If Books Could Kill - Freakonomics

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

In 2005, two men named Steven and Stephen published the quintessential airport book. In 2022, two men named Mike and Peter started a whole podcast just to make fun of it. Thanks to Ted Joyce and Ames Grawert for helping with the research for this episode!Support us on PatreonWhere to find us: TwitterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:The 2003 NYT articleFreakonomics: What Went Wrong?A Review of FreakonomicsDismal ScienceFreak-FreakonomicsThe Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: CommentThe Abortion–Crime Link: Evidence from England and WalesThe Impact of an Abortion Ban on Socioeconomic Outcomes of Children: Evidence from RomaniaDid Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?On the Choice of Control Variables in the Crime EquationSteven Levitt on Abortion and Crime: Old Economics in New BottlesThe Impact Of Legalized Abortion On CrimeThe Great American Mystery Story: Why Did Crime Decline?Is There an iCrime Wave?The Great Crime DeclineThe Crime Drop in America10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime DeclineWhat Caused the Crime Decline?Freaks and Geeks: How Freakonomics is ruining the dismal science.Interesting Questions in FreakonomicsIncentives And The Economic Point Of View: The Case Of Popular EconomicsAbortion and Crime in AustraliaThanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Peter. Michael. What do you remember about a book called a Freakonomics? If I recall correctly, the thesis of the book is had my mother aborted me, I would not have committed so many crimes. Alright, welcome to If Books Good Kill. From your episode. Are we taglining this, Mike? I don't think so. I think that was the tagline. I don't know. I've done that for two shows already.

I've done anything. Yeah, the dumb books that captured our collective imagination. Yes, the books that did to our brains, what Jigsaw did to Robin Hood. I'm Michael Hobbs, I'm a journalist and the co-host of Maintenance Fays. I am Peter Shamsheri, I am a lawyer and the co-host of the Five to Four podcast. Both of us are fascinated by dumb ideas

and how they spread through the population. And so a couple months ago, we started talking about how to do a podcast about the dumbest ideas of the last 50 years. And the more we thought about it, the more we realized that like a good way to do it would be by going through airport books, which are kind of like the the super spreader events at this point of American stupidity. Yeah, there, there're the natural vessel for pseudoscience and fake history. And just sort of quintessentially American, you know, all of this complex knowledge and information,

boiled down into a mush, and packaged and sold for 24.95 to people who forgot to charge their Kindle for the flight. This is the seventh episode that we've recorded, but the first episode that we're releasing because I started reading Freakonomics and then I realized that this book is the perfect overture. The quintessential airport book.

The quintessential like wrong and bad airport book. It's like really shocking how bad this book is. And it's also like the badness of the book is also matched by like how influential it was. Right. What do you actually remember about the book itself and like the era? It comes out in 2005. Is that right? Just five. Yeah. Okay. So in the 80s, you have sort of like the Chicago school economists who start to like school economists who start to like, posit all of these theories that are that basically boil down to like, we can solve most social problems with like economics principles. Yeah. And then you get something like freakonomics, which feels like the mainstreamification

of that concept, right? Yeah. Just taking that sort of nihilistic neoliberal viewpoint and bringing it to the masses. Exactly. I mean, you cannot underestimate how popular this book was. So it sold 4 million copies. It was on the bestseller list for 39 weeks. I think an underrated aspect of this book's influence is the fact that they had a New York Times blog and a podcast, like five years before Syria. I mean, I listened to that podcast for years.

Like there wasn't that much else to listen to. It was like, this are fucking Ricky Jervais. And it's like, that's what you listen to when you were washing dishes. I also think the subtitle of the book is important because it's a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. Like this guy's outside the mainstream, and he's saying things they don't want you to hear,

is also like one of the dominant paradigms of the ways that Americans are liable to believe bullshit. We're coming off a decade of disaster movies, each of which has one scientist that nobody believes that's trying to get the truth to the president. Yeah. People love this shit. They're primed for it. Everybody reading this thinks that they're Pierce Brosnan

in Dante's Peak, but they're actually Randy Quaid in Independence Day. So I'm gonna send you some paragraphs. The book began with a New York Times magazine article. Stephen Dubner, who's one of the co-authors of Freakonomics, was at the time a story editor at The New York Times, and he was working on a story about the psychology of money, and that's how he met Stephen Levit,

who's his co-author and this University of Chicago economist. So the book is co-written by both of them, but it's not kind of clear who wrote what. And there's lots of stuff in the book that is based on Levit studies, but there's also lots in the book that isn't based on Levit studies. It's just kind of random.

Got it, Got it. So I'm sending you the first five paragraphs of New York Times story. Oh boy. This is America's first introduction to the Frekenomics guys and like the Frekenomics way of thinking. The most brilliant young economist in America, the one so deemed at least by a jury of his elders,

breaks to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago's south side. It is a sunny day in mid-June. An elderly homeless man approaches. He wears a torn jacket too heavy for the warm day and a grimy red baseball cap. The economist doesn't lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches as if through one way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along. He had nice headphones, says the economist, still watching in the rearview mirror. Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn't look like he has many assets. Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person, differently to than

the average economist. What do you think? Is that seeing things differently? I'm pretty sure that staring down a homeless person asking for money and then making a snarky comment about the quality of their like a kutra maw is a classic American tradition. Is that is it not? If he's so poor, why does he have stuff? If you've taken that headphone money, Michael,

and invested it in an ETF, starting in 2002, he could have eight pairs of headphones by now. I also love it because we're seeing this like, he's different from the other economists. In a story there's not remotely different from other like pretty well-off people, seeing a homeless man in public. And also, it's basically trying to establish him as like a rogue economist and outside of

the strictures of the field while acknowledging the fact that he's a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. He has degrees from Harvard and MIT, and he won the John Bates Clark Medal. So the article wants to use that as like, this isn't just some crank saying stuff, right? Like look how awarded he is within economics, but then also we'll switch and be like, oh, she's different.

I almost feel like, like, remember when like the Trump campaign had like establishment Washington folks talking about like the swamp and you're just like, you feel like you're through the looking glass a little bit, you're like, what do you? That's you. Exactly. Not just an establishment economist, but like the most establishment economist being like, I'm a sort of a bad boy in the economics industry. Who everybody really likes. Yes.

He also, there's another piece of foreshadowing that says, one paper he wrote as a graduate student is still regularly cited. His question was disarmingly simple. Do more police translate into less crime? The answer would seem obvious, yes, but had never been proved. Since the number of police officers tends to rise along with the number of crimes, the effectiveness of the police was tricky to measure. Levit needed a mechanism that would unlink the crime rate from police hiring. He found it within politics.

