In 2005, two men named Steven and Stephen published the quintessential airport book. In 2022, two men named Mike and Peter started a whole podcast just to make fun of it.
Thanks to Ted Joyce and Ames Grawert for helping with the research for this episode!
Support us on Patreon
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Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
In 2005, two men named Steven and Stephen published the quintessential airport book. In 2022, two men named Mike and Peter started a whole podcast just to make fun of it.
Thanks to Ted Joyce and Ames Grawert for helping with the research for this episode!
Support us on Patreon
Where to find us:
Sources:
Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
Mike: Peter?
Peter: Michael.
Mike: What do you remember about a book called Freakonomics?
Peter: If I recall correctly, the thesis of the book is: "Had my mother aborted me, I would not have committed so many crimes."
[If Books Could Kill Podcast theme]
Peter: All right, welcome to If Books Could Kill.
Mike: A new episode.
Peter: Are we tag lining this, Mike?
Mike: I don't think so. I think that was the tagline. I don't know.
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: I've done that for two shows already-- [crosstalk]
Peter: [laughs] Yeah, the dumb books that captured our collective imagination.
Mike: Yes, the books that did to our brains what Jigsaw did to Robin Hood.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: I'm Michael Hobbes. I'm a journalist and the cohost of Maintenance Phase.
Peter: I am Peter Shamshiri. I am a lawyer and the cohost of the 5-4 podcast.
Mike: Both of us are fascinated by dumb ideas and how they spread through the population. And so, a couple months ago, we started talking about how to do a podcast about the dumbest ideas of the last 50 years. And the more we thought about it, the more we realized that like a good way to do it would be by going through airport books, which are like the super spreader events at this point of American stupidity.
Peter: Yeah, they're the natural vessel for pseudoscience, fake history, and just quintessentially American. All of this complex knowledge and information boiled down into a mush and packaged and sold for $24.95 to people who forgot to charge their Kindle for the flight.
Mike: This is the seventh episode that we've recorded, but the first episode that we're releasing, because I started reading Freakonomics and then I realized that this book is the perfect overture--
Peter: The quintessential airport book.
Mike: The quintessential wrong and bad airport book. It's really shocking how bad this book is.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: And the badness of the book is also matched by how influential it was.
Peter: Right.
Mike: What do you actually remember about the book itself and like the era?
Peter: It comes out in 2005, is that right?
Mike: 2005? Yeah.
Peter: Okay. So, in the 80s, you have the Chicago School economists who start to posit all of these theories that basically boil down to like, "We can solve most social problems with economics principles."
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: And then you get something like Freakonomics, which feels the mainstreamification of that concept, right?
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: Just taking that sort of nihilistic, neoliberal viewpoint and bringing it to the masses.
Mike: Exactly. You cannot underestimate how popular this book was. It sold 4 million copies. It was on the bestseller list for 39 weeks. I think an underrated aspect of this book's influence is the fact that they had a New York Times blog and a podcast five years before Serial. I listened to that podcast for years. There wasn't that much else to listen to. It was like this or fucking Ricky Gervais and it's like that's what you listen to when you were washing dishes. I also think the subtitle of the book is important, because it's "A Rogue economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." Like, "This guy's outside the mainstream and he's saying things they don't want you to hear," is also one of the dominant paradigms of the ways that Americans are liable to believe bullshit.
Peter: We're coming off a decade of disaster movies, each of which has one scientist that nobody believes that's trying to get the truth to the President.
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: People love this shit. They're primed for it.
Mike: Everybody reading this thinks that they're Pierce Brosnan in Dante's Peak, but they're actually Randy Quaid in Independence Day.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: So, I'm going to send you some paragraphs. The book began with a New York Times Magazine article.
Peter: Okay. Yeah.
Mike: Stephen Dubner, who's one of the coauthors of Freakonomics, was at the time a story editor at the New York Times and he was working on a story about The Psychology of Money and that's how we met Steven Levitt, who's his coauthor and this University of Chicago economist.
Peter: Uh-huh.
Mike: So, the book is cowritten by both of them, but it's not clear who wrote what. And there's lots of stuff in the book that is based on Levitt studies, but there's also lots in the book that isn't based on Levitt studies. It's just random.
Peter: Got it. Got it.
Mike: So, I'm sending you the first five paragraphs of New York Times story.
Peter: Oh, boy.
Mike: This is America's first introduction to the Freakonomics guys and the Freakonomics way of thinking.
Peter: The most brilliant, young economist in America, the one so deemed at least by a jury of his elders breaks to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago's South Side. It is a sunny day in mid-June. An elderly homeless man approaches. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red baseball cap. The economist doesn't lock his doors or inch the car forward, nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches as if through one-way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along. "He had nice headphones," says the economist still watching in the rearview mirror. Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn't look like he has many assets. Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person, differently too than the average economist.
Mike: What do you think?
Peter: Is that seeing things differently?
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: I'm pretty sure that staring down a homeless person asking for money and making a snarky comment about the quality of their accoutrement is a classic American tradition, is it not?
Mike: If he's so poor, why does he have stuff?
Peter: If he had taken that headphone money, Michael, and invested it in an ETF [Michael laughs] starting in 2002, he could have eight pairs of headphones by now.
Mike: I also love it because we're seeing this like, "He's different from the other economists," a story that is not remotely different from other pretty well-off people seeing a homeless man in public. Also, it's basically trying to establish him as a rogue economist and outside of the strictures of the field while acknowledging the fact that he's a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, [Peter laughs] he has degree from Harvard and MIT, and he won the John Bates Clark Medal.
Peter: Oh.
Mike: So, the article wants to use that as, "This isn't just some crank saying stuff. Look how awarded he is within economics. But then also, we'll switch and be like, 'Oh, he's different.'"
Peter: Remember when the Trump campaign had establishment Washington folks talking about the swamp and you feel you're through the looking glass a little bit? You're like, "What are you--?" That's you.
Mike: Exactly.
Peter: Not just an establishment economist, but like the most establishment economist being like, "I'm a bad boy in the economics industry."
Mike: Right, who everybody really likes. Yes.
Peter: Right [chuckles]
Mike: There's another piece of foreshadowing that says, "One paper he wrote as a graduate student is still regularly cited. His question was disarmingly simple. Do more police translate into less crime? The answer would seem obvious, yes, but had never been proved. Since the number of police officers tends to rise along with the number of crimes, the effectiveness of the police was tricky to measure. Levitt needed a mechanism that would unlink the crime rate from police hiring. He found it within politics. He noticed that mayors and governors running for reelection often hire more police officers. By measuring those police increases against crime rates, he was able to determine that additional officers do indeed bring down violent crime." That paper was later disputed. Another graduate student found a serious mathematical mistake in it, but Levitt's ingenuity was obvious.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: It's not real. He found something that was fake and let's all just be in awe of his creativity.
Peter: This runner tripped and absolutely ate shit on his first lap, but his speed was obvious.
Mike: [laughs] It's like, "What are we doing here?"
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: So, the article ends with tax evasion, money laundering. "I'd like to put together a set of tools that lets us catch terrorists. I don't necessarily know yet how I'd go about it, but given the right data, I have little doubt that I could figure out the answer."
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: Small problems, just ending terrorism.
Peter: Yeah. "What am I working on now? Look, I've been thinking about stopping terrorism, if someone can get me some numbers."
