An old review

I started looking through some Indian blogs and many of them turned out to be very interesting. An enthusiastic review by Tabula Rasa:
http://nomologic.blogspot.com/2006/05/theory-development-as-freak-management.html
made me look at my write up in Telugudanam last year. Here it is:
"Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (William Morrow, 2005)seems to be becoming a cult book with its own web site and a column in NewYork Times. I enjoyed the book and though I have some reservations, Irecommend the book. It can be classified under Microeconomics ( thoughsome of the pieces seem to be more like investigative journalism) and startswith a worldview of five general principles, two of which are: "Incentives arethe cornerstones of modern life" and `Knowing what to measure and how tomeasure it makes a complicated world much less so". I will quickly sketch twosmaller pieces in the book.Paul Feldman was an economist working for the US Government, got bored with his job, resigned and started selling bagels. He would deliver bagels tovarious companies in the mornings and come back before lunch to collectleftover bagels and money deposited in boxes. Soon he was delivering 8,400bagels a week to 140 companies. He expected about 95 percent of thepeople to be honest but expected that he could get by even if 80 to 90 percentpeople are honest. It turned out that the percentage 87 and he soon earned more than he did in his previous details.There are some other twists and turns, differences between small and big companies and the affects of 9/11.Check what this has to do with Adam Smith!Another small story is detecting corruption among sumo wrestlers which was difficult because the yazuka threats and the reluctance of the police. Thatthere was corruption was proved just by examining the data which consistedof about 32,000 bouts between 281 wrestlers. A wrestler's ranking and hencehis earning are based on his performance in the elite tournaments held six times an year. In each tournament, there are fifteen bouts and if the wrestler finishes with a winning record (that is at least eight wins) he does not loose his rank and it may rise. So, the first thing that was investigated was the record of the fights of 7-7 wrestlers (7 wins and 7 losses) against 8-6opponents. Statistically (here some technical expertise comes in, but it isnatural to guess that the percentage should be less than 50), the 7-7 wrestleris expected to win 48.7 percent of the time where as they won 79.6 percent ofthe time. Clearly there is some thing funny going on here which warrantedfurther investigation.The chapter I liked most is "Why do drug dealers live with their moms?" basedon Levitt's work with Alladi Sudhir Venkatesh. I have doubts about the next two topics: "Where have all the criminals gone?'and the next two chapters on parenting. For one thing, the conclusions in thetwo chapters seem to contradict each other. The first topic was based on Levitt's own research in which he attributes the decline of violent crime from1990s to the Supreme court ruling in Roe vs Wade and he does not evenmention the follow up papers which did not agree with him. There may be a correalation and may be it just that. There are any number of other theoriesfrom the raise of rap music to reemergence of role models in some ghettos.I get the impression that Levitt has some neat ideas and did some good research ( he won a prize awarded every two years to the best Americaneconomist under forty) and seems to have padded up these with somecareless chapters to make a quick buck. But this is the tendency with many popular books these days. Many educated have disposal incomes and arecurious to know about thing outside the areas of their expertise and there area lot of one idea revelation books (selfish gene etc) by good scientists eithercarried away by their own ideas or trying to make money. I guess we shouldtale all these revelations with a grain of salt.But I like this book. It indicates how even amateurs can study somemicroeconomic problems and problems of corruption. Among the follow upstories in New York Times, there is an interesting story of an Yale economistKeith Chen teaching monkeys how to use money:http://freakonomics.com/times0605col.php
P.S. (June 10, 2006) I may be wrong about "The Selfish Gene". It certainly influenced a generation but the pendulam seems to be swinging back. E.O. Wilson seems to have changed his opinion (?) about group selection and Trivers is back with a new book. More about this later.

Browsing through "Freakonomics" again, I realize why I thought later parts (chapters 5 and 6 on parenting) had contradictory elements. The first part of Chapter 5 is based on Judith Harris' work and is explained in much more detail in Steven Pinker's "The Blank State". If I remember right, Harris's data mainly came from middle class white families. In the later part of Chapter 5 of Freakomomics, the data comes from much wider group of blacks as well as whiltes and of varying economic status. May be that is why the conclusions seemed contradictory.
Apart from this both Levitt and Pinker do not take in to account data given in a 2002 study of Caspi and others described by Matt Ridley in his book "Nature via nurture" pp. 267-269 (see also the previous discussion on experiments with rhesus monkeys on page 255). This experiment studied over a long period the affect of maltreatment on over 400 boys born between 1972-73. They found that children with high-active MAOA gene were virtually immune to maltreatment.
It seems to me that many of these studies give interesting and useful insights but it may take a long time and several different type of studies to come to any suggestion that can be recommended.