He noticed that mayors and governors running for reelection often hire more police officers. By measuring those police increases against crime rates, he was able to determine that additional officers do indeed bring down violent crime. That paper was later disputed. Another graduate student found a serious mathematical mistake in it, but Levitt's ingenuity was obvious. So it's not real, he found something that was fake and but let's all just be in awe of his creativity. This runner tripped and absolutely ate shit on his first lap, but his speed was obvious. on his first lap, but his speed was obvious. It's like, what are we doing here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the article ends with tax evasion, money laundering. I'd like to put together a set of tools that lets us catch terrorists. I don't necessarily know yet how I'd go about it, but given the right data, I have little doubt that I could figure out the answer. Small problems, just ending terrorism. Yeah, what am I working on now? Look, I've been thinking about stopping terrorism, you know, if someone can get me some numbers. Steven Levit

may not fully believe in himself, but he does believe in this. Teachers and criminals and real estate agents may lie and politicians and even CIA analysts, but numbers don't. I don't think that Steven Levit seems like he lacks confidence in himself, but perhaps I'm misreading. But then one thing I genuinely really appreciate about Freakonomics is that everything that people will later accuse Freakonomics of, they just fucking say. So like in this passage, he's saying like everybody else lies, but the numbers don't lie.

And it's like, right, the whole problem with this is this overconfidence in quantitative data that is completely stripped of all of its societal context. And that's why we object to this. This is a classic economics guy thing where they act like the narratives that they map onto the data are themselves just as infallible as the data. Exactly. That's a good way to put it. The idea that there's always something hidden, right? Seems to be lurking here where there must be an explanation that is counterintuitive

and fascinating, and people are trying to hide it from you. Right. God, this is so fucking annoying. Okay. You're having the same experience that I had in the last episode. You're like, you can't believe they're just saying it. That's what I cannot get over. God. So after the article got published, it was a huge sensation because of all these like bold ideas. Then like book publishers got in touch. And then they're like quite open about the fact that this was a rush job. Oh my God. And they just like grabbed a bunch of random anecdotes.

I have a lot of respect for being like, look, we're cashing in. Yeah, exactly. And they're like, other people have said there's no over-arching theme to this book. That's correct. What we're doing is we're talking about numbers. And it's like, okay, you just have a bunch of cute anecdotes. And you're going to string together the cute anecdotes with like the most fucking try hard transitions I've ever seen.

So I've kind of broken apart this book and put it back together because even though the book is only 207 pages, they only spend a paragraph or two on each one of these anecdotes. It's like a collection of basically like a hundred cute little stories. I'm trying to take a representative sample of the way that they present information,

but it's like we're only gonna touch on like 10% of the book. Right. Because to debunk these like ridiculous paragraphs takes you four times longer than it took to rate them. Right. So we're not gonna go through the book chapter by chapter basically because like it's too much of a mess to do that.

But I do wanna talk about the core ideology of this book and why it exerted such a negative influence on the culture. The reason I wanted to read that concluding paragraph from the original New York Times story is that the entire Frekenomics approach is setting up this binary between intuitive thinking and data-driven thinking, right? So economics is uniquely positioned to allow us to see the world without all the human

nonsense that comes along with asking people about it. Right, you're cutting through the bullshit. Right, and they're extremely explicit about this in the book. So in the introduction, they say say morality it could be argued represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how it does work. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. evidence that this is a false binary is their own book. So in this episode, we are going to talk about all of the ways that they misuse data. The first thing we're going to talk about is the way they use true data to reach false conclusions. So let me send you one more paragraph. What about the election fruism that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge?

In a typical election year campaigns for the presidency the Senate and the House of Representatives spend about one billion dollars That sounds like a lot of money Unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections It is the same amount for instance that Americans spend every year on chewing gum This was like classic Freakonomics where it's like phrased as some sort of debunking. You thought political spending was bad, but wait till you hear about chewing gum. But like those things have nothing to do with each other. You're just juxtaposing an important thing with a frivolous thing to make them both seem frivolous.

Right, and also like, I mean, the objection to money and politics is a moral one. Right. It's not like we are spending too much money in a vacuum, and that's it. It's because it's like the literal manipulation of society. Right.

That's the point of campaign finance. So, yes, people have objections to that in and of itself at whatever. And they also another example is they have this whole thing, they have a section about cheating, and how there's this infamous thing in 1987 where the IRS started asking people to list the social security numbers of their children if they wanted the child tax deduction. So you get like, it was like two thousand bucks at the time, and you could just say, okay, I have little Timmy, and then all of a sudden your tax bill would go down by two thousand dollars. And then all of a sudden you had to start providing the social security number for Timmy,

and seven million children disappeared from the tax rolls. They explicitly linked this to cheating, that all these people were lying about their kids, and then they had to prove that they had kids, and all of a sudden all these kids disappeared, right? What they leave out is the fact that before 1989, children were not assigned social security numbers automatically. So when the IRS announced this thing,

you're gonna have to start putting social security numbers. Every single parent in America had to fill out a form, send it to the IRS, wait two weeks, and get their kids social security number back. So of those seven million people that didn't include their kids on their taxes that year, a huge percentage of them were people who were like, oh shit, I forgot to do this.

I just can't include my kids this year. Most of the kids that disappeared were divorced parents, and both parents were putting the kid for the deduction on their taxes. And so some of that's cheating, but also it could also just be something of like they had never really talked about it before or thought about it and didn't know

that they couldn't both claim the kid. Again, the number seven million appears to be true, although I've seen somebody say that it was actually more like two million, but the interpretation of it, like what they are using that number to say is mostly wrong. Like we don't know how much of that was cheating.

Yeah, as, look, as someone who used to do his own taxes and then gave it to an accountant this year, I understand fucking it up completely. My accountant was like, what are you, what have you been doing? Yeah, no, I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I just, I kind of wing it and then I submit it and I haven't been arrested.

That's, I thought I was doing it right. But then, God, this is not the worst one in the whole book, but this is like, peak smug. This will give you flashbacks to the kind of dude who read this book. So this is an intersection about parenting. It's talking about risks and how people can be irrational when they consider risks. It says, consider the parents of an eight-year-old girl named Molly. Her two best friends, Amy and Manny, each live nearby. Molly's parents know that Amy's parents keep a gun in their house, so they forbidden Molly to play there. Instead, Molly spends a lot of time at Imani's house,

which has a swimming pool in the backyard. Molly's parents feel good about having made such a smart choice to protect their daughter. But according to the data, their choice isn't smart at all. In a given year, there's one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. In a given year, there's one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. In a country with 6 million pools, that means that roughly 550 children under the age of 10 drown each year. Meanwhile, there's one child killed by a gun for every 1 million plus guns. That means that roughly 175 children under 10 die each year from guns. Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident at a Monty's house than in gunplay at Amies.

Okay. Right. Right. They're making a mistake here that I can't quite articulate, but it might have to do with the amount of guns per household. Yeah.

But I want to take a step back and say, one of the least interesting things on Earth is when people do this sort of like, people are assessing risks incorrectly. Oh my fucking god. Kind of analysis and it's like, are people supposed to know statistics like this before they like make everyday decisions?

No, this is again, weirdly conservative where they're sort of being like, guns aren't as dangerous as people think. Exactly. I would love for them to be like, being like guns aren't as dangerous as people think. Exactly. I would love for them to be like actually a undocumented immigrant, so aren't as dangerous as people think. You know, things like crime, for example, street crime are areas where people are way out of whack. Yet these books don't seem to focus on it.