Mike: Steven Levitt may not fully believe in himself, but he does believe in this. Teachers and criminals and real estate agents may lie, and politicians and even CIA analysts, but numbers don't.
Peter: I don't think that Steven Levitt seems like he lacks confidence in himself, but perhaps, I'm misreading.
Mike: But then one thing I genuinely really appreciate about Freakonomics is that everything that people will later accuse Freakonomics of, they just fucking say-- so, in this passage, he's saying like, "Everybody else lies, but the numbers don't lie." The whole problem with this is this overconfidence in quantitative data that is completely stripped of all of its societal context. That's why we object to this.
Peter: This is a classic economics guy thing, where they act the narratives that they map on to the data are themselves just as in infallible as the data.
Mike: Exactly. That's a good way to put it. Yeah.
Peter: The idea that there's always something hidden seems to be lurking here, where there must be an explanation that is counterintuitive and fascinating, and people are trying to hide it from you, right?
Mike: Right.
Peter: This is so fucking annoying.
Mike: [laughs] Okay. You're having the same experience that I had- [crosstalk]
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: Because you can't believe they're just saying it. That's what I cannot get over.
Peter: Yeah. Oh, God.
Mike: After the article got published, it was a huge sensation because of all these bold ideas. Then, book publishers got in touch and then they're quite open about the fact that this was a rush job-
Peter: Oh, my God.
Mike: -and they just grabbed a bunch of random anecdotes.
Peter: I have a lot of respect for being like, "Look, we're cashing in."
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And they're like, "Other people have said there's no overarching theme to this book. That's correct. What we're doing is [Peter laughs] we're talking about numbers." And it's like, "Okay, you just have a bunch of cute anecdotes and you're going to string together the cute anecdotes with the most fucking trihard transitions I've ever seen." So, I've broken apart this book and put it back together, because even though the book is only 207 pages, they only spend a paragraph or two on each one of these anecdotes. It's a collection of basically a hundred cute little stories.
Peter: Oh, hell, yeah.
Mike: I'm trying to take a representative sample of the way that they present information, but it's like we're only going to touch on 10% of the book, because to debunk these ridiculous paragraphs takes you four times longer than it took to write them.
Peter: Right.
Mike: So, we're not going to go through the book chapter by chapter basically, because it's too much of a mess to do that, but I do want to talk about the core ideology of this book and why it exerted such a negative influence on the culture. The reason I wanted to read that concluding paragraph from the original New York Times story is that the entire Freakonomics approach is setting up this binary between intuitive thinking and data-driven thinking. So, economics is uniquely positioned to allow us to see the world without all the human nonsense that comes along with asking people about it.
Peter: Right. You're cutting through the bullshit.
Mike: Right. And they're extremely explicit about this in the book. So, in the introduction, they say, "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how it does work."
Peter: No. Nope.
Mike: Nope. Nope. [laughs] So, this is just a totally false binary. The best evidence that this is a false binary is their own book.
Peter: Yeah. right.
Mike: In this episode, we are going to talk about all of the ways that they misuse data.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Mike: The first thing we're going to talk about is the way they use true data to reach false conclusions. Let me send you one more paragraph.
Peter: All right. "What about the election truism that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge. In a typical election year, campaigns for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives spend about $1 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections. It is the same amount for instance that Americans spend every year on chewing gum."
Mike: This was like classic Freakonomics where it's phrased as some sort of debunking. "You thought political spending was bad but wait till you hear about chewing gum." But those things have nothing to do with each other. You're just juxtaposing an important thing with a frivolous thing to make them both seem frivolous.
Peter: Right. And also, the objection to money in politics is a moral one.
Mike: Right.
Peter: It's not like we're spending too much money in a vacuum and that's it. It's because it's the literal manipulation of society.
Mike: Right. [laughs]
Peter: That's the point of campaign finance. So, yes, people have objections to that in and of itself, whatever.
Mike: And also, another example is they have this whole thing, they have a section about cheating, and how there's this infamous thing in 1987 where the IRS started asking people to list the social security numbers of their children if they wanted the child tax deduction. It was 2000 bucks at the time and you could just say, "Okay, I have little Timmy," and then all of a sudden, your tax bill would go down by $2,000." And then all of a sudden, you had to start providing the social security number for Timmy and 7 million children disappeared from the tax rolls.
Peter: Uh-huh.
Mike: They explicitly link this to cheating that all these people were lying about their kids and then they had to prove that they had kids, and all of a sudden, all these kids disappeared. What they leave out is the fact that before 1989, children were not assigned social security numbers automatically. So, when the IRS announced this thing, you're going to have to start putting social security numbers, every single parent in America had to fill out a form, send it to the IRS, wait two weeks, and get their kids social security number back. So, of those 7 million people that didn't include their kids on their taxes that year, a huge percentage of them were people who were like, "Oh, shit, I forgot to do this. I just can't include my kids this year."
Peter: Right.
Mike: Most of the kids that disappeared were divorced parents and both parents were putting the kid for the deduction on their taxes. And so, some of that's cheating, but it could also just be something of they had never really talked about it before or thought about it and didn't know that they couldn't both claim the kid.
Peter: Right.
Mike: Again, the number, 7 million, appears to be true, although I've seen somebody say that it was actually more like 2 million. But the interpretation of it, what they are using that number to say, is mostly wrong. We don't know how much of that was cheating.
Peter: Yeah. Look, as someone who used to do his own taxes and then gave it to an accountant this year, I understand fucking it up completely. My accountant was like, "What have you been--?"
Mike: Yeah. no, shit. [laughs]
Peter: I'm like, "I don't know."
Mike: What is this?
Peter: I wing it, and then I submit it, and I haven't been arrested. That's I thought I was doing it right.
Mike: Then God, this is not the worst one in the whole book, but this is like peak smug-- This will give you flashbacks of a kind of dude who read this book. So, this is in a section about parenting. It's talking about risks and how people can be irrational when they consider risks. It says, "Consider the parents of an eight-year-old girl named Molly. Her two best friends, Amy and Imani, each live nearby. Molly's parents know that Amy's parents keep a gun in their house. So, they've forbidden Molly to play there. Instead, Molly spends a lot of time at Imani's house which has a swimming pool in the backyard. Molly's parents feel good about having made such a smart choice to protect their daughter. But according to the data, their choice isn't smart at all.
In a given year, there's one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. In a country with 6 million pools, that means that roughly 550 children under the age of 10 drown each year. Meanwhile, there's one child killed by a gun for every 1 million plus guns. That means that roughly 175 children under 10 die each year from guns. Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident at Imani's house than in gunplay at Amy's."
Peter: Okay. [laughs] They're making a mistake here that I can't quite articulate, but it might have to do with the amount of guns per household.
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: I want to take a step back and say, one of the least interesting things on Earth is when people do this like, people are assessing risks incorrectly-
Mike: Oh, my fucking God, I know.
Peter: -kind of analysis. And it's like, "Are people supposed to know statistics like this before they make everyday decisions?" No. This is again weirdly conservative, where they're being like, "Guns aren't as dangerous as people think."
Mike: Exactly.
Peter: I would love for them to be actually, "Undocumented immigrants aren't as dangerous," whole thing. [crosstalk]
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: Things like crime, for example, street crime are areas where people are way out of whack and yet these books don't seem to focus on it.
Mike: So, the obvious statistical thing to say here is that it's absurd to say deaths per gun versus deaths per swimming pool. Most people who own guns own more than one gun and most people who have swimming pools have exactly one swimming pool. So, what you'd want to do is households with guns versus households with pools.
