a book that will make you think and laugh at the same time, Freakonomics is for you.

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*My wife and mother-in-law both independently came up with the idea of getting it for me for Christmas. However, by the time my mother-in-law gave it to me, I was almost done with the copy from my wife.