So, the obvious statistical thing to say here is that it's absurd to say deaths per gun versus deaths per swimming pool. Most people who own guns own more than one gun. And most people who have swimming pools have exactly one swimming pool. So what you'd want to do is households with guns versus households with pools. But that's not, that's like the sort of one-on of 101 bullshit thing. The much bigger thing is you should not be using average mortality statistics to lecture other people on how to parent their kids. Most of the kids under 10 who drown, this is like really awful,

is like it's mostly very young kids in bathtubs. Uh-huh. Another very large portion is in like lakes and rivers. It's mostly poor kids. A lot of it is kids with physical disabilities who can't swim. Backyard pools actually are really dangerous compared to municipal pools. But the reason is not that kids drown when they're playing at a friend's house. Usually mom is watching when kids are playing in the pool.

Because they know it's dangerous. Usually how kids die in backyard pools is the back door is unlocked, and they wander outside, and they fall into the pool like at night when nobody's around and they can't get out of the pool. If your kid can swim, they're probably fine. Like the dynamics of drownings, you shouldn't just be looking at the average number of drownings across the entire country. Like there's specific dynamics to this, and of course there's specific dynamics to firearm deaths too. But this whole thing is just like,

you might think that you have a good intuition about this, but what if I presented you with the worst oversimplification of the data that you've ever heard in your fucking life? What do you think now, Molly's parents? It's also seems totally rational for me to be just kind of in general worried and uncomfortable around an object that essentially only exists to cause harm. Like there's no reason for my child to be anywhere near a gun.

Whereas swimming pools, like swimming is good for kids at social, it's exercise. You as a parent might say, like, oh, that's actually really worth the risk for me. What they seem to be driving at in part is that maybe we're a little too uptight about gun restrictions and gun safety. What they're missing is that maybe part of the reason

that children are getting killed by guns at relatively low rates is because people are cautious around them, right? Right. Right. And trying to like drop that social stigma is just going to drive those numbers up. Right. Oh, no, I'm about to quote Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I don't want to do that. We would do it. Natuoria, I know you love it. You have a mug next to you. It's throwing away the umbrella in a rain storm because you're not getting wet. Right. That's what they seem to be advocating for here.

What drives me nuts about this section and this kind of way of doing statistics is it doesn't give you any understanding of drownings of firearm deaths. All you have is a little factoid that you can drop at a barbecue with the other dads and be obnoxious. Molly's parents don't let her go over to Emily's house because Emily's parents own a bear and they let it roam free.

But did you know that bear attacks kill under 10 children per year? So that's the misuse of data, part one. Part two is most of the content of the book. It's the over generalization from extremely specific data. So there's some dude who's like an office drone in DC and he starts selling bagels at work, he brings in bagels, and he puts like, you know, 20 bagels in the kitchen and a bowl, and it's like a trust system. People are supposed to take a bagel, leave a buck. Okay. And so he starts making so much money from the bagels in the kitchen and a bowl, and it's like a trust system. People are supposed to take a bagel, leave a book.

Okay. And so he starts making so much money from the bagels that he decides to do this full time. So now he delivers like, I don't know, 10,000 bagels a day to various offices around DC, and he does the same thing. He leaves a big bowl of bagels, and he leaves a bowl for money. And allegedly, this guy has kept meticulous records for years. And so he has basically the honesty of various customers, because they don't have to put in a dollar.

They can just take a bagel. So according to this guy's data, it's like 90% of people pay for the bagel. And there's some borderline interesting stuff around the holidays. People are less likely to pay for the bagels. Certain kinds of companies, like people in big companies, are more likely to pay for the bagels than its small companies And people in the executive suite like on those floors are less likely to pay for the bagels

So like rich people are stingy or whatever. I believe that it's kind of interesting like it's a cute story This guy, but like is this generalizable? I don't really know Freakonomics Thinking like a freak. Well, this guy gave me a dollar for the bagel on the honor system. Maybe not Freakonomics. It's very funny to me that like the only good parts of this book are just the descriptive parts.

Yeah. Where it's like they just like, these are the phenomenon. You're like, oh, interesting. But then as soon as they try to turn them into like Pat little lessons, they're like, and that's why you're like, I don't know that we can really learn anything from this. They have a whole thing with like, incentives and like,

it turns out people cheat way less than you think they do. Well, maybe, but it's like, these are bagels that work. And they cost a dollar. Yeah, they're cheap. Yeah. It just seems like a very unique situation that I'm not sure you can really say anything

about like humans propensity to cheat based on this. They then have a whole section about sumo wrestlers. This is another study of levets. There's a weird thing in sumo wrestling tournaments where you do the best of 15. So you have to win eight matches out of 15, right? But the problem with sumo tournaments is that oftentimes people reach their eight wins, and then they're still, they still have like three more matches to go. So basically, you have all these matches between people who it just doesn't matter if they win or not,

because they've already gotten their eight matches. And sometimes they are matched with people who are like seven and seven, and like really need to win. Really need to win? So Levitt runs the numbers and he finds that you would expect a sort of 50-50 split, with people who are like seven and seven, and like really need to win. Really need to win? Sure. Love it, runs the numbers, and he finds it like you would expect a sort of 50, 50 split, you know, winning and losing percentage on these matches, but it turns out it's 80, 20 for people who need to win

and that winning these things. And the only explanation for this is like widespread, criminal conspiracy. It must be fake. But then once, wow, so I had the same reaction as you. I was like, this seems like a really big leap. But then in 2011, there was an actual like huge scandal in Sumer wrestling that confirmed it was a massive

criminal conspiracy among these dudes. Oh, hell yeah. And like, it's interesting in that there wasn't actually that much selling of matches, but like these guys would just kind of meet in the dressing rooms and be like, dude, you don't need to win this, I need to win this, you might just letting me win and they'd be like, yeah, yeah, you're fine. Uh-huh.

This is one of the only examples in Frekenomics where like he was fucking right. Like, Pudos, I will give you this one, Steve. Economics could have never predicted this. Only Frekenomics could have predicted this. Well, this is the other thing that I learned I was researching the match fixing. Scandal, is it like, sumo fans have been complaining about this for literally decades. Like they changed the rules in the 1970s

to try to prevent this. I'm obviously not effectively enough. But like, everyone knows that like these matches are kind of fake. Right. I do think that like providing numbers to these things and giving evidence to something that feels true is like a very important role for academia. But I don't know that there's like human, human behavior there other than the super banal finding that like, yeah, when

it matters to one person and not the other, they're probably going to trade. Right. You know, this reminds me of like, you know, in like, Econ 101, when you learn about moral hazard. Yeah, yeah. And you feel like really smart for a day. Yeah. This is like some of the most basic human behavior stuff that you could ever conceive of, but they present it like they're blowing your mind.

