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Why "Freakonomics" failed to transform economics
- Anon84 3y agohttps://archive.md/2024.03.22-114851/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/03/21/why-freakonomics-failed-to-transform-economics https://archive.md/2024.03.22-114851/https://www.economist.c...
- Caddickbrown 3y agoWithout reading the article admittedly, but probably because it’s social science which intrinsically suffers from the replication crisis. Fun book - but replicable?
- istultus 3y agoDing Ding. With the added story Levitt told on Jon Hartley's podcast about the extremes Heckman went to, to disparage Levitt - translated into the terse Economist house style (which doesn't do justice to the utter toxicity of Chicago Economics...).
- jordanb 3y agoIf Books Could Kill (a podcast dunking on crappy airport books from the 2000s) did their first episode on Freakonomics: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics/id1651876897?i=1000584731112 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics/id1651876...
- istultus 3y ago[flagged]
- BMc2020 3y agoWhat does DEI mean?
- dmorgan81 3y agoDiversity, Equity, Inclusion. Basically the right wing’s latest boogeymen to scare up their base. Think how “woke” has been co-opted and used by pundits to make people angry.
- rayiner 3y agoYou’ve got the causality reversed. What “makes people angry” is what certain progressives believe and say and do. Co-opting the label “woke” just gives people a way to communicate about those ideas; it doesn’t create the anger. Nor does it refer to a “boogeyman”—those ideas definitely exist and aren’t made up, regardless of what you choose to label them: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...
- metabagel 3y agoThe anger comes from the discomfort that people have (some more than others) with change.
- rayiner 3y agoPeople propose lots of changes, most get shot down and rejected by society because they’re bad ideas. Go look at all the dead-end ideas from the 1960s. Most of what falls within the umbrella of “woke” today will meet the same fate. For example, I’m pretty sure that 10 years from now the racial affinity groups in my 5th grader’s school are going to be an embarrassing idea liberals will pretend never happened, rather than being the future of race relations in America.
- Spark_Ed 3y agoA useful idiot blissfully thinks they're changing the world for the better while installing a Party member to enforce "Equity" on the unwilling.
- JamesBarney 3y ago
- dashundchen 3y agoI listened to a few episodes of this podcast, I don't think they are necessarily fair with each book they discuss. There are, however, many problems with Freakonomics drawing conclusions that aren't justified. They quite rightly point a few out. I wouldn't say the hosts' ideology is "DEI", whatever you mean by that.
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- jph00 3y agoI fail to see how a "quick perusal" could possibly be sufficient to come to such a sweeping conclusion.
- dilyevsky 3y agoThat’s not even correct use of the word
- guhcampos 3y agoI've listened to their whole catalog and the only book I can remember getting more heat that it deserved was actually Freakonomics. While it has quite a lot of correctly pointed out issues, I find the book entertaining and informing enough that it should be read, while most the other hooks they review are indeed harmful, and not bacause of any DEI misalignment in general, but mostly because of pseudoscience. I don't remember ALL episodes of course. I'm not sure they listened to the Freakonomics podcast either, because I find it as left leaning as possible for anyone that can consider themselves Capitalists.
- trial3 3y ago“a quick perusal” ah yes with such intellectual rigor it must be blissful to float self-satisfied above the masses in their “ideological stronghold silos.” nodding to yourself confident in the fact that it simply cannot be you who is missing the point
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- throwaway828 3y agoDEI? What's wrong with a Diverse, Equitable, Inclusive world? Of the podcast, not a fan. Nor of the book. But DEI, that's Startrek TOS/TNG bread and butter. What's the problem?
- smitty1e 3y ago> What's wrong with a Diverse, Equitable, Inclusive world? Ingestion of folly is not wisdom. The litmus test of ideas is the fruit they bear, and the verdict on DEI isn't stellar thus far.
- btreecat 3y agoExamples such as?
