Book Review: Freakonomics

I've been so busy recently with school and my sister's wedding (which was awesome) that I'm way back-logged on posts I want to write. We'll start with a book review. This was another book on cd for Lisa and me. We listened to it while driving to and from Lisa's dad's house in Detroit for Thanksgiving.

Freakonomics claims to present a mind-altering perspective to the way we view not just the economy, but life in general. In the beginning of the book, the author states that many of the points he makes may seem unorthodox at first, but after hearing him out we will discover that his conclusions make perfect sense.

He argues his points in solid syllogisms throughout the entirety of the book, making his points clear and salient from impetus to conclusion. However, almost in passing, the author points out a principle which ultimately is the mortal downfall of his entire platform.

He briefly mentions a principle called "The Butterfly Effect"- one small overlooked cause can have dramatic effects [a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can cause a tornado to form in Texas...see below for a more nerdy description]. Having done numerous calculations of differential equations and knowing more than the average person about chaos theory, my attention was perked when I heard him mention the Butterfly Effect.

On every issue, the author gives us some initial condition (abortion being legalized; the No Child Left Behind program being enacted) and then holds our hand through a series of facts and statistics which lead to the now-logical conclusion (our current crime rate is much lower than 20 years ago because kids who are prone to crime are no longer being born; teachers are becoming corrupt [like sumo wrestlers] in order to keep their class grades high).

The problem is that the Butterfly Effect doesn't work both ways...it's an irreversible process. Essentially what the author is saying is that he has found THE butterfly in South America that caused the tornado in Texas. That's quite a claim!

With that said, I really enjoyed the author's thoughts and feel that he made some interesting points. Maybe he has found the butterfly in many of the issues he tackles. However, the tornado was also effected by the Earth's rotation and the jet stream and the warm and cold air masses...all of which need to be considered.

I think there are two good items of discussion from this book.

1- Let's say that his syllogisms are accurate (the legalizing of abortion does have a significant effect on our current crime rate). How significant of an effect is it in comparison to the myriad of other factors which contributed to the outcome(improved economy, improved schools, fewer crimes being reported, etc...).

2- Let's say that he has genuinely found THE butterfly and direct cause of whatever his conclusion is. Does it qualify that means towards the specified ends? Suppose that the legalizing of abortion is directly responsible for our current drop in crime. Does that mean that we should never consider outlawing abortion for fear of crack-babies shooting up the streets? Where is the line...1st trimester, 2nd, 15th? My sister-in-law (an elementary school teacher) recently had an altercation with one of her more troubled students which ended with the student shoving her. This child obviously is in a statistically high position of engaging in crime during his life. He probably should have been aborted. We might as well just kill him now in order to avoid the inevitable, right? Enter Jonathan Swift...

Or is the problem more with the fact that we have these socio-economic sectors that are prone to crime in the first place? Maybe if we focused more on improving peoples' quality of life and "teaching them how to fish", the crime rate would go down without having to kill children. I realize how naive and high-and-mighty this sounds. I have no idea how to improve the economy or an entire civilization's quality of life, and I'm not creative or charismatic enough to make people think that I can. That's why I'm in science, not politics.

All in all the book is a great "bathroom reader". It's chuck full of interesting statistics and is at times thought provoking. By no means does is knock you over the head and change your view of the world, but it just might make you say "hmmm...interesting, I hadn't thought about that" a few times.

[Butterfly Effect: Gets its roots in chaos theory. Edward Lorentz in the 1960's was running a weather simulation (again) on one of those new-fangled things called computers. Complex calculations took a long time back then...commonly over the course of days. Lorentz stopped his calculation one night and recorded the current value of his computation. He came back the next day and re-entered the value, but truncated it to three decimal places instead of pushing in all six from the night before. To his amazement, the end result of his computation was completely different than the first time he ran it. Apparently, the onehundredthousandth of a change in his daily initial condition was enough to alter the entire algorithm. One uncreative scientist after another suggested a name for this phenomena until eventually "the Butterfly Effect" was settled upon.]