Well, this is something I learned from reading a bunch of extremely scathing reviews of this book by economists. One thing this book does that I think became very prominent in the early 2000s was this idea that like incentives explain everything, right? And if you want to understand a situation, you sort of look at the incentives of all the actors involved. And of course, this book does that, right? It like presents the bagel anecdote and like 50 other anecdotes and it's like, all the incentives, economists can understand things better than other

types of scientists because they look at the incentives But then when you look at the bagel example, it's like well everybody has the incentive to steal a bagel Yeah, but only 10% of people do and they spend almost an entire chapter on this example of Chicago school teachers And how Stephen Levit designed an algorithm to detect teachers who were like erasing bubbles on standardized tests and filling in their own answers to make sure that they didn't get fired. And it's like, oh, the incentives of the teachers. But then they mentioned sort of off-hand that it's only 5% of the teachers who cheat. So it's like 100% of the teachers have the incentive, like very strong incentives to cheat, but very few of them do.

So like, what does it actually mean to say incentives matter? Right, right, right. Like, you could just as easily say that people pay for a bagel because of their upbringing. You could say it's because they're psychology. You could say it's because they wanna be moral people

and they don't wanna be the kind of person who steals a bagel. Like, those are incomplete explanations too, but it's not clear to me that those are less scientific than just saying like incentives over and over again. I know, I just, this book has a very complicated relationship with like morality, and it sort of sees morality as like this weird irrational thing that people do.

That's a classic conservative economist tick, right? Where the goal of a lot of the work is to critique liberal sentimentality. Right, right. In their view. So the third way that this book misuses data is leaping to conclusions on some things while refusing to reach conclusions on others.

This is where we get into the black names stuff. Throughout the book, there's like various examples of kind of weird race stuff. Stephen Levit did a study on, do you remember the weakest link the game show? Yeah. It's like a cross between who wants to be a millionaire and survivor, you like vote people off

for getting questions wrong? Yeah, it's with the mean British lady. Yes, the mean British lady is the host. Yeah. So he did a study of everyone who's ever been kicked off of that show, and it's like you'd expect the black contestants to be kicked off, right? But actually, it wasn't, and the female contestants

weren't kicked off either. It turns out the Hispanic and the elderly contestants were the ones who faced discrimination. Okay. Other people have questioned this because there were only 22 Hispanic contestants on the show out of a thousand contestants, so you can't really make claims about that. But anyway, it's like, okay, whatever. Then we get to the final two chapters of the book,

which are all about cultural explanations for poverty. Yep. Here we go. So, here's a couple of paragraphs that I don't want to read. I'm going to make you read. Uh, they're talking about a researcher named Roland Freier. In addition to economic and social disparity between blacks and whites, Freier had become intrigued by the virtual segregation of culture. Blacks and whites watch different television shows. Monday Night Football is the only show that typically appears on each group's top 10 list. SignFeld, one of the most popular sitcoms

in history, never ranked in the top 50 among blacks. They smoke different cigarettes, and Black parents give their... fucking shit. And Black parents give their children names that are starkly different from white childrens. Friar came to wonder, is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it? It's time to ask,

are poor people poor because it's their fault? Yeah, I mean, are you poor because of socioeconomic structures or are you not watching Seinfeld. You know, there's that problem. The black names thing, like this is, tail is old is time, right? People being like, well, if you have a black name,

you're less likely to get job offers. And then like their conclusion is it's stupid to give your kid a black name instead of like, wow, must be some serious racism at play? Which is the obvious conclusion? It's it's worse Peter it's okay. Okay. This is in a chapter called would a Roshanda by any other name smell as sweet. Oh Shit Long silence

Freakonomics we meet this Roland Fryer guy who has a database of every single person born in California since 1961. And he starts combing through like the demographic data and like cross checking it with like the names. So it says, the data show that the black white gap is a recent phenomenon. Until the early 1970s, there was a great overlap between black and white names.

The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites. By 1980, she received a name that was 20 times more common among blacks. Boys' names moved in the same direction, but less aggressively, probably because parents of all races are less adventurous with boys' names than girls. A great many black names today are unique to blacks. More than 40% of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year. The California study also shows that white parents send a strong signal in the opposite direction. More than 40% of white

babies are given names that are at least four times more common among whites. Consider Connor and Cody, Emily and Abigail. This is interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. Descriptive statistics, it's like, wow, social trends. Yeah, although this is also like a few years before the Great, I don't know how to what to call it, uh, dip-shedification of white names. The Guinness Effect. Yeah. Yeah. We're at a time where the desire among white parents to throw a Y where an I used to be is at peak. We then get a long section that's basically just like riffing on black names. So they talk to a judge in family court in New York who is like presumably a friend of one of theirs who just like tells them the funniest black names

that he's ever seen. They start out with the story of a girl named Tim Triss who's arrested for prostitution at age 15. You're literally making cracks about a 15-year-old who's probably being sexually trafficked. Yeah. That's the joke sexually trafficked. Yeah. Just that's the joke. Good stuff.

And then we get the story of someone named Amchur, who had been named for the first thing his parents saw upon reaching the hospital, the sign for Albany Medical Center Hospital Emergency Room. Okay. And then we have this paragraph. Roland Friar, while discussing his name's research on a radio show, took a call from a black woman who was upset with the name just given to her baby niece.

It was pronounced chateed, but was in fact spelled shithead. Or consider the twin boys Orange, Jello, and Lemon, Jello, also black, whose parents further dignified their choice by instituting the pronunciations a ron jello and limon jello. Now that first one was like 80% a prank call, but yeah, go on. This thing of like black people giving their kids

weird names is like a very well-known urban legend. There are numerous snopes articles about this. This is something that was like huge in email forwards in the 1990s. There are stories of this going back to 1917. These were like Vodville jokes. This thing of naming your kid after like the emergency room where you were born.

This is a really old joke. It's like black people are so stupid that they name their kids like no smoking. Because that's like the sign above the place where they're filling out the birth certificate. There's another one where they name their kids like no smoking. Right. Because that's like the sign above the place where they're filling out the birth certificate. Right. There's another one where they name their kid female because that's like the word in the box

and like they don't understand how to fill out the form. But it's pronounced female. Do you, have you heard this? There's like this urban legend that there's someone named LaDasha and he hasn't spelled LA-A Like just obvious bullshit. I was amazed that this wasn't in the Frekenomics book. It's like every other urban legend about this

is in the Frekenomics book. And then the Shathee, Shathee thing, I've seen this in a Kevin Hart routine, I think that he did. Years ago was the first place I came across it. I like the idea that Kevin Hart is pulling jokes from Freakonomics. He's like good one, guys. But so this, like in a book that is meant to be like data driven, you know, and like exploring the world

through quantitative data to fall for this just rank bullshit that I don't know what the Google situation was in 2005, but like two minutes on Google. It's like, do black people name their kids shit? Yeah. This has been bouncing around for decades. Right. We then get into, you know, these studies about they send in resumes. Yeah. And if you have a black name, you're less likely to go call back than if you have a white name, right? Yes. This says, according to one such study, if Dishon Williams and Jake Williams sent identical

resumes to the same employer, Jake Williams would be more likely to get a call back. The implication is that black sounding names carry an economic penalty. Such studies are tantalizing but severely limited, for they can't explain why D'Acheun didn't get the call. Was he rejected because the employer is a racist and is convinced that D'Acheun Williams is black? Or did he reject him because Dishon sounds like someone from a low income, low education family? A resume is a fairly undependable set of clues. A recent study found that more than 50% of them contain lies. So Dishon may simply signal a disadvantaged background to an employer who will leave it in progress from such backgrounds are undependable.

that workers from such backgrounds are undependable. Ah! You might think this is racism, but what if I told you that they're simply associating the name with a set of undesirable qualities that they attached to black people? Are you fucking kidding me? Did they not hire somebody named Muhammad due to Islamophobia, or did they simply believe that he was going to strap a bomb to himself and blow up the bill? That's a longer way of saying Islamophobia.

