A few days ago I posted a note about a Freakonomics blog by James McWilliams, who asked, “Do Farmers’ Markets Really Strengthen Local Communities?” I was disappointed to see that he offered a historical discussion but no quantitative data or analysis, merely a barrage of subjective impressions and rhetorical questions of the “Who is to say?” sort.
I was hoping for something more in the next installment, but Part Two is unfortunately more of the same. Lots of qualitative quotes but still no data. We get this sort of thing: “Building on this suspicion, she acknowledges that many small farms are indeed more sustainable than larger ones, but then reminds us that “Small scale, ‘local’ farmers are not inherently better environmental stewards.”
“Not inherently better”? That’s the best he can do??
Again, if this were an ordinary magazine article or posted in an ordinary blog, it would be fine. Personal impressions make the world go round. But I expect something more when I turn to Freakonomics. Hard-edged data analysis is what makes Freakonomics special. Otherwise it’s just the sort of opinionating that anyone can do in their sleep.
Part Three is forthcoming. Maybe we’ll see some economic analysis there.
I doubt it. Freakonomics (the blog) has shifted to a deplorable degree from presenting ideas and studies that are clever _and_ go against conventional wisdom or some version of "pc", to ideas that they think are clever _because_ they go against the conventional wisdom or some version of pc. This is made worse by the fact that Levitt/Dubner have discovered that sex sells and push the prostitute line constantly – most recently here:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/…
while I do believe the topic is interesting, this flaunting of it is a bit creepy.
They've also started to go emphasize the curious so much that they don't bother to talk about the economics anymore. Here, Dubner talks about the recent EIchenbaum, Christiano and Rebeldo NBER paper:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/…
this is an incredibly interesting paper, not least because three supposedly "freshwater" economists arrive at a very high fiscal multiplicator for a liquidity trap situation.
But does Dubner talk about that? Nope. He just think it's cool the abstract is so short (nothing wrong with noting that – it's fun – but _just_ that?),
It's quite sad – I did enjoy the initial book and the first couple of years of the blog. I don't even know if I want to read the new book.
In response to my telling my wife about this, my wife said, "It's such a fine line between dataless and and bullshit."
I agree it would be nice to see data, but I think the idea with that was to be provocative and counter-intuitive.
Sebastian:
I don't think that Levitt and Dubner realize what a valuable franchise the Freakonomics blog is, in terms of intellectual influence. My impression is that they started the blog as a way to promote the (first) Freakonomics book, and then the blog took on a life of its own. But it's always looked to me like they see the blog more of a way of blowing off steam and opinionating rather than serious thought. I'm guessing that the second Freakonomics book will be good–Levitt and Dubner probably take the book writing much more seriously than the blogging. In terms of economics, this makes sense–I'm sure the book makes much more money for them than the blog does–but, yeah, I think they're throwing something away by using the blog as a vehicle for pure speculation.
I like Justin Wolfers's posts on Freakonomics, though. They're more in the playful-yet serious style of the Freakonomics book or of blogs such as Marginal Revolution or, for that matter, this blog.
Jonathan: Provocative and counter-intuitive is fine, and that would work for most blogs. But I hold Freakonomics up to a higher standard.
Good, lets see.
I agree 100% on Justin Wolfers by the way.
I'm a bit more worried about Freakonomics than you are.
I'm somewhat partial to parts of John DiNardo's critique:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdinardo/Freak/fre…
one of his most interesting points is that Levitt and Dubner seem more interested in impressing than in educating (note e.g. the heroic stature to which Levitt is edified in the book). And I do think there is a good deal of this on the blog.
And I think Levitt has been oddly thin-skinned reacting to criticism (including, but not limited to DiNardo), which also led to a certain deplorable intellectual arrogance, which comes at a cost: E.g. Levitt went on defending Emily Oster's work on sex-ratio's and hepatitis long after it had been very credibly questioned. (She eventually retracted her findings).
Well, let's read the book, I guess, and reconvene.
Sebastian:
I'm not saying that Freakonomics was perfect. Beyond any stylistic issues, there's a tendency for researchers in this area of economics to define the causal effect of interest as whatever natural experiment happens to be available. (For example, consider David Lee's work on the incumbency advantage. It's interesting but isn't really about incumbency as I see it.) There's always the tension between getting a poorly-identified estimate of something that you care about, as compared to a well-identified estimate of something that's related but not quite the same thing.
That said, I feel like Freakonomics was a good thing in that it introduced statistical thinking to a lot of readers. Also, as an author of several books myself, I respect and admire the writing. Each chapter tells a story well, moving through a range of intellectual speculations that are backed by data. In Red State, Blue State, we were not able to capture that sense of discovery. I think the material in Red State, Blue State is inherently more interesting than that in Freakonomics–and I think we did a better job of connecting our stories with the data. But it was just too dry. Writing in a lively way is a real skill.
Finally, yes, I think the whole Emily Oster thing was horrible and did no service to Oster herself, for that matter. For my thoughts on this when it was happening, see here or search this blog on Monica Das Gupta.
But I take the Oster thing as an example of (sloppy) Blog Levitt, a completely different person than (thoughtful and generally careful) Book Levitt. It will be interesting to see whether the new Freakonomics book is more a product of Book Levitt than of Blog Levitt.
Sebastian: Dubner's not the economist, and tends to get nasty comments from "real economists" (tm?) when he wanders into their turf.
The short abstract issue is one that many people outside economics can relate to.