Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition Page 19

  So the implication is clear: the parents of all those Alexandras, Laurens, Katherines, Madisons, and Rachels should not expect the cachet to last much longer. Those names are already on their way to overexposure. Where, then, will the new high-end names come from?

  It wouldn’t be surprising to find them among the “smartest” girls’ and boys’ names in California, listed on pages 181–82, that are still fairly obscure. Granted, some of them—Oona and Glynnis, Florian and Kia—are bound to remain obscure. The same could be surmised of most of the Hebrew names (Rotem and Zofia, Akiva and Zev), even though many of today’s most mainstream names (David, Jonathan, Samuel, Benjamin, Rachel, Hannah, Sarah, Rebecca) are of course Hebrew biblical names. Aviva may be the one modern Hebrew name that is ready to break out: it’s easy to pronounce, pretty, peppy, and suitably flexible.

  Drawn from a pair of “smart” databases, here is a sampling of today’s high-end names. Some of them, as unlikely as it seems, are bound to become tomorrow’s mainstream names. Before you scoff, ask yourself this: do any of them seem more ridiculous than “Madison” might have seemed ten years ago?

  Most Popular Girls’ Names of 2015?

  Annika

  Ansley

  Ava

  Avery

  Aviva

  Clementine

  Eleanora

  Ella

  Emma

  Fiona

  Flannery

  Grace

  Isabel

  Kate

  Lara

  Linden

  Maeve

  Marie-Claire

  Maya

  Philippa

  Phoebe

  Quinn

  Sophie

  Waverly

  Most Popular Boys’ Names of 2015?

  Aidan

  Aldo

  Anderson

  Ansel

  Asher

  Beckett

  Bennett

  Carter

  Cooper

  Finnegan

  Harper

  Jackson

  Johan

  Keyon

  Liam

  Maximilian

  McGregor

  Oliver

  Reagan

  Sander

  Sumner

  Will

  Obviously, a variety of motives are at work when parents consider a name for their child. They may want something traditional or something bohemian, something unique or something perfectly trendy. It would be an overstatement to suggest that all parents are looking—whether consciously or not—for a “smart” name or a “high-end” name. But they are all trying to signal something with a name, whether the name is Winner or Loser, Madison or Amber, Shithead or Sander, DeShawn or Jake. What the California names data suggest is that an overwhelming number of parents use a name to signal their own expectations of how successful their children will be. The name isn’t likely to make a shard of difference. But the parents can at least feel better knowing that, from the very outset, they tried their best.

  EPILOGUE:

  Two Paths to Harvard

  And now, with all these pages behind us, an early promise has been confirmed: this book indeed has no “unifying theme.”

  But if there is no unifying theme to Freakonomics, there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world. All it requires is a novel way of looking, of discerning, of measuring. This isn’t necessarily a difficult task, nor does it require supersophisticated thinking. We have essentially tried to figure out what the typical gang member or sumo wrestler figured out on his own (although we had to do so in reverse).

  Will the ability to think such thoughts improve your life materially? Probably not. Perhaps you’ll put up a sturdy gate around your swimming pool or push your real-estate agent to work a little harder. But the net effect is likely to be more subtle than that. You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular. To claim that legalized abortion resulted in a massive drop in crime will inevitably lead to explosive moral reactions. But the fact of the matter is that Freakonomics-style thinking simply doesn’t traffic in morality. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

  The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising. Consider the question posed at the beginning of this book’s penultimate chapter: how much do parents really matter?

  The data have by now made it clear that parents matter a great deal in some regards (most of which have been long determined by the time a child is born) and not at all in others (the ones we obsess about). You can’t blame parents for trying to do something—anything—to help their child succeed, even if it’s something as irrelevant as giving him a high-end first name.

  But there is also a huge random effect that rains down on even the best parenting efforts. If you are in any way typical, you have known some intelligent and devoted parents whose child went badly off the rails. You may have also known of the opposite instance, where a child succeeds despite his parents’ worst intentions and habits.

  Recall for a moment the two boys, one white and one black, who were described in chapter 5. The white boy who grew up outside Chicago had smart, solid, encouraging, loving parents who stressed education and family. The black boy from Daytona Beach was abandoned by his mother, was beaten by his father, and had become a full-fledged gangster by his teens. So what became of the two boys?

  The second child, now twenty-eight years old, is Roland G. Fryer Jr., the Harvard economist studying black underachievement.

  The white child also made it to Harvard. But soon after, things went badly for him. His name is Ted Kaczynski.

  BONUS MATERIAL ADDED TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED 2006 EDITION

  The original New York Times Magazine article about Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner, which led to the creation of this book.

  Seven “Freakonomics” columns written for the New York Times Magazine, published between August 2005 and April 2006.

  Selected entries from the Freakonomics blog, posted between April 2005 and May 2006 at http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/.

  THE PROBABILITY THAT A REAL-ESTATE AGENT IS CHEATING YOU (AND OTHER RIDDLES OF MODERN LIFE)

  Inside the curious mind of the heralded young economist Steven Levitt

  by Stephen J. Dubner

  New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003

  The most brilliant young economist in America—the one so deemed, at least, by a jury of his elders—brakes to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago’s south side. It is a sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy Cavalier with a dusty dashboard and a window that doesn’t quite shut, producing a dull roar at highway speeds. But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets: gas stations, boundless concrete, brick buildings with plywood windows.

  An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless right on his sign, which also asks for money. 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 e
conomist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling one, depending on how you feel about economists. The average economist is known to wax oracularly about any and all monetary issues. But if you were to ask Levitt his opinion of some standard economic matter, he would probably swipe the hair from his eyes and plead ignorance. “I gave up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn’t know,” he says. “I mean, I just—I just don’t know very much about the field of economics. I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.”