Also, how come this is the one time in the book that they're like demanding more data? Yeah, no shit. Everything else, they'll hang on to two data points and be like, we've proven that people are irrational about guns, vis-à-vis swimming pool. But with this one, they're like, let's not get crazy before we start calling people racist.

Also, dude, this is why I mentioned the fucking weakest link study. Because like three chapters ago, you're like, whoops, turns out racism doesn't exist. We looked at evidence from a game show. And now, they're looking at like real world examples. These studies are extremely consistent. There's been like a million of these by now. This is like some of the strongest data for racism and hiring

because you can eliminate so many variables that otherwise might complicate the process, right? It's just resumes and they're identical. And also how is this free economics? Where's the free economics here? Well, I mean, Stephen Levit did a study on this, where he's basically asking the question of, like, should Dishon change his name?

Yeah. And so he concludes, so does a name matter? The data show that on average, a person with a distinctively black name, whether it's a woman named Imani or a man named Dishon, does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of their names. If two black boys, Jake Williams and Dishon Williams, are born in the same neighborhood into the same family and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes.

The kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their kid D'Ashan. Loo. But D'Ashan is more likely to have been handicapped by a low income, low education, single-parent background. His name is an indicator, not a cause, of his outcome. Good lord. I mean, first, he's just making that up, right?

The whole point of the resume studies is that they show that that's not true. Exactly. That actually there are disadvantages to the name in and of itself because people are racist. So he's just saying, no, let's ignore those studies and just get the causation exactly backwards or at least eliminate some complexity. But I feel like this is another feature of these books

is that oftentimes they'll set up this like straw man to debunk. So in this, he's like, you thought the only reason Dachon can't get a job is his name, but it turns out most poor black people can't get jobs. It's like, right, that's what I thought in the first place. I didn't think it was only the name. This is like a little darker than like, what Gladwell does, which is so we, like often a little cuter, like Gladwell would be like,

how one soccer team used jelly donuts to win a championship and you're like, hmm, what's going on there? And Levitz is like, it feels just a little more racist every single time. Yeah, there's a huge amount of conservative, iron-rand bullshit presented in this book as harsh truths. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And again, I would like to circle back to whoever thought of Freakonomics as a title because Black people, a critique, is much worse title. Oh, God. I didn't realize he was a Chicago guy, but it's starting to all click together in my brain. Chicago and bio, he could have stopped at that. So speaking of which, the final way that this book misuses data is waltzing into huge pre-existing debates and pretending to solve them. Chapter five of Frekenomics is dedicated to the question,

what explains the crime drop of the 1990s? Oh, yeah. We both know where this one is going, but we're gonna let them work up to it. So first of all, the massive crime drop of the 1990s is probably one of the biggest social shifts to happen in our lifetimes. Yes.

The murder, the national murder rate went down by 50 percent. Murders in New York City went from 2,300 a year to 600 a year. This is like an actual huge deal. And there's a whole field of criminology dedicated to explaining this. I interviewed three different criminologists for this. So Stephen Levit says there's actually three things that explain the massive crime drop in the 1990s, right? So the first is imprisonment, mass incarceration. You will love this because this is a Supreme Court. First of all, to explain the crime drop,

we have to explain why crime rose so much in the 1960s, like massive increase in crime. He says, in retrospect, it is clear that one of the major factors pushing this trend was a more lenient justice system. Conviction rates declined during the 1960s and criminals who were convicted served shorter sentences. This trend was driven in part by an expansion in the rights of people accused of crimes. Along overdue expansions somewhat argue, others would argue that the expansion went too far. At the same time, politicians were growing increasingly softer on crime. For fear of sounding racist, the economist Gary Becker has written,

since African Americans and Hispanics commit a disproportionate share of felonies. So the reason we got more crime is because America was famously not racist in the 1960s. We hadn't hit that Goldilocks just right amount of racism that we needed to drive crime down to historical goals. So the only citations in this section of mass incarceration reduced crime are three articles that Barry Becker wrote in Business Week. All three criminologists told me that like, this is not remotely an accepted explanation.

Like, we gave too many rights to people and then we got more crime. I want to point out some big picture, social science shit before we advance, just to get it off my chest. First of all, taking away the like, inherent moral concerns with mass incarceration. A lot of what it's actually doing is just containing crime,

placing crime into prisons where it's generally not recorded and doesn't add to the crime rate. Another thing is that when we talk about the decrease in crime, what we're talking about is something very specific and it's really the decrease in certain crimes, generally violent crimes, generally violent crimes, right? We're talking about murders, assaults, etc.

The sort of phenomenon of corporate level crime and government level crime, right? Crime by massive institutions is completely excluded from these calculations. And so I'm not saying that crime didn't go down. But our understanding of crime is tunneled through street-level violent crime. But this is one of the reasons why I think this book has been such a negative force in American life is that a lot of policy makers read this and I think adopted the conflation that the book is making, where it's toggling back and forth between what is the most effective policy for reducing crime and what is the right policy?

I remember when I was in grad school, I took a class on crime and punishment, and on the first day, the professor told us that like if you imprisoned every teenage boy on their 16th birthday and released them on their 25th birthday, you would prevent 80% of crime. That's a horrifying policy for many reasons, but it would be very effective to deter crime. If every speeding ticket came with the death penalty, just immediate shot to the back of

the head, we would have no speeding in America. Many, many, many policies would be effective at reducing crime, but that does not mean that they are the right policy. Other countries, which did not have mass incarceration, also had huge crime drops in the 1990s, which is a worldwide phenomenon. I actually think that it's probably the case that mass incarceration reduced a lot of crimes mostly because you're just imprisoning a bunch of fucking teenagers. That doesn't mean that it was the right policy

and that also doesn't mean that there weren't other policies that would have had the same outcome with a lot less like human misery. And also it's not an assurance of long-term declines in the crime rate, right? The benefit, quote unquote, is extremely immediate, right? This person is off the streets, you know, so to speak, and not committing crimes. What happens in 10 years when they're out and

unemployable? Yeah, I don't know what else to say about these sorts of analyses, but the idea that someone is saying like, mass incarceration is uniquely effective. It's like, what fucking country are you looking at? That's why America has so few murders. Yeah. Right. So that was reason one for the crime drop. He says that explains 40% of the reduction in crime mass incarceration. Reason number two is that we had more cops on the street. Of course. This is the one time in the book they talk about like actual methodologies and how difficult it is to measure many things. So they basically say you can't just do a correlation between like this city has more cops and less crime and

Divine any kind of causal analysis. But then Steven Levit comes up with this unique model that does allow you to do causation where he says after Mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns they often hire more cops. It's like a campaign promise Like I'm gonna hire 50 more cops, put them on the street, whatever. And then you get less crime. The main thing to know about Levitt's work on this is that it doesn't hold up.