Mike: Right.
Mike: That's like the 101 bullshit thing. The much bigger thing is you should not be using average mortality statistics to lecture other people on how to parent their kids.
Peter: Right.
Mike: Most of the kids under 10 who drowned, this is really awful, it's mostly very young kids in bathtubs.
Peter: Uh-huh.
Mike: Another very large portion is in lakes and rivers. It's mostly poor kids. A lot of it is kids with physical disabilities who can't swim. Backyard pools actually are really dangerous compared to municipal pools. But the reason is not that kids drown when they're playing at a friend's house. Usually, mom is watching when kids are playing in the pool, because they know it's dangerous, right? Usually, how kids die in backyard pools is the back door is unlocked. They wander outside, and they fall into the pool at night when nobody's around, and they can't get out of the pool. If your kid can swim, they're probably fine. The dynamics of drownings, you shouldn't just be looking at the average number of drownings across the entire country. There's specific dynamics to this. And of course, there's specific dynamics to firearm deaths too.
Peter: This whole thing is just like, "You might think that you have a good intuition about this. But what if I presented you with the worst oversimplification of the data that you have ever heard in your fucking life?"
Mike: Right. [laughs]
Peter: "What do you think now, Molly's parents?"
Mike: It's also seemed totally rational for me to be just in general worried and uncomfortable around an object that essentially only exists to cause harm. [Peter laughs] Like, there's no reason for my child to be anywhere near a gun. Whereas swimming pools, swimming is good for kids. It's social, it's exercise. You as a parent might say like, "Oh, that's actually really worth the risk for me."
Peter: What they seem to be driving at in part is that maybe we're a little too uptight about gun restrictions and gun safety.
Mike: Right.
Peter: What they're missing is that maybe part of the reason that children are getting killed by guns at relatively low rates is because people are cautious around them and trying to drop that social stigma is just going to drive those numbers up.
Mike: Right.
Peter: Oh, no, I'm about to quote Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I don't want to do that.
Mike: Oh, do it. Notorious RBG. I know you love her.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: You have the mug next to you.
Peter: "It's throwing away the umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet." That's what they seem to be advocating for here.
Mike: What drives me nuts about this section and this way of doing statistics is, it doesn't give you any understanding of drownings of firearm deaths.
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: All you have is a little factoid that you can drop at a barbecue with the other dads and be obnoxious.
Peter: Yeah. "Molly's parents don't let her go over to Emily's house, because Emily's parents own a bear and they let it roam free."
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: "But did you know that bear attacks kill under 10 children per year?"
Mike: [laughs] So, that's the misuse of data, part 1. Part 2 is most of the content of the book, it's the overgeneralization from extremely specific data. So, there's some dude who's like an office drone in D.C., and he starts selling bagels at work. He brings in bagels. He puts 20 bagels in the kitchen in a bowl and it's a trust system. People are supposed to take a bagel, leave a buck.
Peter: Okay.
Mike: And so, he starts making so much money from the bagels that he decides to do this full time. Now, he delivers, I don't know, 10,000 bagels a day to various offices around D.C., and he does the same thing. He leaves a big bowl of bagels and he leaves a bowl for money. And allegedly, this guy has kept meticulous records for years. And so, he has, basically, the honesty of various customers. They don't have to put in a dollar. They can just take a bagel. So, according to this guy's data, it's 90% of people pay for the bagel. And there's some borderline interesting stuff, like around the holidays, people are less likely to pay for the bagels. Certain kinds of companies like people in big companies are more likely to pay for the bagels than at small companies and people in the executive suite on those floors are less likely to pay for the bagels. So, rich people are stingy or whatever.
Peter: Mm-hmm. I believe that.
Mike: It's interesting. It's a cute story, this guy, but is this generalizable? I don't really know.
Peter: Freakonomics.
Mike: [laughs] Thinking like a freak.
Peter: Will this guy give me $1 for the bagel on the honor system? Maybe not. Freakonomics.
Mike: It's very funny to me that the only good parts of this book are just the descriptive parts, where they just like, "These are the phenomena." You're like, "Oh, interesting." But then as soon as they try to turn them into pat little lessons, they're like, "And that's why you're like dah, dah, dah, dah." I don't know that we can really learn anything from this.
Peter: Right.
Mike: They have a whole thing with incentives and it turns out people cheat way less than you think they do.
Peter: Right.
Mike: Well, maybe, but these are bagels at work.
Peter: And they cost a dollar.
Mike: Yeah, they're cheap. It just seems like a very unique situation that I'm not sure you can really say anything about humans' propensity to cheat based on this. They then have a whole section about sumo wrestlers. This is another study of Levitt's. There's a weird thing in sumo wrestling tournaments, where you do the best of 15. So, you have to win 8 matches out of 15, right?
Peter: Okay.
Mike: But the problem with sumo tournaments is that oftentimes, people reach their eight wins and then they still have like three more matches to go. So, basically, you have all these matches between people who it just doesn't matter if they win or not, because they've already gotten their eight matches. And sometimes, they are matched with people who are seven and seven and really need to win.
Peter: Really need to win. Sure.
Mike: So, Levitt runs the numbers and he finds you would expect a 50:50 split winning and losing percentage on these matches. But it turns out, it's 80:20 for people who need to win end up winning these things. The only explanation for this is widespread criminal conspiracy.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: I had the same reaction as you. I was like, "This seems like a really big leap." But then in 2011, there was an actual huge scandal in sumo wrestling that confirmed that was a massive criminal conspiracy [laughs] among these dudes.
Peter: Oh, hell, yeah. Wow.
Mike: It's interesting in that there wasn't actually that much selling of matches, but these guys would just meet in the dressing rooms and be like, "Dude, you don't need to win this. I need to win this. Do you mind just letting me win?" And he'll be like, "Yeah, you're fine." This was one of the only examples in Freakonomics where he was fucking right.
Peter: Yeah, good for him.
Mike: Kudos, I will give you this one, Steve.
Peter: Economics could have never predicted this. Only for Freakonomics could have predicted this.
Mike: Exactly. Well, this is the other thing that I learned when I was researching the match fixing scandal is sumo fans have been complaining about this for literally decades. They changed the rules in the 1970s to try to prevent this. Obviously, not effectively enough. But everyone knows that these matches are fake. I do think that providing numbers to these things and giving evidence to something that feels true is a very important role for academia. But I don't know that there's human behavior there other than the super banal finding that like, yeah, when it matters to one person and not the other, they're probably going to trade.
Peter: Right. This reminds me of you know in Econ 101 when you learn about moral hazard and you feel really smart for a day?
Peter: Yeah. [laughs]
Mike: This is some of the most basic human behavior stuff that you could ever conceive of, but they present it like they're blowing your mind.
Mike: Well, this is something I learned from reading a bunch of extremely scathing reviews of this book by economists. One thing this book does that I think became very prominent in the early 2000s was this idea that incentives explain everything. And if you want to understand the situation, you look at the incentives of all the actors involved.
Peter: Right.
Mike: And of course, this book does that. It presents the bagel anecdote, and 50 other anecdotes and it's like, "Oh, the incentives. Economists can understand things better than other types of scientists, because they look at the incentives." But then, when you look at the bagel example, it's like, well, everybody has the incentive to steal a bagel, but only 10% of people do. They spend almost an entire chapter on this example of Chicago school teachers and how Steven Levitt designed an algorithm to detect teachers who were erasing bubbles on standardized tests and filling in their own answers to make sure that they didn't get fired. It's like, "Oh, the incentives of the teachers."
