Sticky?
How does it feel to be the University of Chicago professor who has co-authored a book containing the following paragraph?
“We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch and feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon… We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes — the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.”
“Freakonomics”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006073132X/ref=pd_kar/002-8783501-4320000?n=283155 pg. 140.
If despite the smirking and the urging you’ve got a free hand, there is something else you can do with that paragraph, and it relates to the book’s success. From its opening scene (a homeless black man with “expensive headphones”), to its closer (a black scholar who “beat the odds” and made it from underprivilege to a fellowship at Harvard), with a marquee story about the impact of legalized abortion along the way, the book constructs a slithery aperture into transformative transactions from which many of its presumably most enthusiastic readers have otherwise been shut out.
This is a book about feminism and racism written for people who feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome in the great conversation North American society has been having about feminism and racism since the 1960s. It presents an authoritative alternate language in which — not to participate in, but — to dominate that conversation. Dubner and Levitt assure their readers that “economics” is the value-free idiom with respect to which those other, value-laden, idioms can be shown to be misguided at best, stupid at worst, and almost always dead wrong.
That’s the point, so much so that most of the material which fluffs out the text (shoddy footnotes, sleight of hand interpretation of titillating evidence, a long final chapter that doesn’t even pretend to be anything but an extended chortle on what negro and po’ white mommas name their babies) hardly matters. _Freakonomics_ is a pandering invitation to a certain societal segment of bombasticators to re-flate their bellows.
That’s all I’ll say for now, but to get back to the question with which I began: the obvious answer to my opening query is that it feels great to be that prof, and that not only does he sleep at night but that rolling in book-sales mega-bucks has given him a lovely and dew-like complexion. But I still wonder. Maybe it feels kinda sticky.
Would it be too much to ask why you don’t believe Steve Levitt’s argument that legalizing abortion led to a fall in the number of unwanted children, which led to a decline in the crime rate? Or is that just not the way you are playing this game?
No, of course not. I think it’s important to start by saying that the “abortion = decline in crime rate” argument is hardly the revelation Levitt and Dubner claim it to be; the sort of family planning-cum-eugenicist approach of, say, Margaret Sanger at the turn of the twentieth century flogged this point no end.
“game-playing” creetur that I am, I even felt a bit bad for William Bennett who got dumped on for saying clearly what Levitt was saying coyly.
There is no doubt that legalizing abortion leads to a decline in the number of unwanted children; that’s a tautology.
Whether, however, legalizing abortion COULD –in some hypothetical society in which previous to legalization all unplanned children turned into ax murderers — lead to a decline in the crime rate is different than asserting that legal abortion HAS led to the decline in the crime rate in the United States that we saw in the 90s: Levitt doesn’t just paw the air and speculate about the former (which would raise no objection from me); instead, he claims to have robustly *proven* the latter, which is, I think, a tenuous claim and in the context of American race and gender politics a more Bill Bennetty one than he is willing to admit.
The book cites studies from Canada and Australia that they say also “prove” this connection; when you look at the notes, however, one of them is unpublished (that is to say, not peer-reviewed) and the other is not very fully described.
What, it seems to me, Levitt *actually* does, in lieu of proving anything, is pooh-pooh other reasonable explanations for the 90s decline in the crime rate: an aging population and a booming economy. Nowhere does he demonstrate these explanations to be wrong; instead he insists it is unreasonable to suppose that they could be right. This clears the way for his abortion argument. He also –tellingly I think — talks about who gets “most” abortions without ever making even the most delicate allusion to the fact that 40% of American women have at least one abortion during the course of their lives. So his argument pushes the impression that post-Roe, abortion has been overwhelmingly an experience of the underclass.
Levitt takes a big phenomenon with multiple causes, sweeps aside two major contending causal factors (demography and economy) and then declares his pet explanation (which is not novel, and which in fact has a particularly ugly history) to be the only one left standing and insists it therefore follows that his pet explanation must be THE cause of the phenomenon in question.
First, he does not in fact dispense definitively with the other two causes; second, with such a complex phenomenon “the one cause left in my analysis, which I am choosing to champion and which no one has specifically disproved” is not in fact necessarily equivalent to THE cause.
This raises the question (which, if memory serves, came up also with Diamond’s peculiar form of “logical” argumentation”) of how one *would* disprove Levitt’s negative hypothesis (the absence of babies A,B, and C explains the absence of criminals X, Y, and Z). One would have to run that part of history again, with the missing babies thrown back into the mix, and see what happens. A conveniently impossible proposition.
Levitt himself does just what he says is inexcusable in others: takes a correlation and asserts it as a cause on the basis of conjectural reasoning (“surely many of those babies would have been born to poor homes, to unloving mothers, and so would have grown up to be criminals”), and asserts he’s proven something thereby.