People have found coding errors in it. There's like mistakes in the data. The shocker. Other people have pointed out that, like, mayors and governors don't hire enough cops after elections to make much of a difference. Like, you can only really get to this through like weird statistical mumbo jumbo. And also there's other reasons why crime might go down after a giant election

that don't have to do with cops. And then the number one problem with this, which I feel like should be much more front and center in like every debate about crime and policing, is that crime statistics are not statistics about crime. They are statistics about reports of crime, right, which run through police departments. Exactly. And there are many, many things that would increase reports of crime, but not increase crime. Yes. A lot of countries that have done large-scale public information campaigns on

sexual assault have sky-high rates of rape and sexual assault, not because they have more of those crimes, but because people are willing to come forward about them. You also find, after large corruption scandals or police brutality incidents, people become more reluctant to report crimes to the police. That results in what appears to be a drop in crime, because you have fewer reports of crime, and the police lists that as a triumph. Like, look, the police are working, we're reducing crime, but it actually means they're not working,

because people don't trust them. Right. So every single, like, study of crime and like discussion of crime has to start with the fact that, like, for most crime statistics, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. Most crimes are not reported to the police, and there's all kinds of weird stuff about like what counts as an aggravated assault

versus not an aggravated assault. Even violent crime statistics include robbery, which is stealing from somebody through violence or the threat of violence. That's also something that depends on a judgment call. Right. So with the exceptions of homicides, where like basically a body is a body and like those tend to get counted. And one of

the criminologists I talked to you said that like motor vehicle theft is also weirdly reliable because people have to report it to their insurance. Yeah, I also want to point out this is 2005 another big cultural phenomenon on 2005, the wire. And if you watch the wire, you would know that when there's a new mayor, they put pressure on the police departments to keep the crime stats down, artificially deflated, okay? And I want to be a guy that learns lessons about city government from the wire, but I do trust it more than Stephen Levin at this point. There are two separate teams of researchers that tried rerunning his data and weren't

able to replicate it. So the first one just found this coding error. And then the second team of researchers said that when you run it, you actually find more reports of crime, but that's probably because when there's more cops on the street, they just see more stuff. And like it gets included, but it's this weird thing where a reduction in crime reports means the cops are working and an increase in crime reports Also means the cops are working. Yeah. Yeah, so we just really don't like know very much about what's going on And so again do cops reduce crime is like a huge debate in like three different fields

And they're just like waltzing into this and being like obviously police reduced crime, because like I did a single study. Freakin'omics. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ugh. So that explained so mass incarceration and policing explain 50% of the crime reduction according to this argument.

And the third reason is Schmischmorschen. Do you remember remember this theory? Yeah, I mean, in broad strokes, the theory is that, I'm gonna try to be somewhat polite about it, I think, but that crime disproportionately emanates from poor communities and is within poor communities. Abortion is something that is utilized disproportionately by poor communities. Abortion is something that is utilized disproportionately by poor communities.

Therefore, the decline in crime can be explained by Roe v. Wade and the spread of abortion. Yes. So this is from the chapter of the book. It says, Levitt and his co-author, John Donahue of Stanford Law School, argued that as much as 50% of the huge drop in crime since the early 1990s can be traced to Roe v Wade. They're thinking goes like this. The women most likely to seek an abortion, poor, single, black, or teenage mothers, were the very women whose children, if born, would have been most likely to become criminals. But since those children weren't born, crime began to decrease during the years they would have entered their criminal prime. In conversation, Levit reduces the theory to a tiny syllogism.

Unwantedness leads to high crime, abortion leads to less unwantedness, abortion leads to less crime. Look, I don't even want to say that this is like, that there is like no causal connection here. I have no idea. But the amount of information you would need to draw that conclusion is enormous, right? The fact that this comes after them casting doubt on a much clearer correlation with the resume, like the black names and resumes, it's fucking hilarious.

But why, Peter? But why? Yeah, it's a real mystery. They begin with a cute anecdote about Romania where abortion was a really common form of birth control. For every four live births, there was one abortion. And then in 1966, Chau Chescu was doing some like national or Romanian greatness thing

and he banned abortion. So like overnight, abortion went from like, extremely common to non-existent, essentially. And so they say, compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way. They would test lower in schools,

they would have less success in the labor market, and they would prove much more likely to become criminals. And then they sort of lay out the argument for the way that abortion reduces crime, which basically it reduces the percentage of unwanted kids in the population. And so when you have abortion being legalized, so the opposite of what Romania did, it's like clockwork, 18 years later, you start to see these really significant reductions in crime. To make this argument, they have four pieces of evidence. The first is that five states legalized abortion two years before row, and all five of those states had earlier crime drops.

Okay. The second piece of evidence is states with higher abortion rates at that time, also had bigger crime drops. The third piece of evidence is people born after Roe v. Wade have lower crime rates. If you look at people born after 1973, it's like, oh, they commit less crime.

And number four is data from other countries confirms the result. So they say studies of Australia and Canada have since established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime. Of these four pieces of evidence, two are dubious and two are straight up lies. So the main thing to know about all this stuff, about like states that are legalizing abortions, had less crime, and states with more abortions had the biggest crime drops is like, mostly the data is just garbage. So all of the states that legalized abortion earlier had like huge rates of abortion because people were traveling to those states to get abortions. There's no guarantee that those people

are living in those states 18 years later. Right. Right. And I really couldn't believe this. They don't actually track like a rise in abortion. Oh. For this, I interviewed a guy named Ted Joyce who's written a bunch of articles about this because he's an economist who specializes in abortion policy. He points out that Stephen Levit is just assuming that there were zero abortions in all of these states before a roe v. Wade. You're proposing that abortion explains 50% of the crime drop.

This is a huge effect, right? To demonstrate that you would have to have like doubling, tripling, quadrupling of abortions, right? But a lot of the states that legalized abortion early were fairly liberal states that had a lot of abortions going on even when it was technically illegal. It's not big enough to explain this huge effect. And then Ted Joyce also points out that abortion

didn't actually change the birth rates all that much. Like it was like the same number of people being born. One of the weird things about this is that abortion in and of itself is just another way of talking about birth rates. Right? You're saying there's this thing that decreased birth rates among poor people, then why not just look at birth rates among poor people, right?

Why do this whole rigour moral? And also, the biggest thing to me, if it was Roe v. Wade, right, you have this cohort of kids that are born after Roe v. Wade is legalized, right? So if there were 20% unwanted kids in the population, now there's like 10% because there's higher access to abortion, right? But then when you look at the specifics of how crime dropped, it wasn't young people who drove the reduction.

It was old people. I read this fascinating article on the reduction in adult homicides. This was also a time when the demographics were shifting, where the baby boomers were aging into later adulthood. So basically you just had the entire population getting older. There's just fewer teenagers in the population.

