Freakonomics - Steven Levitt

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FREAKONOMICS
A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of
Everything
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
CONTENTS
AN EXPLANATORY NOTE
In which the origins of this book are clarified.
INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything
In which the book’s central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how
people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does
work.
Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong…How “experts”—from
criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists—bend the facts…Why
knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding
modern life…What is “freakonomics,” anyway?
1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?
In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side—
cheating.
Who cheats? Just about everyone…How cheaters cheat, and how to catch
them…Stories from an Israeli day-care center…The sudden disappearance of
seven million American children…Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago…Why
cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win…Could sumo wrestling, the
national sport of Japan, be corrupt?…What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be
more honest than we think.
2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?
In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially
when its power is abused.
Going undercover in the Ku Klux Klan…Why experts of every kind are in the
perfect position to exploit you…The antidote to information abuse: the
Internet…Why a new car is suddenly worth so much less the moment it leaves
the lot…Breaking the real-estate agent code: what “well maintained” really
means…Is Trent Lott more racist than the average Weakest Link
contestant?…What do online daters lie about?
3. Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?
In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-
interest, and convenience.
Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic
halitosis…How to ask a good question…Sudhir Venkatesh’s long, strange trip
into the crack den…Life is a tournament…Why prostitutes earn more than
architects…What a drug dealer, a high-school quarterback, and an editorial
assistant have in common…How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the
invention of nylon stockings…Was crack the worst thing to hit black Americans
since Jim Crow?
4. Where Have All the Criminals Gone?
In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions.
What Nicolae Ceau?escu learned—the hard way—about abortion…Why the
1960s were a great time to be a criminal…Think the roaring 1990s economy put a
crimp on crime? Think again…Why capital punishment doesn’t deter
criminals…Do police actually lower crime rates?…Prisons, prisons
everywhere…Seeing through the New York City police “miracle”…What is a
gun, really?…Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later
crack dealers were like Pets.com…The superpredator versus the senior
citizen…Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed
everything.
5. What Makes a Perfect Parent?
In which we ask, from a variety of angles, a pressing question: do parents really
matter?
The conversion of parenting from an art to a science…Why parenting experts like
to scare parents to death…Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming
pool?…The economics of fear…Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture
quagmire…Why a good school isn’t as good as you might think…The black-
white test gap and “acting white”…Eight things that make a child do better in
school and eight that don’t.
6. Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as
Sweet?
In which we weigh the importance of a parent’s first official act—naming the
baby.
A boy named Winner and his brother, Loser…The blackest names and the
whitest names…The segregation of culture: why Seinfeld never made the top
fifty among black viewers…If you have a really bad name, should you just
change it?…High-end names and low-end names (and how one becomes the
other)…Britney Spears: a symptom, not a cause…Is Aviva the next
Madison?…What your parents were telling the world when they gave you your
name.
EPILOGUE: Two Paths to Harvard
In which the dependability of data meets the randomness of life.
AN EXPLANATORY NOTE
The most brilliant young economist in America—the one so deemed, at least, by
a jury of his elders—brakes to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago’s south side. It is
a sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy Cavalier with a dusty
dashboard and a window that doesn’t quite shut, producing a dull roar at
highway speeds.
But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets: gas stations, boundless
concrete, brick buildings with plywood windows.
An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless right on his sign,
which also asks for money. 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,
too, than the average economist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling
one, depending on how you feel about economists.
—The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003
In the summer of 2003, The New York Times Magazine sent Stephen J. Dubner,
an author and journalist, to write a profile of Steven D. Levitt, a heralded young
economist at the University of Chicago.
Dubner, who was researching a book about the psychology of money, had lately
been interviewing many economists and found that they often spoke English as
if it were a fourth or fifth language. Levitt, who had just won the John Bates
Clark Medal (awarded every two years to the best American economist under
forty), had lately been interviewed by many journalists and found that their
thinking wasn’t very…robust, as an economist might say.
But Levitt decided that Dubner wasn’t a complete idiot. And Dubner found that
Levitt wasn’t a human slide rule. The writer was dazzled by the inventiveness of
the economist’s work and his knack for explaining it. Despite Levitt’s elite
credentials (Harvard undergrad, a PhD from MIT, a stack of awards), he
approached economics in a notably unorthodox way. He seemed to look at
things not so much as an academic but as a very smart and curious explorer—a
documentary filmmaker, perhaps, or a forensic investigator or a bookie whose
markets ranged from sports to crime to pop culture. He professed little interest in
the sort of monetary issues that come to mind when most people think about
economics; he practically blustered with self-effacement. “I just don’t know very
much about the field of economics,” he told Dubner at one point, swiping the
hair from his eyes. “I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics,
and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock
market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to
grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me
about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any
of those things.”
What interested Levitt were the stuff and riddles of everyday life. His
investigations were a feast for anyone wanting to know how the world really
works. His singular attitude was evoked in Dubner’s resulting article:
As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers
but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to
ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do
they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a
swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past
decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do
black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do
schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling
corrupt?
And how does a homeless man in tattered clothing afford $50 headphones?
Many people—including a fair number of his peers—might not recognize
Levitt’s work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal
science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want.
Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and
curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (but he is afraid of
calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that
no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an effect that veteran
economists had declared unmeasurable. His abiding interests—though he says
he has never trafficked in them himself—are cheating, corruption, and crime.
Levitt’s blazing curiosity also proved attractive to thousands of New York Times
readers. He was beset by questions and queries, riddles and requests—from
General Motors and the New York Yankees and U.S. senators but also from
prisoners and parents and a man who for twenty years had kept precise data on
his sales of bagels. A former Tour de France champion called Levitt to ask his
help in proving that the current Tour is rife with doping; the Central Intelligence
Agency wanted to know how Levitt might use data to catch money launderers
and terrorists.
What they were all responding to was the force of Levitt’s underlying belief: that
the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright
deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are
asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of
looking.
In New York City, the publishers were telling Levitt he should write a book.
“Write a book?” he said. “I don’t want to write a book.” He already had a million
more riddles to solve than time to solve them. Nor did he think himself much of
a writer. So he said that no, he wasn’t interested—“unless,” he proposed, “maybe
Dubner and I could do it together.”
Collaboration isn’t for everyone. But the two of them—henceforth known as the
two of us—decided to talk things over to see if such a book might work. We
decided it could. We hope you agree.
Levitt had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the venerable intellectual
clubhouse at Harvard that pays young scholars to do their own work, for three
years, with no commitments. Levitt felt he didn’t stand a chance. For starters, he
didn’t consider himself an intellectual. He would be interviewed over dinner by
the senior fellows, a collection of world-renowned philosophers, scientists, and
historians. He worried he wouldn’t have enough conversation to last even the
first course.
Disquietingly, one of the senior fellows said to Levitt, “I’m having a hard time
seeing the unifying theme of your work. Could you explain it?”
Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme was, or if he even
had one.
Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in and neatly
summarized what he saw as Levitt’s theme.
Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that’s my theme.
Another fellow then offered another theme.
You’re right, said Levitt, my theme.
And so it went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher Robert Nozick
interrupted.
“How old are you, Steve?” he asked.
“Twenty-six.”
Nozick turned to the other fellows: “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he
need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people
who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer
it, and it’ll be fine.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003
INTRODUCTION:
The Hidden Side of Everything
Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper
of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having
been scared out of his skin.
The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime
rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—
and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by
gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had
carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome,
constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All
the experts were saying so.
The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere.
Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-
thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun
in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out
there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country
into deepest chaos.
In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney
general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox
proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he
believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next
decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. “The next crime
wave will get so bad,” he said, “that it will make 1995 look like the good old
days.”
Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid
out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. “We know we’ve got
about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,” Clinton said, “or our
country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving
speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they’ll be
trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities.”
The smart money was plainly on the criminals.
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and
fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was
ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It
was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely
unanticipated—especially by the very experts who had been predicting the
opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead
of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more
摘要：

FREAKONOMICSARogueEconomistExplorestheHiddenSideofEverythingStevenD.LevittandStephenJ.DubnerCONTENTSANEXPLANATORYNOTEInwhichtheoriginsofthisbookareclarified.INTRODUCTION:TheHiddenSideofEverythingInwhichthebook’scentralideaissetforth:namely,ifmoralityrepresentshowpeoplewouldliketheworldtowork,theneco...

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