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: But then, they mentioned offhand that it's only 5% of the teachers who cheat. So, it's like 100% of the teachers have the incentive, very strong incentives to cheat, but very few of them do. So, what does it actually mean to say incentives matter?
Peter: Right.
Mike: You could just as easily say that people pay for a bagel because of their upbringing. You could say it's because of their psychology. You could say it's because they want to be moral people and they don't want to be the kind of person who steals a bagel. Those are incomplete explanations too. But it's not clear to me that those are less scientific than just saying incentives over and over again.
Peter: [chuckles] Right.
Mike: This book has a very complicated relationship with morality. It sees morality as this weird, irrational thing that people do.
Peter: That's a classic conservative economist tick, where the goal of a lot of the work is to critique liberal sentimentality-
Mike: Right.
Peter: -in their view.
Mike: So, the third way that this book misuses data is leaping to conclusions on some things while refusing to reach conclusions on others. This is where we get into the black names stuff.
Peter: Uh-oh.
Mike: Throughout the book, there's various examples of weird race stuff.
Peter: Oh, no.
Mike: Steven Levitt did a study on-- Do you remember The Weakest Link, the game show?
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: It's like a cross between Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Survivor. You vote people off for getting questions wrong.
Peter: Yeah, the mean British lady-
Mike: Yes. The mean British lady. Yes.
Peter: -was the host. Yeah.
Mike: So, he did a study of everyone who's ever been kicked off of that show and it's like you'd expect the black contestants to be kicked off, right? But actually, it wasn't. The female contestants weren't kicked off either. It turns out the Hispanic and the elderly contestants were the ones who faced discrimination.
Peter: Okay. [chuckles]
Mike: Other people have questioned this because there were only 22 Hispanic contestants on the show out of a thousand contestants. So, you can't really make claims about that. But anyway, it's like okay, whatever. Then, we get to the final two chapters of the book, which are all about cultural explanations for poverty.
Peter: Yep, here we go.
Mike: So, here's a couple of paragraphs that I don’t want to read and want to make you read.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: They are talking about a researcher named Roland Fryer.
Peter: "In addition to economic and social disparity between blacks and whites, Fryer had become intrigued by the virtual segregation of culture. Blacks and whites watched different television shows. Monday Night Football is the only show that typically appears on each group's top 10 list. Seinfeld, one of the most popular sitcoms in history never ranked in the top 50 among blacks. They smoke different cigarettes and black parents give their--" [laughs] Oh shit.
Mike: It's happening.
Peter: "And black parents give their children names that are starkly different from white children's. Fryer came to wonder, "Is distinctive black culture, a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it?''
Mike: It's time to ask, are poor people poor because it's their fault?
Peter: Yeah. Are you poor, because of socioeconomic structures or are you not watching Seinfeld?
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: Is that the problem? The black names thing, this is a tale as old as time. People being like, "Well, if you have a black name, you're less likely to get job offers." And then, their conclusion is it's stupid to give your kid a black name instead of like, "Wow, must be some serious racism at play," which is the obvious conclusion.
Mike: It's worse, Peter.
Peter: Okay.
Mike: This is in a chapter called "Would a Rashonda by any other name would smell as sweet?"
Peter: Oh, shit. [laughs]
Mike: Long silence. Long silence.
Mike: Freakonomics.
Mike: We meet this Roland Fryer guy, who has a database of every single person born in California since 1961. He starts combing through the demographic data and crosschecking it with the names. It says, "The data show that the black-white gap is a recent phenomenon. Until the early 1970s, there was a great overlap between black and white names. The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites. By 1980, she received a name that was 20 times more common among blacks. Boys' names moved in the same direction, but less aggressively, probably, because parents of all races are less adventurous with boys' names than girls.
A great many black names today are unique to blacks. More than 40% of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year. The California study also shows that white parents send a strong signal in the opposite direction. More than 40% of white babies are given names that are at least four times more common among whites. Consider Connor and Cody, Emily and Abigail." This is interesting.
Peter: Yeah, it is interesting.
Mike: Descriptive statistics. It's like, "Wow, social trends."
Peter: Yeah. Although, this is also a few years before the great, I don't know what to call it, dipshitification of white names.
Mike: The Gwyneth effect?
Peter: [chuckles] Yeah.
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: We're at a time where the desire among white parents to throw a "Y" where and "I" used to be is that peak.
Mike: We then get a long section that's basically just riffing on black names. They talk to a judge in family court in New York, who is presumably a friend of one of theirs, who just tells them the funniest black names that he's ever seen. They start out with the story of a girl named Temptress, who's arrested for prostitution at age 15.
Peter: You're literally making cracks about a 15-year-old who's probably being sexually trafficked. That's the joke.
Mike: Yeah, good stuff.
Peter: Hilarious.
Mike: And then, you get the story of someone named Amcher, who had been named for the first thing his parents saw upon reaching the hospital, the sign for Albany Medical Center Hospital emergency room.
Peter: Okay.
Mike: And then we have this paragraph. "Roland Fryer while discussing his names research on a radio show took a call from a black woman who was upset with the name just given to her baby niece. It was pronounced Shateed, but was in fact spelled shithead. Or, consider the twin boys Orange Jello and Lemon Jello also black, whose parents further dignified their choice by instituting the pronunciations are Oranjello and Lemonjello."
Peter: Now, that first one was 80% a prank call, but [laughs] go on.
Mike: Yeah. This thing of black people giving their kids weird names is a very well-known urban legend. There are numerous Snopes articles about this. This is something that was huge in email forwards in the 1990s. There are stories of this going back to 1917. These were like Vaudeville jokes. This thing of naming your kid after the emergency room where you were born, this is a really old joke. It's like, "Black people are so stupid that they name their kids like No Smoking, because that's the sign above the place where they're filling out the birth certificate."
Peter: Right.
Mike: There's another one where they name their kid Female, because that's the word in the box and they don't understand how to fill out the form, but it's pronounced FeMale.
Peter: Have you heard this? There's this urban legend that someone named Ladasha-
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: -and how it's spelled? LA-A. Just obvious bullshit.
Mike: I was amazed that this wasn't in the Freakonomics book.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: Every other urban legend about this is in the Freakonomics book. And then, the Shateed/Shithead thing, I've seen this in a Kevin Hart routine I think that he did years ago was the first place I came across it.
Peter: I like the idea that Kevin Hart is pulling jokes from Freakonomics.
Mike: [laughs] He's like, "Good one, guys." So, this in a book that is meant to be data driven and exploring the world through quantitative data to fall for this just rank bullshit that-- I don't know what the Google situation was in 2005, but two minutes on Google, it's like, "Do black people name their kids Shithead? Ah, yeah, this has been bouncing around for decades."
Peter: Right.
Mike: We then get into-- you know these studies about they send in resumes?
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: And if you have a black name, you're less likely to get a call back than if you have a white name, right?
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: This says, "According to one such study, if DeShawn Williams and Jake Williams sent identical resumes to the same employer, Jake Williams would be more likely to get a call back. The implication is that black-sounding names carry an economic penalty. Such studies are tantalizing but severely limited for they can't explain why DeShawn didn't get the call. Was he rejected, because the employer is a racist and is convinced that DeShawn Williams is black? Or did he reject him, because DeShawn sounds like someone from a low income, low education family."