So that drove a lot of reduction in crime rates to begin with. And at the same time, you had reductions like fewer adults killing each other. And like the biggest decrease was among wives killing their husbands. Dude, rock. Let's go boys. That's also something that draws up on all these other

social shifts at the time, right? There's like there's no fault divorce, people waiting longer to get married, people moving in together before they get married. It's easier to leave somebody rather than have this sense of desperation. Guys, just getting nice, sir, you know, give us some credit on my client. No, it's definitely the decreasing murderability

of straight men. They stopped wearing such provocative clothing. I don't wanna swap like one cute counterintuitive explanation for another one, where I just, there's not that many wives killing their husbands in the country. No, this is insanely noisy. Exactly, it's just so noisy.

The amount of variables we have going on here is just crazy. And so you would expect for something like this, for way fewer teenagers to be killing each other, the cascade through the population is exactly the opposite. It starts with like 40-year-olds, and teenagers were actually killing each other more because this was right during the crack epidemic.

So it's this extremely weird thing, where Stephen Levitt says, oh abortion explains the crime drop among teenagers. And then people are like, oh well, teenagers were actually killing each other more. Oops. But then he says, like, if you control for the crack epidemic, then we have the effect. Then what's this based on? Control. Sorry, but control for the crack epidemic is killing me. This is too good. Control for the causes of crime, please. But then to me, this is where it gets really cynical.

So in the book, they say studies of Australia and Canada have established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime. This is a lie. This is just a straightforward fucking lie. In Canada, abortion was legalized in two waves, one in 1969 and one in 1988. And the crime drops don't line up with either one of them.

And then the paper that they're citing about Australia finds mixed results. It's like, in Australia, it's also some states did it before other states. The researchers who clearly agree with Levit and are like trying to make the data show that. They're like, we found it earlier in some states, but not in others. And also, we don't have data on the age of perpetrators of homicide. So we can't actually say whether it was teenagers. So it's like, oh, so you just can't say anything. Right.

There are other studies where they found that in the UK, the crime rate fell almost equally in England and Northern Ireland, even the Northern Ireland didn't legalize abortion. There's a review of 20 countries which found no link between abortion and crime. This also brings us back to the Romania stuff. So in the book, the way that they described this is like this perfect mirror image of what happened in America. So in America, we legalized abortion and then we got less crime. And in Romania, they banned abortion and then we got less crime. And in Romania, they banned abortion, and then they got more crime.

So again, the way that Frekenomics frames this is, these children would turn out to have miserable lives. Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way. They would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals. So like slam dunk, right?

One of the first things you find when you start googling around for this is you find a series of studies by an actual Romanian who looked into the data on the abortion ban and then this huge explosion of birth rates right after the abortion ban. And what he finds is exactly the opposite. The kids born in the wake of the abortion ban committed less crime. So the reason for this is all about who was getting abortions in Romania. So the people who were getting abortions were mostly middle class, more educated women. Partly because you would get abortions

from the official medical system, and you had to be able to afford to go see a doctor. You had to be educated enough to know that abortions were available to you, right? And living in a city where you could access them. And so when they banned abortion, the birth rate spiked. But the women who were having babies were mostly educated, middle class, relatively well-off women who could afford to give their kids the resources,

to make sure they sort of ended up okay in life. And then when you look at America, it turns out to kind of be the same thing. One of the things they mentioned in the Frekenomics book is that after abortion is legalized And then when you look at America, it turns out to kind of be the same thing. One of the things they mention in the Frekenomics book is that after abortion is legalized in the United States, the cost of an abortion goes from roughly $500 to around $100, which is like a huge difference, right? But also $100 in the early 1970s is still a decent amount of money. And a lot of people do not have access to abortion clinics, right?

If you live in a rural area, if you're not educated enough to know like what the signs of pregnancy are, you don't realize what's happening. You might have super religious parents that don't allow you to go get an abortion. It would be very odd to act like Roe v. Wade didn't increase abortion access for poor women because like obviously it did, right? But there's not enough of a shift in who was getting abortions to explain all that much, right? The poorest women, the most marginalized women in America were having babies when abortion was illegal and they're having babies when abortion is legal. Right. He's, he's implying that legality was the real barrier to abortion access, but it's only one barrier.

Right. And I, I really could not believe this. So when, when I read the Freakonomics book, Google Around found this Romanian study, and I was thinking of like how to explain this to you. I was like, okay, so they wrote Freakonomics, and then later this Romanian guy looks into the data and he finds that it doesn't hold up. And like fair enough, we've all written stuff

in popular media that like eventually it turns out not to be true when we get better data, whatever, right? Yeah. So I went back and double checked this Romanian study. The study came out in 2002, three years before, freaking on it. Oh my God. So this is not a debunking of freaking on it.

This is their source. This is the source they're using in the footnotes. Oh my God. So it's like this to me is like a new level of cynicism for this fucking book. There's something so wild about this because what you expect from these little pop science books is oversimplification.

And what you so often get is just incorrect information. Right? Well, this is what is so fascinating about this book and like the discourse around this book is that whenever you see criticism of these dumb airport bessillers, the defense of them is usually like, well, you got to sand down some rough edges, right? You're trying to convey complicated issues to the lay public. And like, you know what? Fine. I have spent a lot of my career doing this. It is hard to simplify complex ideas and like entire fields of academic studies.

I get that, right? But it's very odd to use that defense when what we're talking about is a study says crime went down and you are saying crime went up. No one would understand that as like simplification of a complex idea. That is a fucking lie. There's something completely insane about it was 40% this, 10% this, 50% this. And it's like, what the fuck? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's just take a big step back and this is speculative, but also almost certainly true. Part, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's just take a big step back, and this is speculative, but also almost certainly true. Part of the crime drop, I don't know how much,

maybe even a very tiny amount, part of it is probably just cultural norms shifting. Yes, sure. Part of it is probably education going up. You know, like, all these little things, and when you're saying three things, account for 100% of it, you're allowing for no flexibility. But like, I looked into this, there's a really good post by John Roman, where he goes through

like 25 explanations for the crime drop, all of which are backed up by like pretty good data. But like, you can't combine all of them. Right. Like, everybody has their kind of pet theory and you can use statistics however you want to bolster your pet theory. As far as I could tell, the consensus seems to be that it's some combination of various justice system things, so incarceration, policing. This is also a period where there's huge technological changes. People are less likely to carry around cash now.

There's one theory that it's air conditioning, where people were just indoors more in comfort and not like outside hanging out where they're like interacting with people. People talk about the VCR. Yeah, because crime goes up in the summer, right? That's like a classic sort of social psych 101 thing. Yeah.

And the reason for that, of course, that people tend to be outside more. And the idea that things are keeping people indoors more seems to make some sense, right? There's also a lot more people are on medications for various mental health things. There's also, I think a really underrated factor is better medical procedures.

So if somebody gets shot, they're much more likely to live now than they were 40 years ago. So a lot of those murders just became assaults. There's all kinds of other social changes, which like you can't really disentangle from the crime stuff. So like teen pregnancy, teen fertility is way down. That's another like long, slow shift that has happened in our lifetimes.

