This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative. In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt’s friends and colleagues. Considering such problems yields useful lessons for those who wish to popularize statistical ideas.

We and others have noted a discouraging tendency in the Freakonomics body of work to present speculative or even erroneous claims with an air of certainty. The other side of this challenge, though, is presenting ideas in interesting ways without oversimplifying them or misleading readers. And as teachers of statistics, we recognize the challenge of creating interest in the subject without resorting to clichéd examples such as baseball averages, movie grosses and political polls. On the heels ofįreakonomics, the pop-economics or pop-statistics genre has attracted a surge of interest, with more authors adopting an anecdotal, narrative style.Īs the authors of statistics-themed books for general audiences, we can attest that Levitt and Dubner’s success is not easily attained. Dubner has perfected the formula for conveying the excitement of Levitt’s research-and of the growing body of work by his collaborators and followers. Levitt is celebrated for using data and statistics to solve an array of problems not typically associated with economics.

Dubner, a widely published New York–based journalist. Levitt, an award-winning professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Stephen J.

A summary of freakonomics steven levitt