Freakonomics, by Merely Existing, Confirms Rational Choice Models!

In response to Dan's excellent post, I felt I would offer up an article I highly recommend at yet at the time of reading it couldn't think of a good post in which to pass it on. This was written a couple years ago, in response to the ridiculous success of Freakonomics, but based on what I've heard and read about Superfreakonomics (leaving aside the climate change/geo-engineering chapter, which has borne the brunt of outrage, deservedly), it remains a solid criticism of Dubner and Levitt's recent work. In it, Noam Scheiber makes a couple of excellent points, drawing from his time as a Master's student in economics. First, he notes that economic academia has, thanks to the efforts and success of Levitt and others like him, become something of an "academic parlor game":

With the 2005 publication of Freakonomics, the breezy exposition of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt's oeuvre, the rest of the world has come to see that economists are capable of spectacular feats of cleverness--and to a degree I couldn't imagine back in my poseur days. In the search for what's known as "clean identification"--a situation in which it's easy to discern the causal forces in play--Levitt has turned to such offbeat contexts as Japanese sumo-wrestling and the seedy world of Chicago real estate. He has studied racial discrimination on "Weakest Link," a once-popular game show, and reflected on the scourge of white-collar bagel-filching. This has, in turn, inspired a flurry of imitators, including papers on such topics as point-shaving in college basketball, underused gym memberships, and the parking tickets of U.N. diplomats.

Within the frequently tedious body of economics scholarship, these papers stand out as fantastically entertaining. Judging from the dizzying sales of Freakonomics and the thousands of lecture halls across the country now bursting with econ majors, they've also been wildly successful at ginning up interest in the discipline. But it does make you worry: What if, somewhere along the road from Angrist to Levitt to Levitt's growing list of imitators, all the cleverness has crowded out some of the truly deep questions we rely on economists to answer?

Scheiber makes a distinction between long, tedious, number-crunching economics and Levitt's brand of flashy, too-clever, get people talking research - noting that, like the good rational actors that they are, economists see the numerous benefits in opting for the parlor game over the grind. The problem, in the long run, is that the grind is much, much more likely to produce useful (if uninteresting) data.

Schieber's second point is that Freakonomics-style research doesn't do a huge amount to advance economics as a discipline:

One growth industry in recent years has been what you might call the lookie-here paper: a small-scale setting for observing some broad principle of economics. Many of these papers deal with sexy topics like corruption and, well, sex. One top journal recently published a paper deducing that Iraq had received billions in kickbacks from rogue buyers under the Oil-For-Food program. Another recent paper, this one in the Journal of Political Economy, demonstrated that johns in Mexico pay prostitutes more for unprotected sex than sex with a condom. Both of these findings may be of journalistic interest. But the fact that Saddam Hussein would try to profit from a scarce commodity, or that people might pay extra for services they value more, will surprise no one who has opened an economics textbook lately.

In economic terms, Schieber argues that Levitt has opened up a wide gap between the kind of academic work that one would consider a "common good" (ie. beneficial to the discipline and non-academics) and the kind of work that economists are more likely to pursue for self-interested, careerist purposes (flashy, headline-grabbing, affirming of previously agreed upon theories).

Now, I don't know a great deal about the shape and scope of modern academic economics, but this whole thing reminded me an awful lot of the kinds of bunk theories archaeologists will from time to time trot out to get a TED talk or a blurb in National Geographic (two that I immediately come to mind, and which I have no doubt vented my spleen about before, are the Aquatic Ape Theory and the "First Americans were actually Europeans" argument). I'm sure every social science faces similar problems. Thanks to publish-or-perish policies and the viral nature of the media, getting something controversial out there and getting tons of heat for it, regardless of the type of heat it is, is a sound strategy - as they say, all publicity is good publicity.