Peter: What?
Mike: "A resume is a fairly undependable set of clues. A recent study found that more than 50% of them contain lies. So, DeShawn may simply signal a disadvantaged background to an employer who believes workers from such backgrounds are undependable."
Peter: Argh.
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: You might think this is racism, but what if I told you that they're simply associating the name with a set of undesirable qualities that they attach to black people?
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: Are you fucking kidding me?
Mike: Did they not hire somebody named Mohammed due to Islamophobia or did they simply believe that he was going to strap a bomb to himself and blow up the building?
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: That's a longer way of saying Islamophobia. [laughs]
Peter: Also, how come this is the one time in the book that they're demanding more data?
Mike: Yeah. No, shit.
Peter: Everything else, they'll hang on to two datapoints and be like, "We've proven that people are rational about guns vis a vis swimming pool."
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: But with this one, they're like, "Let's not get crazy before we start calling people racist."
Mike: Also, dude, this is why I mentioned the fucking Weakest Link study., because three chapters ago, you're like, "Oops, it turns out racism doesn't exist." We looked at evidence from a game show.
Peter: Right.
Mike: And now, they're looking at real world examples. These studies are extremely consistent. There's been a million of these by now.
Peter: This is some of the strongest data for racism in hiring-
Mike: Exactly.
Peter: -because you can eliminate so many variables that otherwise might complicate the process. It's just resumes and they're identical. And also, how is this Freakonomics? Where's the Freakonomics here?
Mike: Well, Steven Levitt did a study on this, where he's basically asking the question of like, "Should DeShawn change his name?"
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: And so, he concludes, "So, does a name matter? The data show that on average, a person with a distinctively black name, whether it's a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn, does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of their names. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood, into the same family and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. The parents who named their son Jake don't tend to live in the neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their kid DeShawn.
Peter: Ooh.
Mike: While DeShawn is more likely to have been handicapped by a low income, low education, single-parent background, his name is an indicator, not a cause of his outcome.
Peter: Good Lord. First, he's just making that up. The whole point of the resume studies is that they show that that's not true.
Mike: Exactly.
Peter: But actually, there are disadvantages to the name in and of itself, because people are racist. So, he's just saying, "No, let's ignore those studies and just get the causation exactly backwards or at least eliminate some complexity."
Mike: But I feel this is another feature of these books, is that oftentimes, they'll set up this strawman to debunk. So, in this, he's like, "You thought the only reason DeShawn can't get a job is his name. But it turns out most poor black people can't get jobs."
Peter: Right. [laughs]
Mike: It's like, "Right, that's what I thought in the first place. I didn't think it was only the name."
Peter: This is a little darker than what Gladwell does, which is-- Often a little cuter, Gladwell will be like, "How one soccer team used jelly donut to win a championship," and you're like, "Hmm, what's going on there?" And Levitt, it feels just a little more racist every single time.
Mike: Yeah. There's a huge amount of conservative Ayn Rand bullshit presented in this book as "harsh truths."
Peter: yeah. [chuckles] Again, I would like to circle back to whoever thought of Freakonomics as a title, because Black People Critique is a much worse title.
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: [sighs] God, I didn't realize he was a Chicago guy, but it's starting to all click together in my brain.
Mike: Chicago and bio.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: He could have stopped at that. Speaking of which, the final way that this book misuses data is waltzing into huge preexisting debates and pretending to solve them. Chapter 5 of Freakonomics is dedicated to the question, "What explains the crime drop of the 1990s?"
Peter: Oh, yeah.
Mike: We both know where this one is going, but we're going to let them work up to it.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: So, first of all, the massive crime drop of the 1990s is probably one of the biggest social shifts to happen in our lifetimes.
Peter: Yes.
Mike: The national murder rate went down by 50%. Murders in New York City went from 2,300 a year to 600 a year.
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: This is an actual huge deal and there's a whole field of criminology dedicated to explaining this. I interviewed three different criminologists for this. So, Steven Levitt says there's actually three things that explain the massive crime dropped in the 1990s. The first is imprisonment. Mass incarceration. You will love this, because this is supreme courty. First of all, to explain the crime drop, we have to explain why crime rose so much in the 1960s, like massive increase in crime.
He says, "In retrospect, it is clear that one of the major factors pushing this trend was a more lenient justice system. Conviction rates declined during the 1960s and criminals who were convicted serve shorter sentences. This trend was driven in part by an expansion in the rights of people accused of crimes. A long overdue expansion, some would argue. Others would argue that the expansion went too far. [Peter laughs] At the same time, politicians were growing increasingly softer on crime for fear of sounding racist." The economist, Gary Becker, has written, "Since African-Americans and Hispanics commit a disproportionate share of felonies." So, the reason we got more crime is because America was famously not racist in 1960s.
Peter: Yeah, we hadn't hit that Goldilocks just right amount of racism that we needed to [Michael laughs] drive crime down to historic lows.
Mike: [crosstalk] The only citations in this section of mass incarceration, reduced crime are three articles that Gary Becker wrote in Business Week. All three criminologists told me that this is not remotely an accepted explanation, like we gave too many rights to people and then we got more crime.
Peter: I want to point out some big picture social science shit before we advance just to get it off my chest.
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: First of all, taking away inherent moral concerns with mass incarceration, a lot of what it's actually doing is just containing crime. Placing crime into prisons, where it's generally not recorded and doesn't add to the crime rate. Another thing is that when we talk about the decrease in crime, what we're talking about is something very specific and it's really the decrease in certain crimes, generally violent crimes. We're talking about murders, assaults, etc. The phenomenon of corporate level crime and government level crime, crime by massive institutions is completely excluded from these calculations. And so, I'm not saying that crime didn't go down, but our understanding of crime is tunneled through street-level violent crime.
Mike: But this is one of the reasons why I think this book has been such a negative force in American life is that a lot of policymakers read this and I think adopted the conflation that the book is making, where it's toggling back and forth between what is the most effective policy for reducing crime and what is the right policy. I remember when I was in grad school, I took a class on crime and punishment. On the first day, the professor told us that like, "If you imprisoned every teenage boy on their 16th birthday and release them on their 25th birthday, you would prevent 80% of crime."
Peter: Right.
Mike: That's a horrifying policy for many reasons, but it would be very effective to deter crime. If every speeding ticket came with the death penalty, just immediate shot to the back of the head, we would have no speeding in America.
Peter: Right.
Mike: Many, many, many policies would be effective at reducing crime, but that does not mean that they are the right policy. Other countries, which did not have mass incarceration also had huge crime drops in the 1990s, which is a worldwide phenomenon. So, I actually think that it's probably the case that mass incarceration reduced a lot of crimes mostly because you're just imprisoning a bunch of fucking teenagers. But that doesn't mean that it was the right policy and that also doesn't mean that there weren't other policies that would have had the same outcome with a lot less human misery.
Peter: Also, it's not an assurance of long-term declines in the crime rate, right?
Mike: Right.
Peter: The "benefit" is extremely immediate. This person is off the streets, so to speak, and not committing crimes, but what happens in 10 years when they're out and unemployable?
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: I don't know what else to say about these sorts of analyses, but the idea that someone is saying like, "Mass incarceration is uniquely effective," it's like, "What fucking country are you looking at?"
Mike: That's why America has so few murders.
