Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics and Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One are two books one could actually judge by their covers. Sowell’s cover has an academic aesthetic, solidly colored with strong font, and so, he tackles fundamental economic problems in human society, like housing costs, racism, and discrimination. Levitt’s cover is adorned with a graphic design of an apple-orange fruit hybrid, alluding to the seemingly random, and absolutely freakish comparisons he draws between independent events, like Chicago school-board testing and Japanese sumo wrestling. 

 

Fundamentally, Sowell’s book is about the methodology of economics, really about asking the right questions; Levitt’s book is about the fruits of economics, the answers that come out of research, more than the methods that went into it.

 

Covers are, of course, not products of the author, who writes the argument, but the publisher, who sells the book. Appropriately, Sowell’s book required a Borders’ assistant to track it down for me. After I purchased it, there were exactly zero copies remaining in the store. Freakonomics was purchased at that intellectual bastion known as Target, for 30% off the cover price. One copy was taken off the large display case, dwarfed only by J.K. Rowling’s juggernaut, Harry Potter, Episode 6. That Levitt’s book is popular, while Sowell’s is mired in obscurity, here elucidates another axiom – though one more elite and academic than Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover – that political scientists champion: Voters are illogical. 

 

Freakonomics, as it attempts to find truth in messy situations, becomes an example of truth itself: Books are usually bought for entertainment. In that respect, it is indeed a success. Debating with your friends whether a gun is safer than a pool is fun. So is explaining how real estate agents cost you more money than just their commissions.

 

To be sure, Freakonomics is fun, and its topics will make us sound smart, but Sowell wrote a better book that, by teaching methodology, not just sharing discoveries, will actually make us think smarter. Because Sowell takes us into the thinking process, we can learn from his methods and then repeat them in our own public policy analysis. Thinking is the skill required for thoughtful analysis, not just sheer intelligence or knowledge, which are accumulations of ideas, not creative processes.

 

Ostensibly both books are textbooks, articulating methodologies of scientific truth. Levitt is retrospective, looking at the data from the past to explain the present, like abortion rates that determine the young violent male criminal cohort of society; where Sowell is prospective, using what we know of the past to predict what future our actions will cause, like examining Jackie Robinson’s breaking the baseball color barrier to explain that wherever black labor is competitive, that blacks should not suffer from racial discrimination. Levitt’s basis for writing an engaging book is fundamentally correct: Common knowledge has a tendency to be wrong. Since common knowledge is concerned with likable explanations, which form rather easily, instead of thorough explanations, it is susceptible to subjective preferences, where it should reflect absolute truth. 

 

Ultimately, Levitt and Sowell’s works are scientific ventures which is based on the foundation of good methods, basic principles, and repeatable results. This is where the authors diverge. Sowell the victor; Levitt the failure.

 

Sowell imparts his methodology to the reader, as his teacher taught it to him. Consider simply the questions, what will happen next? And then? And then? Methodology need not be complicated, in fact, it should not. Sowell then takes broad important topics and elaborated on the consequences beyond stage one. 

 

Affirmative action has no bearing on professional sports, where blacks dominate – since their labor is higher skilled than their white counterparts.   A slave’s status was more complicated than the Hegelian master relationship -- as they were often based on the quality of their labor, better treated than ‘free’ persons such as Irishmen, whose labor was cheaper and more replaceable.   NYC tax-and-spend policies have driven away businesses for the benefits of municipal benefits – since up and coming businesses opt for lower-taxed regions to set up shop. Rent-controlled apartments protect the interest of poor people without housing – since they limit housing available on the open market which inflates the price of the lowered supply. Medical care policies, and their obstructive litigation and insurance, hurt the quality of medical care at the expense of society – since multiple visits, which are logistically cumbersome, are incentivised over the simple single visit. 

 

These are repeatable exercises prompting my own exploration of road construction. After the road is built, what happens? And then what? And then what? Of course, the answers we produce are not necessarily correct, but the right questions are nonetheless the first step towards constructing good answers. As a methodologist would say: Ask the wrong questions and you get the wrong answers.

 

Conversely, Levitt’s book is an adventure through the eccentric imagination of a singular genius. It offers only as much methodology to the common reader as does its rival, Mr. Potter, offer practical lessons in magic tricks. The answers, much less the questions, are unique constructions forged in a unique mind. Hardly reproducible. Before I’m trampled for critiquing genius itself, it should be well-noted that the titans of scientific thought – Newton, Einstein, Darwin – all produced work commonly understood by undergraduate-level intellects, much less actively practiced. In fact, Darwin remains an influence, even in his original 19^th century text, because not only is he readable, but he extensively documents his methodology, effectively teaching others how to think like him.

 

Levitt offers no democratizing methodology. If he succeeds at finding truth himself, and even of educating others of his discovery, he whole-heartedly fails at transmitting his essential principles of economics – incentives and penalties. The laboratory is only in his mind, and the doors remain locked.

 

To be fair to Levitt, and respective to Sowell, their work should be compared to more comparables than the epic Darwin. For instance, Deborah Tannen, who wrote “You Just Don’t Understand”, supplies a perfect example of a scholarly work that empowers the reader’s thinking processes with her own methods. Since she just did not explain the difference between male and female communication -- namely that males communicate to transmit information, while females communicate to transmit emotions – but systematically demonstrated the process of differentiating, for instance, by parsing scripted dialogues, the reader is better able to interpret such patterns of communication in their own world. Tannen’s Ph.D. level academic scholarship therein becomes a pedestrian talent of asking the right questions: Is this sentence for Information? Or for Emotion?

 

Indeed, much point was made by Dubner that Levitt has no “unifying theme” to this work. Which is all well and good. Truth is truth is truth; whether captured by theme or not. But that Levitt could not properly indoctrinate the reader in what to focus on in their own research is a gross and rather short-sighted failure, dooming Freakonomics to be an intellectual fad instead of an academic pillar. 

 

Freakonomics is in many senses Dubner hagiography of Levitt, where as we move from article to article we are treated with a literary vignette, framing Levitt as a series of metaphorical characters. First, he is the Innocent Academic, who blamelessly goes about his work, not convoluted with a greater purpose, axe to grind, or fish to fry, simply concerned with good economics. This veneer is shed, when as he explains economics potential to find terrorist organizations become a Messianic Genius, using his superhuman cognitive functions to solve crimes and find criminals no mortal had any hope of catching. And, unfortunately when his first son dies within a year of birth, and Levitt explores what makes a parent better than another, he becomes a Tragic Hero, plying his trade to overcome a great loss he feels irrationally responsible for. He is no longer just a scientist in pursuit of truth, but a fallen man in need of redemption.

 

The world will not long remember the similarities between Chicago school-teachers and Japanese sumo wrestlers, so Levitt’s legacy will be forged by how many followed in his footsteps.   Unfortunately, in the process of extolling his own intellectual virtues, he has left little guidance for those to follow. Offering only the transient hope that he will soon return to offer more cocktail party conversation fodder.

 

Science is supposed to be repeatable, Steve, so get over yourself. A much more powerful book would have been a treatise on what questions should be asked, as a Sowell collected, much more than what conclusions could be wrong.

 

I am eager to read Levitt’s next book in much the same way that one of his subjects, crack dealers, profit off a quick fix; this time quirky revelations instead of physiological drug addiction. Most books are about entertainment.

 

Sowell fills an altogether different purpose; like the laborers he writes of, good scholarship produces higher skilled and more valuable workers.

 

Science shouldn’t make moral arguments, so I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which book will benefit them more. After all, more people buy and do drugs than learn how to manufacture their own.