- smitty1e 3y agohttps://youtu.be/jKHi__DaplU?si=aD9pqnLMakr49jZ4 https://youtu.be/jKHi__DaplU?si=aD9pqnLMakr49jZ4
- smitty1e 3y agohttps://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2024/03/23/asu-inclusive-communities-faculty-training-discrimination/73050003007/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2024/03/23/asu...
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- fancyfredbot 3y agoGreat first episode from a great series of podcasts. Have to say though that although it's usually totally justified, the relentless cynicism Mike and Peter employ when dispatching these books unfortunately begins to grate after a while. I still fully recommend listening until that happens though.
- QuantumG 3y agoYour Favourite Band Sucks is popular despite most people only listening to one or two episodes before they're sick of the format.
- AlgoRitmo 3y agoThanks for posting this, these two are hilarious, I was laughing out loud the entire time.
- sn41 3y agoThank you for suggesting this podcast. Sounds very interesting. Will check out other episodes as well.
- adastra22 3y agoNo doubt there’s some gems in there, but also some horrendously bad calls. They have an episode deriding the ridiculous lab leak theory for COVID… which is now one of the official explanations according to a US Senate report.
- sp332 3y agoA report from senate Republicans, who are in the minority.
- bdw5204 3y agoThat's a glaring red flag that they're overly conventional thinkers. Independent-minded people were generally either proponents of the lab leak theory all along or were not going to ridicule it as "obviously ridiculous". Likewise, I'd be suspicious of somebody who very strongly argued in favor of "masks don't work" in March 2020 when that was the official position of the US CDC. People whose opinions I'd consider worth listening to are the ones who don't automatically change their position whenever their tribe's party line changes.
- jjeaff 3y agoThe CDC never had any official position that masks don't work. In March of 2020, the CDC official position was that people not working in healthcare or caring for the at-risk do not need to wear masks. in the same announcement they said "Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers" in other words, masks work, but we need to save them for where they will do the most good. however, the Trump admin's messaging was an unholy pile of hot burning garbage, so one could be forgiven for thinking the official recommendations were that masks don't work.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ghufran_syed 3y agoI guess strictly speaking is was the official position of the US government, but not the CDC: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cdc-mask-guidance-during-covid-19-pandemic https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...
- PandaRider 3y agoWhat I wanted (from Freakonomics) was to peer through "the hidden side of everything"... What I needed was the serenity to accept that causality is too damn hard. I appreciated the attempts by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to communicate with layman non-economists like me. I think The Economist article was, as always, too harsh and nitpicky. I think Freakonomics holds a special place in the "intellectual" and "rationalists" community. I cannot verify the flaws in techniques and conclusion as stated in this article but I would still recommend reading Freakonomics first over the dry economics textbooks or MIT OCW courseware.
- skybrian 3y agoI think that, much like with Thinking, Fast and Slow, anyone recommending it needs to add a caveat that some of the results didn't hold up. Ideally, there were would be revised editions with mistakes corrected.
- seewhydee 3y agoThe trouble with doing that for Freakonomics is that the work on abortions reducing crime, which has been proven wrong, is the first chapter and the centerpiece of the book. It's the thing that they use to exemplify the "freakonomics" approach in the rest of the book.
- skybrian 3y agoYeah, it would be a major revision.
- snapplebobapple 3y agodo you have links to the papers disproving that? That result is kind of the basis for the moral argument for allowing abortion for consensual fetuses for me. Without that result the cost/benefit looks terrible because the deflationary death spiral of the below replacement birthrate it helps cause is really, really bad.
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- oglop 3y ago“A recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve found that less than half of the published papers they examined could be replicated, even when given help from the original authors. Mr Levitt’s counterintuitive results have fallen out of fashion and economists in general have become more sceptical.” Didn’t realize replication was so bad in Econ too.
- jdougan 3y agoDepends on which part of econ. Micro and econometrics fare pretty well (there was even an econ pseudo-Nobel awarded to Vernon Smith for figuring out how to do reproducible experiments in micro), but macro is the darkest of swamps.
