What I wanted (from Freakonomics) was to peer through "the hidden side of everything"... What I needed was the serenity to accept that causality is too damn hard.
I appreciated the attempts by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to communicate with layman non-economists like me. I think The Economist article was, as always, too harsh and nitpicky. I think Freakonomics holds a special place in the "intellectual" and "rationalists" community. I cannot verify the flaws in techniques and conclusion as stated in this article but I would still recommend reading Freakonomics first over the dry economics textbooks or MIT OCW courseware.
The trouble with doing that for Freakonomics is that the work on abortions reducing crime, which has been proven wrong, is the first chapter and the centerpiece of the book. It's the thing that they use to exemplify the "freakonomics" approach in the rest of the book.
do you have links to the papers disproving that? That result is kind of the basis for the moral argument for allowing abortion for consensual fetuses for me. Without that result the cost/benefit looks terrible because the deflationary death spiral of the below replacement birthrate it helps cause is really, really bad.
I'm not even an armchair economist but when I read the book many years ago, I could still tell that some of the stories and conclusions were anecdotal at best. It was still a fun read and fun to think about. The best thing about it besides entertainment value was don't take what you read at face value, even if (maybe especially) it's popular.
Hard not to read this as, "because some old guard economists don't like fun things."
I am not overly fond of some of the ideas in freakonomics, but I can't deny the fun of looking at things and trying to tease out explanations. If anything, I would want to laud getting people to even try replication at a good thing. I fear if we only enjoy the flawless replications, we set a bit too high of a bar.
Freakonomics is actually covered in some college econ textbooks (usually as an aside that reinforces a core concept). It's hard to say which one as I've gone through like 7 so far in the program I'm doing. Most of the textbooks I've read have been VERY "cool" and approachable with a decent amount of humor from the authors.
“A recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve found that less than half of the published papers they examined could be replicated, even when given help from the original authors. Mr Levitt’s counterintuitive results have fallen out of fashion and economists in general have become more sceptical.”
Didn’t realize replication was so bad in Econ too.
Depends on which part of econ. Micro and econometrics fare pretty well (there was even an econ pseudo-Nobel awarded to Vernon Smith for figuring out how to do reproducible experiments in micro), but macro is the darkest of swamps.
If the purpose of half of economics study was to justify political decisions, rather than to learn facts about the world, that replication rate would be what you'd expect.
> If the purpose of half of economics study was to justify political decisions
I mean, let’s be honest, is it _not_ actually this? Maybe economics should just give up the charade and accept its role as a political tool and not something with a scientific base so comically bad, even the softest of other sciences look positively mathematical in comparison.
Math is math and the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, biology,and engineering are all good assuming somebody isn't mining p-values or something like that.
The social sciences require a ton of data and simulating something like the economy with trillions of variables and bounded rationality just isn't possible. If you wanted to simulate an agent like myself you'd likely need millions of lines of probabilistic code and then you'd need millions of other agents running on a supercomputer the size of Rhode Island.
Biomed is already too complex to simulate fully, which is why simulating is just, not really a thing that is done to find new knowledge. Heck, some quantum interactions are already (so far) computationally intractable, which is why quantum chemistry exists as a field at all, it's far from trivial. That doesn't mean the best practices developed for medicine won't help in the social sciences as well.
The issue with degrees of freedom can be mostly pinned down with preregistration, among other measures. It won't solve the problem of having more type I errors at any specific error rate the more science you do, but it does give assurances the target type I error rate is accurate.
Econ is a notorious "nothing and everything topic" (not being fair here, but economists also talk about this). It doesn't really fit anywhere. It's not very practical to study scientifically.
I don't want to insult Sociologists here, but economics can be very much like sociology for money issues.
It's intuitive that replication would be terrible in economics (not taking a shot at you for not "realizing"; we don't think about every subject in the world).
What you really want to do is take one society, run it for 5-200 years. Then go back in time, take the same society, and try again with one small change. In practice, you might need to repeat many times because you would expect chance to change such a complicated system (butterfly effect).
"In practice"... listen to me, I'm being absurd. This is clearly impossible. Of course there's ways to try anyway, but they're all known to be "bad science".
I used to love the podcast in particular. But then it sort of went in this annoying lifestyle direction with very rare involvement from Levitt and had nothing to do with it's original subject matter.
The podcast was good for awhile, but I think they mined all the novel ideas and just turned into a stop on the book promotion tour so many authors take.
It's fun and clever, but is it true?!?! [or if you think it doesn't matter whether it's true and replicable, it's great salon chatter material, but that wouldn't be science, it would be something above Malcolm Gladwell-grade material.]
It's more from the "interesting-if-true" school of clickbait. It popularized the "amazing counterintuitive results!" school of airport books along with Ariely, Kahneman.
(Conversely, it did have a few benefits: teaching the layman about experiment design, correlation-does-not-imply-causation, instrumental variables.)
