This week, I started the highly recommended Freakonomics, and I’m really enjoying
it. Throughout the first part, the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J.
Dubner, introduce several social trends and spend time proving the causes for
them. For example, although criminologists predicted increased crime rates over
the past few decades, rates have actually decreased – Levitt and Dubner explore
the reason for this. Ultimately, the authors use exemplification more
immediately to correct false interpretation over certain trends, but on an
extended level to show that not everything is what it seems.
An example I found particularly interesting was the story
about crime rates. When crime rates decreased, the incorrect criminologists
tried explaining why they were wrong, but even these explanations were
incorrect. The authors attribute the actual cause of the decrease in crime
rates to a court case Roe v. Wade -
an event which prevented the births of the group of children who would be
committing crimes 20 years later. It is a bit of a difficult process to
comprehend, but basically, “It’s possible that X causes Y; it’s also possible
that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other
factor Z” (8). In statistics, this is known as confounding. In their
exemplification – that is, the explanation of Roe v. Wade – the authors are able to connect a seemingly unrelated
event to the trend. They could make all the claims that they want, and
attribute the trend to anything – but their presentation of the Roe v. Wade case is quite convincing
and offers a unique perspective on the situation.
I am looking forward to reading on in Freakonomics. The authors take a very untraditional stance on
economics, and treat it as “the study of incentives” (16) and an analysis of
actual events versus expected events. So far, the authors have gotten me
interested in economics, because they’ve presented it in a way that does not
take the expected, boring lecture route.
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