Peter: Yeah. [laughs] Right.
Mike: [laughs] That was reason one for the crime drop. He says that explains 40% of the reduction in crime, mass incarceration. Reason number two is that we had more cops on the streets.
Peter: Of course.
Mike: This is the one time in the book they talked about actual methodologies and how difficult it is to measure many things. They basically say, "You can't just do a correlation between this city has more cops and less crime and divine any causal analysis." But then, Steven Levitt comes up with this unique model that does allow you to do causation, where he says after mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns, they often hire more cops. It's like a campaign promise. It's like, "I'm going to hire 50 more cops, put them on the street," whatever and then you get less crime. The main thing to know about Levitt's work on this is that it doesn't hold up. People have found coding errors in it. There's mistakes in the data.
Peter: Shocker.
Mike: Other people have pointed out that mayors and governors don't hire enough cops after elections to make much of a difference. You can only really get to this through weird statistical mumbo jumbo. And also, there's other reasons why crime might go down after a giant election that don't have to do with cops. And then, the number one problem with this which I feel should be much more front and center in every debate about crime and policing is that crime statistics are not statistics about crime. They are statistics about reports of crime.
Peter: Right, which run through police departments.
Mike: Exactly. And there are many, many things that would increase reports of crime, but not increase crime.
Peter: Yes.
Mike: A lot of countries that have done large-scale public information campaigns on sexual assault have sky high rates of rape and sexual assault, not because they have more of those crimes, but because people are willing to come forward about them. You also find, after large corruption scandals or police brutality incidents, people become more reluctant to report crimes to the police and that results in what appears to be a drop in crime, because you have fewer reports of crime and the police list that as a triumph. Like, "look, the police are working. We're reducing crime," but it actually means they're not working, because people don't trust them.
Every single study of crime and discussion of crime has to start with the fact that for most crime statistics, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. Most crimes are not reported to the police and there's all kinds of weird stuff about what counts as an aggravated assault versus not an aggravated assault. Even violent crime statistics include robbery, which is stealing from somebody through violence or the threat of violence, that's also something that depends on a judgment call. So, with the exceptions of homicides where basically, a body is a body and those tend to get counted and one of the criminologists I talked to said that motor vehicle theft is also weirdly reliable, because people have to report it to their insurance.
Peter: Yeah, I also want to point out, this is 2005, another big cultural phenomenon 2005, The Wire.
Mike: Oh, yeah.
Peter: And if you watch The Wire, you would know that when there's a new mayor, they put pressure on the police departments to keep the crime stats down, artificially deflated, okay?
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: And I want to be a guy that learns lessons about city government from The Wire, but I do trust it more than Steven Levitt at this point.
Mike: There are two separate teams of researchers that tried rerunning his data and weren't able to replicate it.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: The first one just found this coding error. And then, the second team of researchers said that when you run it, you actually find more reports of crime. But that's probably because when there's more cops on the street, they just see more stuff and it gets included. But it's this weird thing where a reduction in crime reports means the cops are working and an increase in crime reports also means the cops are working.
Peter: Yeah. Right.
Mike: We just really don't know very much about what's going on. Again, do cops reduce crime is a huge debate in three different fields and they're just waltzing into this and being like, "Obviously, police reduce crime, because I did a single study."
Peter: Freakonomics.
Mike: [laughs] So, mass incarceration and policing explain 50% of the crime reduction according to this argument. The third reason is shmishmortion. Do you remember this theory?
Peter: Yeah, in broad strokes, the theory is that-- I'm going to try to be somewhat polite about it [laughs] that crime disproportionately emanates from poor communities and is within poor communities. Abortion is something that is utilized disproportionately by poor communities. Therefore, the decline in crime can be explained by Roe v. Wade and the spread of abortion.
Peter: Yes. So, this is from the chapter of the book. It says, "Levitt and his coauthor, John Donohue, of Stanford Law School argued that as much as 50% of the huge drop in crime since the early 1990s can be traced to Roe v. Wade." Their thinking goes like this. "The women most likely to seek an abortion poor, single black or teenage mothers were the very women whose children if born would have been most likely to become criminals. But since those children weren't born, crime began to decrease during the years they would have entered their criminal prime."
In conversation, Levitt reduces the theory to a tiny syllogism. "Unwantedness leads to high crime, abortion leads to less unwantedness. Abortion leads to less crime."
Peter: Look, I don't even want to say that there is no causal connection here. I have no idea. But the amount of information you would need to draw that conclusion is enormous. The fact that this comes after them casting doubt on a much clearer correlation with [Michael laughs] black names in resumes, it's fucking hilarious.
Mike: But why, Peter? But why?
Peter: Yeah, it's a real mystery.
Mike: They begin with a cute anecdote about Romania, where abortion was a really common form of birth control. For every four livebirths, there was one abortion.
Peter: Okay.
Mike: And then in 1966, Ceaușescu was doing some national Romanian greatness thing and he banned abortion. So overnight, abortion went from extremely common to nonexistent, essentially. And so, they say, "Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way. They would test lower in schools, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would prove much more likely to become criminals."
Peter: Okay.
Mike: And then, they lay out the argument for the way that abortion reduces crime, which basically reduces the percentage of unwanted kids in the population. And so, when you have abortion being legalized, so the opposite of what Romania did, it's like clockwork. 18 years later, you start to see these really significant reductions in crime. To make this argument, they have four pieces of evidence. The first is that five states legalized abortion two years before Roe and all five of those states had earlier crime drops. The second piece of evidence is states with higher abortion rates at that time also had bigger crime drops. The third piece of evidence is people born after Roe v. Wade had lower crime rates. If you look at people born after 1973, it's like, "Oh, they commit less crime." And number four is data from other countries confirm the result. They say studies of Australia and Canada have since established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime. Of these four pieces of evidence, two are dubious and two are straight-up lies.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: The main thing to know about all this stuff about states that are legalizing abortions have less crime and states with more abortions had the biggest crime drops is mostly the data is just garbage. So, all of the states that legalized abortion earlier had huge rates of abortion, because people were traveling to those states to get abortions. There's no guarantee that those people are living in those states 18 years later.
Peter: Right.
Mike: I really couldn't believe this. They don't actually track a rise in abortion.
Peter: Oh.
Mike: For this, I interviewed a guy named Ted Joyce, who's written a bunch of articles about this, because he's an economist who specializes in abortion policy. He points out that Steven Levitt is just assuming that there were zero abortions in all of these states before Roe v. Wade. You're proposing that abortion explained 50% of the crime dropped. This is a huge effect, right?
Peter: Right.
Mike: To demonstrate that you would have to have doubling, tripling, quadrupling of abortions. But a lot of the states that legalized abortion early were fairly liberal states that had a lot of abortions going on, even when it was technically illegal. It's not big enough to explain this huge effect. And then, Ted Joyce also points out that abortion didn't actually change the birth rates all that much. It was the same number of people being born.
Peter: One of the weird things about this is that abortion in and of itself is just another way of talking about birth rates, right?
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: You're saying there's this thing that decreased birth rates among poor people. Then, why not just look at birth rates among poor people, right?
Mike: Exactly.
Peter: Why do this whole rigmarole?
Mike: And also, the biggest thing to me, if it was Roe v. Wade, you have this cohort of kids that are born after Roe v. Wade is legalized. So, if there were 20% unwanted kids in the population, now there's 10%, because there's higher access to abortion. But then, when you look at the specifics of how crime dropped, it wasn't young people who drove the reduction. It was old people.