(The most plausible-sounding counterintuitive which Freakonomics radio program (on NPR) reported was the claim that participating in the FIFA World Cup tended to reduce overall internal corruption in a country, because if the sports ministry embezzled the money or didn't hire good staff and use it effectively (or at the most basic level, pay players' wages, facilities, travel, jerseys), the country's national team would tend to get beaten embarrassingly by their peers, and the outraged populace would demand reform, not just in sports but other sectors. However, better check if that was replicable or not; it should be, because international tournaments, World Cup player strikes or scandals plus Transparency.org rankings give us "natural experiments" every 2-4 years.)
I found the episode, but although it cited some sources, can't see an actual publication with that finding, but other sources plus some plausible conjecture by people who are fairly informed:
[5m00s-onwards]" the World Cup isn’t just a gargantuan sporting event; it’s a microcosm of human foibles and (yep) economic theory brought to life."
Click on 'Read Full transcript'. In the audio, jump to 11m29s, where they talk to Stefan Szymanski, professor of economics at the University of Michigan and co-author of Soccernomics.
Without reading the article admittedly, but probably because it’s social science which intrinsically suffers from the replication crisis. Fun book - but replicable?
Ding Ding. With the added story Levitt told on Jon Hartley's podcast about the extremes Heckman went to, to disparage Levitt - translated into the terse Economist house style (which doesn't do justice to the utter toxicity of Chicago Economics...).
Great first episode from a great series of podcasts. Have to say though that although it's usually totally justified, the relentless cynicism Mike and Peter employ when dispatching these books unfortunately begins to grate after a while. I still fully recommend listening until that happens though.
No doubt there’s some gems in there, but also some horrendously bad calls. They have an episode deriding the ridiculous lab leak theory for COVID… which is now one of the official explanations according to a US Senate report.
That's a glaring red flag that they're overly conventional thinkers. Independent-minded people were generally either proponents of the lab leak theory all along or were not going to ridicule it as "obviously ridiculous". Likewise, I'd be suspicious of somebody who very strongly argued in favor of "masks don't work" in March 2020 when that was the official position of the US CDC.
People whose opinions I'd consider worth listening to are the ones who don't automatically change their position whenever their tribe's party line changes.
The CDC never had any official position that masks don't work. In March of 2020, the CDC official position was that people not working in healthcare or caring for the at-risk do not need to wear masks. in the same announcement they said
"Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers"
in other words, masks work, but we need to save them for where they will do the most good.
however, the Trump admin's messaging was an unholy pile of hot burning garbage, so one could be forgiven for thinking the official recommendations were that masks don't work.
I would argue the complete opposite. One of Michael Hobbes' persistant cri de couers is that the media is overwhelmingly only capable of covering the meta-conversation around the reactions to various claims and seem totally incapable and incurious about digging into the meat of the claims themselves, despite it being methodologically trivial to do so.
One of their most recent episodes was on the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal where they systematically dug into every one of the 54 cases of plagiarism and demonstrated just how much of it was bad faith right wing bullshit that didn't stand up to even the slightest intellectual scrutiny. But the larger point they were making was not about the right, for which they expected intellectual dishonesty, but the complicity of the left & mainstream media in only ever talking about the scandal in terms of who is saying what about it and why and not on the meat of the facts on the ground.
They took the exact same approach to the lab leak episode where they said let's ignore all of the media meta-narrative and look at just the plain facts on the ground and they found that, like most things, it was a sandcastle built of air that collapsed when you even looked at it funny.
It had been the official position of the CDC for decades that masks are not effective for stopping a respiratory virus. They did an about face with covid for unknown reasons.
Are we talking about the October 2022 report by Senate Republicans or the April 2023 report from, again, Senate Republicans? Because as I understand it, the official political explanation according to Republicans of a lot of things doesn't exactly comport with reality, so I'm not sure why you believe we should trust them here, given the track record. Unless the idea was to push a particular point of view.
I listened to a few episodes of this podcast, I don't think they are necessarily fair with each book they discuss. There are, however, many problems with Freakonomics drawing conclusions that aren't justified. They quite rightly point a few out.
I wouldn't say the hosts' ideology is "DEI", whatever you mean by that.
> What's wrong with a Diverse, Equitable, Inclusive world?
If you center the putative ends and ignore the means, what’s wrong with communism?
Also, even in terms of ends: I come from Asia, where most countries are homogenous. Are you suggesting that Taiwan or Japan is somehow worse because everyone is Taiwanese or Japanese? Would India and Bangladesh both benefit if we took some people from one side of the border and swapped them over to the other side? Or better yet—added a bunch of white people and Latinos? Would Aladdin or Mulan be better with a diverse cast?
