Why "Freakonomics" failed to transform economics
economist.com
economist.com
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.
Ideally, there were would be revised editions with mistakes corrected.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...
[1]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...
Its a popular book that people take very seriously
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.
Didn’t realize replication was so bad in Econ too.
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.
Math is math and the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, biology,and engineering are all good assuming somebody isn't mining p-values or something like that.
The social sciences require a ton of data and simulating something like the economy with trillions of variables and bounded rationality just isn't possible. If you wanted to simulate an agent like myself you'd likely need millions of lines of probabilistic code and then you'd need millions of other agents running on a supercomputer the size of Rhode Island.
The issue with degrees of freedom can be mostly pinned down with preregistration, among other measures. It won't solve the problem of having more type I errors at any specific error rate the more science you do, but it does give assurances the target type I error rate is accurate.
I don't want to insult Sociologists here, but economics can be very much like sociology for money issues.
It's intuitive that replication would be terrible in economics (not taking a shot at you for not "realizing"; we don't think about every subject in the world).
What you really want to do is take one society, run it for 5-200 years. Then go back in time, take the same society, and try again with one small change. In practice, you might need to repeat many times because you would expect chance to change such a complicated system (butterfly effect).
"In practice"... listen to me, I'm being absurd. This is clearly impossible. Of course there's ways to try anyway, but they're all known to be "bad science".
Interview format. I really enjoy his questions and perspectives. He asks things I don't really hear from other interviewers.
Great to see all the subscribers to The Economist commenting in this thread so far!
A more subtle and standard economics book is probably more correct.
But then it would be boring and I wouldn't have read it.
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.)
Freakonomics Radio Episode #338 "How to Catch World Cup Fever" Jun 13, 2018 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.
Also book: Stefan Szymanski, "Football economics and policy" (2010)
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Football_Economics_and_...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics/id1651876...
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.
"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.
It was hordes of social media personalities trying to sound Very Smart and establishing themselves as authorities during a time of crisis.
One of their most recent episodes was on the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal where they systematically dug into every one of the 54 cases of plagiarism and demonstrated just how much of it was bad faith right wing bullshit that didn't stand up to even the slightest intellectual scrutiny. But the larger point they were making was not about the right, for which they expected intellectual dishonesty, but the complicity of the left & mainstream media in only ever talking about the scandal in terms of who is saying what about it and why and not on the meat of the facts on the ground.
They took the exact same approach to the lab leak episode where they said let's ignore all of the media meta-narrative and look at just the plain facts on the ground and they found that, like most things, it was a sandcastle built of air that collapsed when you even looked at it funny.