  In Levitt’s view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?

  And how does a homeless man afford $50 headphones?

  Many people—including a fair number of his peers—might not recognize Levitt’s work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science down to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want, or need. Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities (though he does fear calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else had found. He devises a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable. His abiding interests—though he says he has never trafficked in them himself—are cheating, corruption and crime.

  His interest in the homeless man’s headphones, meanwhile, didn’t last long. “Maybe,” he said later, “it was just testimony to the fact I’m too disorganized to buy a set of headphones that I myself covet.”

  Levitt is the first to say that some of his topics border on the trivial. But he has proved to be such an ingenious researcher and clear-eyed thinker that instead of being consigned to the fringe of his field, the opposite has happened: he has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world.

  “Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science,” says Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. “He represents something that everyone thinks they will be when they go to grad school in econ, but usually they have the creative spark bored out of them by endless math—namely, a kind of intellectual detective trying to figure stuff out.”

  Levitt is a populist in a field that is undergoing a bout of popularization. Undergraduates are swarming the economics departments of elite universities. Economics is seen as the ideal blend of intellectual prestige (it does offer a Nobel, after all) and practical training for a high-flying finance career (unless, like Levitt, you choose to stay in academia). At the same time, economics is ever more visible in the real world, thanks to the continuing fetishization of the stock market and the continuing fixation with Alan Greenspan.

  The greatest change, however, is within the scholarly ranks. Microeconomists are gaining on the macro crowd, empiricists gaining on the theorists. Behavioral economists have called into doubt the very notion of “homo economicus,” the supposedly rational decision-maker in each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into bordering disciplines—psychology, criminology, sociology, even neurology—with the intent of rescuing their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical models.

  Levitt fits everywhere and nowhere. He is a noetic butterfly that no one has pinned down—he was once offered a job on the Clinton economic team, and the Bush campaign approached him about being a crime adviser—but who is widely appreciated.

  “Steve isn’t really a behavioral economist, but they’d be happy to have him,” says Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. “He’s not really an old price-theory guy, but these Chicago guys are happy to claim him. He’s not really a Cambridge guy”—although Levitt went to Harvard and then M.I.T.—“but they’d love him to come back.”

  He has critics, to be sure. Daniel Hamermesh, a prominent labor economist at the University of Texas, has taught Levitt’s paper “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime” to his undergraduates. “I’ve gone over this paper in draft, in its printed version, at great length, and for the life of me I can’t see anything wrong with it,” Hamermesh says. “On the other hand, I don’t believe a word of it. And his stuff on sumo wrestlers—well, this is not exactly fundamental, unless you’re Japanese and weigh 500 pounds.”

  But at thirty-six, Levitt is a full professor in the University of Chicago’s economics department, the most legendary program in the country. (He received tenure after only two years.) He is an editor of the Journal of Political Economy, a leading journal in the field. And the American Economic Association recently awarded him its John Bates Clark Medal, given biennially to the country’s best economist under 40.

  He is a prolific and diverse writer. But his paper linking a rise in abortion to a drop in crime has made more noise than the rest combined. Levitt and his co-author, John Donohue of Stanford Law School, argued that as much as 50 percent 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, have been shown 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 tidy syllogism: “Unwantedness leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime.”

  Levitt had already published widely about crime and punishment. 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 re-election 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. He began to be acknowledged as a master of the simple, clever solution. He was the guy who, in the slapstick scene, sees all the engineers futzing with a broken machine—and then realizes that no one has thought to plug it in.

  Arguing that the police help deter crime didn’t make Levitt any enemies. Arguing that abortion deterred crime was another matter.

  In the abortion paper, published in 2001, he and Donohue warned that their findings should not be seen “as either an endorsement of abortion or a call for intervention by the state in the fertility decisions of women.” They suggested that crime might just as easily be curbed by “providing better environments for those children at greatest risk for future crime.”

  Still, the very topic managed to offend nearly everyone. Conservatives were enraged that abortion could be construed as a crime-fighting tool. Liberals were aghast that poor and black women were singled out. Eco
nomists grumbled that Levitt’s methodology was not sound. A syllogism, after all, can be a magic trick: All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.

  “I think he’s enormously clever in so many areas, focusing very much on the issue of reverse causality,” says Ted Joyce, an economist at Baruch College who has written a critical response to the abortion paper. “But in this case I think he ignored it, or didn’t tend to it well enough.”

  As the news media gorged on the abortion-crime story, Levitt came under direct assault. He was called an ideologue (by conservatives and liberals alike), a eugenicist, a racist and downright evil.

  In reality, he seems to be very much none of those. He has little taste for politics and less for moralizing. He is genial, low-key and unflappable, confident but not cocky. He is a respected teacher and colleague; he is a sought-after collaborator who, because of the breadth of his curiosities, often works with scholars outside his field—another rarity for an economist.

  “I hesitate to use these words, but Steve is a con man, in the best sense,” says Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University. “He’s the Shakespearean jester. He’ll make you believe his ideas were yours.” Venkatesh was Levitt’s co-author on “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances,” which found that the average street dealer lives with his mother because the take-home pay is, frankly, terrible. The paper analyzed one crack gang’s financial activities as if it were any corporation. (It was Venkatesh who procured the data, from a former gang member.) Such a thing had never been tried. “This lack of focus,” Levitt deadpanned in one version of the paper, “is perhaps partly attributable to the fact that few economists have been involved in the study of gangs.”