- immibis 3y agoIf the purpose of half of economics study was to justify political decisions, rather than to learn facts about the world, that replication rate would be what you'd expect.
- FridgeSeal 3y ago> If the purpose of half of economics study was to justify political decisions I mean, let’s be honest, is it _not_ actually this? Maybe economics should just give up the charade and accept its role as a political tool and not something with a scientific base so comically bad, even the softest of other sciences look positively mathematical in comparison.
- Gunax 3y agoFreakonomics is fun and clever. A more subtle and standard economics book is probably more correct. But then it would be boring and I wouldn't have read it.
- smcin 3y agoIt's fun and clever, but is it true?!?! [or if you think it doesn't matter whether it's true and replicable, it's great salon chatter material, but that wouldn't be science, it would be something above Malcolm Gladwell-grade material.] It's more from the "interesting-if-true" school of clickbait. It popularized the "amazing counterintuitive results!" school of airport books along with Ariely, Kahneman. (Conversely, it did have a few benefits: teaching the layman about experiment design, correlation-does-not-imply-causation, instrumental variables.) (The most plausible-sounding counterintuitive which Freakonomics radio program (on NPR) reported was the claim that participating in the FIFA World Cup tended to reduce overall internal corruption in a country, because if the sports ministry embezzled the money or didn't hire good staff and use it effectively (or at the most basic level, pay players' wages, facilities, travel, jerseys), the country's national team would tend to get beaten embarrassingly by their peers, and the outraged populace would demand reform, not just in sports but other sectors. However, better check if that was replicable or not; it should be, because international tournaments, World Cup player strikes or scandals plus Transparency.org rankings give us "natural experiments" every 2-4 years.)
- smcin 3y agoI found the episode, but although it cited some sources, can't see an actual publication with that finding, but other sources plus some plausible conjecture by people who are fairly informed: Freakonomics Radio Episode #338 "How to Catch World Cup Fever" Jun 13, 2018 https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-catch-world-cup-fever/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-catch-world-cup-feve... [5m00s-onwards]" the World Cup isn’t just a gargantuan sporting event; it’s a microcosm of human foibles and (yep) economic theory brought to life." Click on 'Read Full transcript'. In the audio, jump to 11m29s, where they talk to Stefan Szymanski, professor of economics at the University of Michigan and co-author of Soccernomics.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- stevage 3y agoI used to love the podcast in particular. But then it sort of went in this annoying lifestyle direction with very rare involvement from Levitt and had nothing to do with it's original subject matter.
- gamepsys 3y agoThe podcast was good for awhile, but I think they mined all the novel ideas and just turned into a stop on the book promotion tour so many authors take.
- omgbear 3y agoLevitt has his own podcast, "people I mostly admire." Interview format. I really enjoy his questions and perspectives. He asks things I don't really hear from other interviewers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- karmakaze 3y agoI'm not even an armchair economist but when I read the book many years ago, I could still tell that some of the stories and conclusions were anecdotal at best. It was still a fun read and fun to think about. The best thing about it besides entertainment value was don't take what you read at face value, even if (maybe especially) it's popular.
- blitzar 3y ago> was don't take what you read at face value, even if (maybe especially) it's popular. Its a popular book that people take very seriously
- karaterobot 3y agohttps://archive.is/Wlmsf https://archive.is/Wlmsf Great to see all the subscribers to The Economist commenting in this thread so far!
- taeric 3y agoHard not to read this as, "because some old guard economists don't like fun things." I am not overly fond of some of the ideas in freakonomics, but I can't deny the fun of looking at things and trying to tease out explanations. If anything, I would want to laud getting people to even try replication at a good thing. I fear if we only enjoy the flawless replications, we set a bit too high of a bar.
- 7thaccount 3y agoFreakonomics is actually covered in some college econ textbooks (usually as an aside that reinforces a core concept). It's hard to say which one as I've gone through like 7 so far in the program I'm doing. Most of the textbooks I've read have been VERY "cool" and approachable with a decent amount of humor from the authors.