What? I’m saying DEI as an abstract goal is great. The problem is that every institutional attempt to solve DEI results in blatant discrimination. So it ends up being that you can assume anyone who actually works on DEI initiatives at a corporation is doing pretty shitty things.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Basically the right wing’s latest boogeymen to scare up their base. Think how “woke” has been co-opted and used by pundits to make people angry.
You’ve got the causality reversed. What “makes people angry” is what certain progressives believe and say and do. Co-opting the label “woke” just gives people a way to communicate about those ideas; it doesn’t create the anger.
People propose lots of changes, most get shot down and rejected by society because they’re bad ideas. Go look at all the dead-end ideas from the 1960s. Most of what falls within the umbrella of “woke” today will meet the same fate.
For example, I’m pretty sure that 10 years from now the racial affinity groups in my 5th grader’s school are going to be an embarrassing idea liberals will pretend never happened, rather than being the future of race relations in America.
My litmus test for what’s real versus manufactured outrage is running things by my CNN-watching, Biden-voting immigrant parents. Most woke ideas get a derisive snort from my dad, though he’s quite worked up over racial preferences, affinity groups, and the idea that you can’t be racist towards whites. My mom, meanwhile, got very worked up over the 2020 riots and mass immigration from Latin America. She approvingly texted me Trump’s ban on DEI trainings in the federal government.
These are people who consume zero right wing content, so it’s not like they’re being socialized to be mad about stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise be mad about. In fact it’s the opposite—they would be madder if CNN wasn’t careful to hide the full scope of what woke people think and believe.
For example the collection of beliefs that led Google to engineer an AI that draws pictures of black Nazis. That did percolate up to CNN, because it was so silly. But all the stuff that these engineers learned about race in college that led them to make the AI this way doesn’t make it to CNN.
This is like asking a Roman to "be specific" in describing early Christianity (and doing so in a couple of sentences). What, like you're not seeing what I'm seeing?
But let's pick one example: woke people believe that skin-color diversity is both meaningful and a good thing in and of itself. They would say that, all else being equal, a group of people with a mix of races is better than a group of white people, even if there was no evidence that the white group was that way due to discrimination.
Do they? I thought the woke thing was more about discrimination, but I don’t know much about this. The statement makes sense though, why do you think it’s wrong?
The statement is wrong because skin color is superficial and meaningless. Here’s a thought experiment: say you have a group of white people, and then I (a “brown” person) join them. Woke thought posits that, through added “diversity,” the group has become “stronger.” But to be “stronger” it must be “different.” What non-superficial characteristic about me are you inferring about me that leads you to conclude I changed the group by joining it? Any answer to that is going to be racist.
Regardless of skin color, a group with N members vs a group with N+1 members has the added advantage of that one extra person; assuming that person isn't a negative influence on the group's productivity. That's one extra set of eyes, one extra point of view, one more set of hands. Regardless of skin color, that extra person is going to have different life experiences leading them to have a different perspective from the rest of the group.
Fine, say instead of joining the white group, I sub in for one of the white people. Woke people would still say that it’s an improvement because of increased “diversity.”
Sure. But that’s just the old “don’t discriminate” attitude, which is why I worded the hypothetical to exclude that. What distinguishes “woke” ideology is that it posits ”diversity” is better even if the lack of diversity isn’t due to discrimination. Universities aren’t saying that they need diversity to counteract the discrimination that’s happening in admissions.
This idea manifests in media, for example adding a characters of different races to historical contexts where the lack of diversity isn’t due to discrimination. (E.g. adding a random African character to medieval Scandinavia in Frozen 2.)
You're upset that a fantasy world that is based on a real place, but isn't that place mind you, added a black character? In a world with ice magic, animated snowmen, and singing reindeer you are upset about diversity because it's not realistic.
And this is a significant political issue for what you claim is the “left”? Well hidden from mainstream media-stream media (why?) i find it a bit hard to follow
“a quick perusal” ah yes with such intellectual rigor it must be blissful to float self-satisfied above the masses in their “ideological stronghold silos.” nodding to yourself confident in the fact that it simply cannot be you who is missing the point
I've listened to their whole catalog and the only book I can remember getting more heat that it deserved was actually Freakonomics. While it has quite a lot of correctly pointed out issues, I find the book entertaining and informing enough that it should be read, while most the other hooks they review are indeed harmful, and not bacause of any DEI misalignment in general, but mostly because of pseudoscience. I don't remember ALL episodes of course.
I'm not sure they listened to the Freakonomics podcast either, because I find it as left leaning as possible for anyone that can consider themselves Capitalists.
I appreciated the attempts by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to communicate with layman non-economists like me. I think The Economist article was, as always, too harsh and nitpicky. I think Freakonomics holds a special place in the "intellectual" and "rationalists" community. I cannot verify the flaws in techniques and conclusion as stated in this article but I would still recommend reading Freakonomics first over the dry economics textbooks or MIT OCW courseware.