Peter: Huh?
Mike: I read this fascinating article on the reduction in adult homicides. This was also a time when the demographics were shifting where the baby boomers were aging into later adulthood. So basically, you just had the entire population getting older, there's just fewer teenagers in the population. So, that drove [chuckles] a lot of reduction crime rates to begin with. And at the same time, you had reductions like fewer adults killing each other. And the biggest decrease was among wives killing their husbands.
Peter: Dudes rock. Let's go boys.
Mike: Yeah. [laughs] That's also something that draws upon all these other social shifts at the time. There's no-fault divorce, people waiting longer to get married, people moving in together before they get married. It's easier to leave somebody rather than have this sense of desperation.
Peter: Guys just getting nicer. Give us some credit, Michael.
Mike: [laughs] No, it's definitely the decreasing murderability of straight men.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: They stopped wearing such provocative clothing.
Peter: [chuckles]
Mike: I don't want to swap one cute counterintuitive explanation for another one, right?
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: There's not that many wives killing their husbands in the country.
Peter: This is insanely noisy.
Mike: Exactly. It's just so noisy.
Peter: The amount of variables we have going on here is just crazy.
Mike: You would expect for something like this for way fewer teenagers to be killing each other but the cascade through the population is exactly the opposite. It starts with 40-year-olds. And teenagers were actually killing each other more, because this was right during the crack epidemic.
Peter: Right.
Mike: It's this extremely weird thing where Steven Levitt says, "Oh, abortion explains the crime drop among teenagers." And then, people like, "Oh, well, teenagers were actually killing each other more."
Peter: Oops.
Mike: But then, he says, "If you control for the crack epidemic, then we have the effect."
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: Well, then, what's this based on?
Peter: Sorry, but control for the crack epidemic is killing. It is too good.
[laughter]
Peter: Control for the causes of crime, please.
Mike: But then, to me, this is where it gets really cynical. In the book, they say, "Studies of Australia and Canada have established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime." This is a lie. This is just a straightforward fucking lie.
Peter: Ah.
Mike: In Canada, abortion was legalized in two waves, one in 1969 and one in 1988, and the crime drops don't line up with either one of them. And then, the paper that they're citing about Australia finds mixed results. In Australia, it's also some states did it before other states. The researchers, who clearly agree with Levitt and are trying to make the data show that, they're like, "Ah, we found it earlier in some states, but not in others. And also, we don't have data on the age of perpetrators of homicide. So, we can't actually say whether it was teenagers." It was like, "Oh, so you just can't say anything."
Peter: Right.
Mike: There are other studies where they found that in the UK, the crime rate fell almost equally in England and Northern Ireland even though the Northern Ireland didn't legalize abortion. There's a review of 20 countries which found no link between abortion and crime.
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: This also brings us back to the Romania stuff.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Mike: So, in the book, the way that they describe this is this perfect mirror image of what happened in America. In America, we legalized abortion and then we got less crime. And in Romania, they banned abortion and then they got more crime.
Peter: Right.
Mike: So, again, the way that Freakonomics framed this is, "These children would turn out to have miserable lives. Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way. They would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals." So, slam dunk, right?
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Mike: One of the first things you find when you start googling around for this is you find a series of studies by an actual Romanian who looked into the data on the abortion ban and then this huge explosion of birth rates right after the abortion ban. What he finds is exactly the opposite. The kids born in the wake of the abortion ban committed less crime.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: The reason for this is all about who was getting abortions in Romania. The people who were getting abortions were mostly middle class, more educated women partly because you would get abortions from the official medical system and you had to be able to afford to go see a doctor. You had to be educated enough to know that abortions were available to you and living in a city where you could access them. And so, when they banned abortion, the birth rates spiked. But the women who were having babies were mostly educated, middle class, relatively well-off women who could afford to give their kids the resources to make sure they ended up okay in life. Then, when you look at America, it turns out to be the same thing. One of the things they mentioned in the Freakonomics book is that after abortion is legalized in the United States, the cost of an abortion goes from roughly $500 to around $100, which is a huge difference, right?
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: But also, $100 in the early 1970s is still a decent amount of money.
Peter: Right.
Mike: A lot of people do not have access to abortion clinics. If you live in a rural area, if you're not educated enough to know what the signs of pregnancy are, you don't realize what's happening, you might have super religious parents that don't allow you to go get an abortion, it would be very odd to act Roe v. Wade didn't increase abortion access for poor women, because obviously it did, right?
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Mike: There's not enough of a shift in who was getting abortions to explain all that much.
Peter: Right.
Mike: The poorest women, the most marginalized women in America were having babies when abortion was illegal and they're having babies when abortion is legal.
Peter: Right. He's implying that legality was the real barrier to abortion access, but it's only one barrier.
Mike: Right. I really could not believe it. When I read the Freakonomics book, googled around, found this Romanian study, and I was thinking of how to explain this to you, I was like, "Okay, so they wrote Freakonomics." And then later, this Romanian guy looks into the data and he finds that it doesn't hold up. Fair enough. We've all written stuff in popular media that eventually turns out not to be true when we get better data, whatever. So, I went back and double check this Romanian study. The study came out in 2002, three years before Freakonomics.
Peter: Oh, my God. [laughs]
Mike: This is not a debunking of Freakonomics. This is their source. This is the source they're using in the footnotes.
Peter: Oh, my God.
Mike: This to me is a new level of cynicism for this fucking book.
Peter: There's something so wild about this because what you expect from these little pop science books is oversimplification. And what you so often get is just incorrect information.
Mike: Well, this is what's so fascinating about this book and the discourse around this book is that whenever you see criticism of these dumb airport bestsellers, the defense of them is usually like, "Well, you got to sand down some rough edges. You're trying to convey complicated issues to the lay public." You know what? Fine. I have spent a lot of my career doing this. It is hard to simplify complex ideas in entire fields of academic studies. I get that. But it's very odd to use that defense when what we're talking about is a study says crime went down and you are saying crime went up.
Peter: Right. [laughs]
Mike: No one would understand that as simplification of a complex idea. That is a fucking lie.
Peter: There's something completely insane about, "It was 40% this, 10% this, 50% this." And it's like, "What the fuck?"
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: Let's just take a big setback. This is speculative, but also almost certainly true. Part of the crime drop, I don't know how much, maybe even a very tiny amount, part of it is probably just cultural norms shifting.
Mike: Yeah. Sure.
Peter: Part of it is probably education going up, all these little things. When you're saying three things account for 100% of it-
Mike: Yeah. [laughs] I know.
Peter: -you're allowing for no flexibility.
Mike: But I looked into this. There's a really good post by John Roman where he goes through 25 explanations for the crime drop, all of which are backed up by pretty good data. But you can't combine all of them. Everybody has their pet theory and you can use statistics however you want to bolster your pet theory. As far as I could tell, the consensus seems to be that it's some combination of various justice system things. So, incarceration, policing. This is also a period where there's huge technological changes. People are less likely to carry around cash now. There's one theory that it's air conditioning, where people were just indoors more in comfort and not outside hanging out where they're interacting with people. People talk about the VCR.
Peter: Yeah, because crime goes up in the summer. That's a classic social psych 101 thing. The reason for that, of course, is that people tend to be out outside more and the idea that things are keeping people indoors more seems to make some sense.
