I thought the book might be interesting based on a post on Lifehacker.com. It seems people either love or hate the book.
You can read other reader's comments at Lifehacker and on Amazon
. On a five star rating scale I'd give the book one collapsed star to indicate a black hole sucking knowledge out of the universe.
The author's state in the epilogue, "...if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the real world."
What they purport to show is that a careful examination of statistical data will provide you with "the real world", valuable insights, and if not the truth - at least a glimpse at some partial truths.
In my simple minded way another word for a partial truth is a lie. I'm not saying these gentlemen are lying. They are just confused, perhaps not surprisingly, by the statistics. The sad, maybe a little scary part, of it is that because of their credentials some people might take their claims as gospel.
For example - In their effort to be fair and open-minded they cite statistics that show that children raised in single parent homes are just as successful in school as children from two-parent homes, yet on the other hand statistics show them that children from single-parent homes are twice as likely to be criminals.
If I was a statistic's shaman, which of those facts I choose to emphasize depends on what point I want to make, do I want to convince you that "the breakdown of the nuclear family has led to society's ills?" or "single parent families can be as good as two parent families?"
From the book -
Page 138 - "These two factors - childhood poverty and a single-parent household are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a a child's propensity to commit crime."
Page 169 - In discussing the factors that correlate to a good childhood education...."But whether a child's family is intact doesn't seem to matter. Just as the earlier studies show that family structure has little impact on a child's personality, it does not seem to affect his academic abilities either."
A single parent family turns out twice as many criminals but on the upside they are smart with good personalities?
The authors get confused about the impact of good schools on children as well, making the point that what school a child attends is not a predictor of educational excellence but rather his or her "desire" to attend a good school. They also use data to make the opposite point that there really are bad schools that do effect a child's education. You can't have it both ways (unless you are using statistical evidence to prove a social theory, and then you can have it anyway you want). From the book -
Page 158 - In discussing a lottery system where students applied to a "good" school and the lucky winners were selected by a drawing...the author's state, "It is true that the students who entered the Chicago student lottery were more likely to graduate than the students who didn't - which seems to suggest that school choice does make a difference. But that's an illusion. The proof is in this comparison: the students who won the lottery and went to a "better" school did no better than equivalent students who lost the lottery and were left behind." Statistically the students who went to the better schools "gained no benefit by changing schools."
Page 165 - The author's, having explained how the Chicago data showed schools don't matter, now explain why they do. "Black students are hardly the only ones to suffer in bad schools. White children in these schools also perform poorly. In fact, there is essentially no black-white test score gap within a bad school in the early years once you control for students backgrounds. But all students in a bad school, black and white, do lose ground to students in good schools......So according to these data, a child's school does have a clear impact on academic progress."
This is a bad book, for a variety of reasons. In my opinion there's an undertone of racism, class prejudice and weird inhumane thought processes that lead to statements like -
Page 132 - "Not that this is likely, but if the death penalty were assessed to anyone carrying an illegal gun, and if the penalty were actually enforced, gun crimes would surely plunge."
Page 173 - "There is another explanation for low-achieving adoptees which, though it may seem distasteful, jibes with the basic economic theory of self-interest: a woman who knows she will put her baby up for adoption may not take the same prenatal care as a woman who is keeping her baby. Consider - at the risk of futher distasteful thinking - how you treat a car you own versus a car you are renting for the weekend."
The final chapter is all about baby names - which one are most likely to be black baby names, poor baby names, rich baby names...how baby names correlate to how many years of education the mother has. Is this information intended to inform poor, black, under-educated mothers when picking a baby name, or a sort of snide comment between rich, white, over-educated authors? Not sure what the point is, but it seems to me to have a tone that suggests something less than respect and reverence for individual human beings.
On the other hand the book includes somewhat bizarre, self-serving, glowing descriptions of one wonderful human being (the author) before each chapter. For example -
"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 2000 Bush campaign asked him about being a crime advisor) but who is claimed by all. He has come to be acknowledged as a master of the simple, clever solution. He is the guy in the slapstick scenario, who sees all the engineers fultzing with a broken machine - and then realizes that no one has thought to plug it in."
"Leavitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science."
"He (Leavitt) is genial, low-key and unflappable, confident but not cocky. He speaks with a considerable lisp. His appearance is High Nerd: a plaid button down shirt, nondescript khakis and a braided belt, brown sensible shoes. His pocket calendar is branded with the National Bureau of Economic Research logo."
Most author's, and one would think particularly scientific authors, let what was written speak for itself, and keep the glowing comments about what a great guy or gal they are on the book's jacket. Demigod indeed.
Some of the statements are just laughable. In one spot the author talks about the decreasing murder rate among crack dealers and says, granting that this is a minor effect, but still in his opinion worth saying - that crack dealers had taken to shooting their enemies in the butt rather than in a more vital spot that might kill them.
Here's the quote,
"Another minor contributor to the falling homicide rate is the fact that some crack dealers took to shooting their enemies in the buttocks rather than murdering them; this method of violent insult was considered more degrading - and was obviously less severely punished - than murder."
How does that work again? Does the crack dealer say, "Hey turn around and stand still so I can shoot you in the butt?" Or were they only shooting at people running away? and if they were running how's that shaky crack dealer with a cheap pistol hit em in the butt?
There are much more controversial and equally ill thought out, claims in the book - abortion caused the declining crime rate, parenting doesn't really effect childhood development, intelligence of adoptees is constained by their biological parents with little impact due to nuturing by their adopted parents.
It's not worth parsing all the errors in those claims. It might have helped some of the more naive readers, if the author's would have used words like, "this may be so" or "one conclusion that could be drawn is...", instead of stating opinions as hard facts.
I don't think this book is an intentional effort to mislead anyone, there are some interesting factoids in it - which would fit on a couple of pages. The fact that people, even smart authors like this, can be misled by the data shouldn't surprise us. You have to use your head and your heart, the data and common sense, logic and intuition, theory and practice and most of all learn by doing. Studying and presenting the statistics can (as the book intentionally and unintentionally) points out can lead you down a rabbit hole.
Overall it's an odd book, full of contradictions, a hodgepodge of information with no unifying thread and no suggestion on what one would do with the data, facts or opinons presented.
Makes me wonder how the publishing world works. How a book like this becomes a best seller, how it get's good reviews?
I did learn a couple of things from reading it - noetic means intellectual, and don't let young children play around a swimming pool without adult supervision.
Glad I got it from the library rather than buying it.
Postscript - The book touched a nerve with me (as you may be able to tell from the length of this post), for various reasons - partly because yesterday I was listening to some very caring people talk about real-world experiences with some of the very things this book touches on in such a heavy-handed uncaring way.
I respect the work statisticians and economists do. There are of course areas where economic theory and statistics can serve us well. The areas that this book discusses do not fall in that category.
If anything the book teaches us to not use economics or statistics for finding "the" reason or "the" answer when dealing with complex human issues such as education, crime and punishment, adoption, or abortion's impact on individuals and society.
We need cross-functional diverse teams to solve difficult complex problems. Depending on the issue under consideration, an economist may be a valuable member of such a team.
For an economist or statistician to claim to have arrived at "the" right answer for any complex social issue, Benjamin Disrali probably had it about right -
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