Teen's are less likely to use drugs in alcohol now. Adult strength less alcohol. There's less, you know, whatever inflation and unemployment is higher and just like living standards are higher. One theory is that it's immigration, you know, because immigrants commit less crime. Oh, Michael, I think you have that backwards. Surely we are. We are under siege, sir. There's the lead stuff.

People are kind of like very attached to this one. And like, I think it's in there. I think it might explain why crime went up so much in the 1960s, basically because baby boomers were become teenagers. And then crime didn't go up as much when like Gen X and millennials became teenagers, like, maybe the lead thing is in there, although it totally breaks down internationally and doesn't really work. I'm not invested in like, it's fake, but I'm also not accepting that like, that's what really explains it. I don't think there's any, like, quote unquote, real explanation.

Yeah. But what they're doing is the equivalent of just being like, you're just looking at one trend and being like, wow, it looks like ice cream sales went up. Right. And crime went down. There it is. Ice cream and crime. That's all they're fucking doing here, right? Just like, yeah, throw a dart at a board, hit a data point,

throw another at another board, hit another, and you're like, those two bang. Ultimately, you're looking at correlations. You're looking at very noisy data on crime, very noisy data on abortions. And like, I'm not even covering all of the statistical debate that has gone on around this. Like, there's been a huge number of papers about like,

there are basic coding errors in Levit study. He uses arrests as a proxy for crime. Oh, he uses the raw number of arrests rather than the arrest rates. So it's like, New York has more crime than Wyoming. It's like, well, yeah, because it has more people. One of the criminologists, I interviewed said that like, no responsible sociologist would ever, because it has more people. One of the criminologists, I interviewed, said that like no responsible sociologist would ever say that it's one thing, or even like three things.

It's going to be like 12, and they're all going to be interlinked. We may just never be able to untangle this. That's a sound right. But then what's so weird to me is like, you know, the international comparisons don't hold up. The timeline doesn't hold up. The timeline doesn't hold up. The statistics don't hold up. And yet, Levitt continues to double down.

Yeah, I remember a couple of years ago, right? Yeah, there's still publishing papers on this. Yeah, I mean, what the fuck man? So he just released an updated version of this. I think it was 2018, maybe it was 2019, and they did an updated Freakonomics episode about this, which think it was 2018, maybe it was 2019, and they did an updated freakingomics episode about this, which I listened to. And again, they find, oh, it explains 50% of the crime drop, but then in the freakingomics episode, Levit just sort of drops in. He's like, well, it might

even explain as much as 80 or 90%. Hell yeah. Well, that's not in your paper, but okay. I love the idea of like a serious academic, and this actually happens, I think, to some more than you might expect, but an academic puts a thesis out there, and they're just in need of therapy, and so when people attack the thesis, rather than being like, mm, you know, that's interesting.

Maybe if we reconceptualize it like this, or maybe I'm wrong, they just get defensive for 20 years, and by the end of it, they're just a complete crank. Well, what's so weird to me is like, I don't even feel all that strongly that like this effect doesn't exist. Yeah. If it's really important to you to say that like abortion is one of the things that's in

there. Yeah. I can't really disprove that given the data that we have. But to me, it's on the level of VHS or air conditioning. You know, it's vaguely plausible. You can kind of use statistics to say almost anything you want if you're trying to explain 10% of this massive social shift.

You can say the decline of vinyl records explains 10% of the crime drop if you want to, using modern physical techniques. So I'm not going to say like he's full of shit. The data does not allow me to say that. I mean, look, yeah, I mean, this is an incredibly complex set of phenomena. And if you wanted to say that abortion is like part of this tapestry, sure, when you're, once you're saying it's 50%,

right, then you need to show an unbelievable amount of data. Yeah. And instead, he gives you fucking nothing, right? Some incorrect data from Romania and some hypothesizing. To wrap up, I mean, I read a bunch of reviews of this book and there was only one that pointed out what an ideological project this is. Once you get to the actual things that you learned from reading this book,

it's like, okay, campaign finance doesn't matter that much. And like discrimination isn't that big of a deal. They have a whole section that I fucking skipped about how like protecting the forests to save the spotted owl is like not worth the money. And like throughout the book, they're setting up this binary between acting on intuition and acting on data, right? But what we see throughout this book is that all of

their quote unquote data driven presentation is riddled with ideology, right? Yeah. They're leaving out important information. They're using data that doesn't indicate what they say it indicates. They're miss citing existing research. Right. I don't wanna set up like a weird QAnon thing where it's like it's bullshit to look at the data or like we shouldn't look at research. Like that's obviously just a shallow

as saying that like research will solve everything. Yeah. But I just wanna stress that this is a false binary. There is no such thing as using data to remove all human judgment, value, ideology from the way that we make decisions. We should make decisions based on values. Right. The book has a confidence to it that carries forward into its readers almost, right? Where people had this belief that this was sort of groundbreaking in a sense.

And I have to say, as much as they present that dichotomy between intuition and science, the appeal of most of their ideas is really intuitive. They're making these claims that might not be the consensus, but are not really counterintuitive, right? Oh, well, swimming pools are dangerous, too. I mean, that's something we all sort of know, right, that kids around swimming pools is a dangerous combination.

I actually think what they're presenting is basically something that is designed to appeal to your intuition, and that's why it's effective. And I think very importantly, they're repackaging it and selling it back to you while telling you that it's science, right? While telling you that it's objective. Which I think is like somehow worse, because if you know that you're going on your gut,

you can compare that to other people's guts and have a little bit of humility about like, no, I say it this way, somebody else needs it the other way, but it's like, no, I'm doing this way, somebody else sees it the other way, but it's like, no, no, I'm doing science, and everyone else is a fucking rube. That's actually like really dangerous. Right, and there's an implication that institutions,

like major academic institutions are either ignoring or covering up this information in some way, right? And that shit is wildly dangerous. Right. And there's a sense to which sometimes I hear about a book like Freakonomics and it conjures up like very specific discussions, like the abortion component. And then you hear all the things that the book contains.

And rather than getting clarity, it just ends up being a jumble of bullshit in my mind where I'm like, damn, that book was a lot dumber than I thought. It really is shocking how dumb this book is. I was expecting like, Gladwell, where you have to kind of look for it. This is also why I wanted to leaprog this to the first episode that we released because we've talked about a lot of other books. We've already recorded episodes on like one of the Gladwell books and the end of history and clash of civilizations. But I think Frekenomics is really one of the worst entries in this both because of how stupid it is and also how like no one seemed to comment on that at the time.

It's kind of incredible. And you know, Michael, you once described this phenomenon to me, the TED talkification of American discourse as a common consumer, I think you would assume that to the degree that this sort of like pop science exists above it somewhere is a level of serious science that the serious people are discussing. But in reality, there are no serious people and they're all reading this bullshit. That is like a very true and haunting phenomenon. But where like, you know, the most powerful people

in the world are absorbing the same dumb ideas that the rest of us are. Freakonomics. Freakonomics. Yes. That's right.