Mike: Yeah. There's also a lot more people are on medications for various mental health things. I think a really underrated factor is better medical procedures. If somebody gets shot, they're much more likely to live now than they were 40 years ago. So, a lot of those murders just became assaults. There's all kinds of other social changes which you can't really disentangle from the crime stuff. Teen pregnancy, teen fertility is way down. That's another long, slow shift that has happened in our lifetimes. Teens are less likely to use drugs and alcohol now. Adults drink less alcohol. There's less, whatever, inflation, and unemployment is higher, and just living standards are higher. One theory is that it's immigration, because immigrants commit less crime.
Peter: Oh, Michael, I think you have that backwards. Surely.
Mike: [laughs]
Peter: We are under siege, sir.
Mike: There's the lead stuff.
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: People are very attached to this one. I think it's in there. I think it might explain why crime went up so much in the 1960s basically, because baby boomers were becoming teenagers and then crime didn't go up as much when Gen X and Millennials became teenagers. Maybe the lead thing is in there although it totally breaks down internationally and it doesn't really work. I'm not invested in it's fake, but I'm also not accepting that that's what really explains it. I don't think there's any "real explanation."
Peter: Yeah. But what they're doing is the equivalent of just being like-- you're just looking at one trend and being like, "Wow, it looks like ice cream sales went up and crime went down. There it is. Ice cream and crime." That's all they're fucking doing here. Like throw a dart at a board, hit a datapoint, throw another at another board, hit another and you're like, "Those two, bang."
Mike: Ultimately, you're looking at correlations. [chuckles] You're looking at very noisy data on crime, very noisy data on abortions. I'm not even covering all of the statistical debate that has gone on around this. There's been a huge number of papers about there are basic coding errors. In Levitt study, he uses arrests as a proxy for crime.
Peter: Oh. Mm, mm, mm.
Mike: He uses the raw number of arrests rather than the arrest rates.
Peter: Uh-huh. [laughs]
Mike: He's like, "New York has more crime than Wyoming." It's like, "Well, yeah, because it has more people."
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: One of the criminologist I interviewed said that no responsible sociologist would ever say that it's one thing or even three things. It's going to be 12 and they're all going to be interlinked.
Peter: Right.
Mike: We may just never be able to untangle this.
Peter: That does sound right.
Mike: But then what's so weird to me is the international comparisons don't hold up, the timeline doesn't hold up, the statistics don't hold up. And yet, Levitt continues to double down.
Peter: Yeah. I remember a couple years ago, right?
Peter: Yeah, they're still publishing papers on this.
Peter: Yeah. What the fuck, man?
Mike: So, he just released an updated version of this. I think it was 2018, maybe it was 2019 and they did an updated Freakonomics episode about this, which I listened to. And again, they find, "Oh, it explains 50% of the crime drop." But then, in the Freakonomics episode, Levitt just drops in. He's like, "Well, it might even explain as much as 80% or 90%."
Peter: Hell, yeah.
Mike: He's like, "Well, that's not in your paper, but okay."
Peter: [laughs] I love the idea of a serious academic. And this actually happens, I think, more than you might expect. But an academic puts a thesis out there and they're just in need of therapy. And so, when people attack the thesis rather than being [Michael laughs] like, "Hmm, that's interesting. Maybe if we reconceptualized it like this or maybe I'm wrong," they just get defensive for 20 years.
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: By the end of it, they're just a complete crank.
Mike: What's so weird to me is I don't even feel all that strongly that this effect doesn't exist.
Peter: Yeah.
Mike: If it's really important to you to say that abortion is one of the things that's in there, I can't really disprove that given the data that we have. But to me, it's on the level of VHS or air conditioning. It's vaguely plausible. You can use statistics to say almost anything you want if you're trying to explain 10% of this massive social shift. You can say the decline of vinyl records explains 10% of the crime drop, if you want to, using [Peter laughs] modern statistical techniques. So, I'm not going to say that he's full of shit. The data does not allow me to say that.
Peter: Yeah. This is an incredibly complex set of phenomena. If you wanted to say that abortion is part of this tapestry, sure. Once you're saying it's 50%, then you need to show an unbelievable amount of data.
Mike: Yeah.
Peter: And instead, he gives you fucking nothing. Some incorrect data from Romania and some hypothesizing.
Mike: To wrap up, I read a bunch of reviews of this book and there was only one that pointed out what an ideological project this is. Once you get to the actual things that you learned from reading this book, it's like, "Okay, campaign finance doesn't matter that much and discrimination isn't that big of a deal." They have a whole section that I fucking skipped about how protecting the forests to save the spotted owl is not worth the money.
Peter: [laughs]
Mike: Throughout the book, they're setting up this binary between acting on intuition and acting on data. But what we see throughout this book is that all of their "data-driven presentation" is riddled with ideology. They're leaving out important information, they're using data that doesn't indicate what they say it indicates, they're misciting existing research. I don't want to set up a weird QAnon thing where it's bullshit to look at the data or we shouldn't look at research. That's obviously just as shallow as saying that research will solve everything.
Peter: Yeah, right. [chuckles]
Mike: But I just want to stress that this is a false binary. There is no such thing as using data to remove all human judgment, value ideology from the way that we make decisions. We should make decisions based on values.
Peter: Right. The book has a confidence to it that carries forward into its readers almost, where people had this belief that this was groundbreaking in a sense. I have to say, as much as they present that dichotomy between intuition and science, the appeal of most of their ideas is really intuitive. They're making these claims that it might not be the consensus but are not really counterintuitive. Oh, well, swimming pools are dangerous too. That's something we all know that kids around swimming pools is a dangerous combination. I actually think what they're presenting is basically something that is designed to appeal to your intuition and that's why it's effective.
Mike: And I think very importantly, they're repackaging it and selling it back to you while telling you that it's science, while telling you that its objective, which I think is like somehow worse. Because if you know that you're going on your gut, you can compare that to other people's guts and have a little bit of humility about like, "Oh, well, I see it this way. Somebody else sees it the other way." But it's like, "No, no. I'm doing science and everyone else is a fucking rube." That's actually really dangerous.
Peter: Right. There's an implication that institutions, like major academic institutions, are either ignoring or covering up this information in some way. And that shit is wildly dangerous. There's a sense to which sometimes, I hear about a book like Freakonomics and it conjures up very specific discussions, like the abortion component. And then, you hear all the things that the book contains. And rather than getting clarity, it just ends up being a jumble of bullshit in my mind, where I'm like, "Damn, [Michael laughs] that book was a lot dumber than I thought."
Mike: It really is shocking how dumb this book is. I was expecting Gladwell where you'd have to look for it. [Peter laughs] This is also why I wanted to leapfrog this to the first episode that we released, because we've talked about a lot of other books, we've already recorded episodes on one of the Gladwell books, and The End of History, and Clash of Civilizations. But I think Freakonomics is really one of the worst entries in this both because of how stupid it is and also how no one seemed to comment on that at the time. It's incredible.
Peter: And Michael, you once described this phenomenon to me that the TED Talkification of American discourse as a common consumer, I think you would assume that to the degree that this pop science exists above it somewhere is a level of serious science that the serious people are discussing. But in reality, there are no serious people and they're all reading this bullshit.
Mike: Yeah. [laughs]
Peter: That is a very true and haunting phenomenon, but where the most powerful people are absorbing the same dumb ideas that the rest of us are.
Mike: Freakonomics.
Peter: Freakonomics.
[laughter]
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