Freakonomics is a triumph of marketing and speculation over expertise. Its point was never to be “accurate”, but to be controversial, to which end it focused on

Freakonomics is a triumph of marketing and speculation over expertise. Its point was never to be “accurate”, but to be controversial, to which end it focused on ambitious “counter-intuitive” claims in far flung fields (in which the authors had no deep knowledge or experience), backed with sloppy data and analysis. Most of its claims have aged rather poorly as more grounded and meticulous scholars examined them. On the flip side it got a lot of high school students interested in studying economics and statistics once they got to college.