I don’t see that he has; I don’t see how anyone could say that he has. But that’s not what is most interesting to me; what is interesting to me is *why* it was so important to Levitt to reach so hard for a “value-neutral” way to opine on the abortion question and the crime&punishment question at the same time — and in a way that turns out to say much of the same shit eugenicists were saying a century ago. And to throw in, for good measure, a good few kicks toward ‘liberal” attitudes toward crime in the post-1960s era, and also to endorse stiff sentencing in several asides, while he was at it.
So let me ask you, Professor DeLong: what kind of game are you playing that you evidently consider that kind of garbage defensible?
Ozma, this book plainly has your back up. But putting your obvious revulsion aside for the moment, I am left with several interesting questions.
1. Why are we even remotely surprised that an economist privileges an explanation in economic terms over alternative explanations? Isn’t he simply being a member of his tribe?
2. Why are we expected to worry about the fact that an idea has precursors (here Margaret Sanger and other eugenicists), when this is by far the usual case in most academic writing? And what are we doing, after all, but applying a kind of “guilt by association” to the idea in question?
This second question is particularly interesting to me, for a couple of reasons.
First, I recall Richard Rorty’s observation in The Philosophy of Social Hopethat there is no necessary connection between a thinker’s philosophical views on, for example, the nature of truth or language (where, for instance, the positions of Martin Heidegger and John Dewey are very similar) and the thinker’s politics (Heidegger was a Nazi, Dewey a social democrat). One of the virtues of the old, much-maligned fact/value distinction is that it enables us to recognize that thoroughly despicable people may, in fact, have useful insights to offer.
Second, when you write,
I wonder how effective these arguments really are. Would one, for example, have dismissed Gregor Mendel’s observations on genetics, while they lay unpublished for many years? It would also be good to know what would count for you as more fully described. Your statement as it stands could reflect nothing more than personal bias.
Turning, then, to your principal claim,
I wonder here how different this is from the usual approach of those who write “critical theory,” constructing abstruse jargon to intimidate the uninitiated? It is arguably more insidious, a.k.a., better propaganda, to use everyday language and a casual style, but, at the end of the day, isn’t trying to dominate conversations simply run-of-the-mill scholarly practice?
None of this, please note, should be taken as praise for Freakanomics; I have no dog in that fight. I feel your anger and recognize that you needed to vent. But more ice and less fire would have made your arguments more compelling to this reader.
I agree with John — I personally enjoy Ozma’s posts more when she skewers people like Leavitt by pointing out the faults with their logic and data (as she does in her response to Brad) than by refering to him and his work as garbage, slippery, sticky, etc. and merely alluding to the fact that there are problems with their logic and data. Ozma may believe Leavitt and De Long beyond redemption, but this kind of tone threatens to alienate not only those people sitting on the fence, but even people who more or less agree with her!
But ultimately, like: whatever. I’ve “already”:http://alex.golub.name/log/ mentioned what I think about Leavitt. I’ll also reiterate that I think Cass Sunstein’s “review”:https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20050725&s=sunstein072505 of the book useful, but more meandering than I’d like it to be.
Don’t feel restrained or anything.
Would it be worth taking a step back and asking more abstract, generative questions about the “incentive theory of causation”? Because while I don’t find it (the general theory or the specific book) convincing in the reductive form it takes, I did think that the method of Freakonomics had some potential to usefully “shake things loose”, to generate new angles of attack on old questions, and to underline, accidentally or not, a number of “common sense” propositions about social life and causality that once looked at askew from Leavitt’s perspective, seem as dubious as anything that might be proposed to take their place.
It’s worth it to me to take that step back. I think you just have a fundamentally different strategy of reading and scholarship. I’d rather try to be connective, generous in looking for possibilities and things of value, playfully open rather than preemptively dismissive. Different strokes for different folks.
But the one place where I’d really say you’re missing out on something that ought to be important to ethnography as a method and anthropology as a discipline is being more rigorous about the subject-position of others, in this case, the readership (and even authorship) of Freakonomics. It’s one thing for you to speak from your own positionality and disciplinary perspective about why you think such a book is wrong, wrong, wrong, substantively and morally. It’s another thing to just make these huge, general, casual assertions about what’s going on out there in the audience, about why people read and what they do with what they read (and why people write and what they feel as they write). There’s a kind of professional caution that ought to come at the moment you want to make statements about those issues, I feel.
I think what Rex, John, and Tim have said here all points to the same issue: one of good faith. What I take each of you to be saying is: while you may really disagree with this book, it’s important to engage its ideas, its authors, and its readership under the assumption of good faith. That is, assume the ideas are offered in good faith, the authors (“Levitt” and not “Leavitt”, btw) are asking the questions they are asking in good faith, and the part of the audience reception that is positive is, similarly, enthusiastic in good faith.
Now, disagreeing with that sort of generosity — and I do — puts me in the position of being the grinch. And a particular kind of grinch: knee jerk, opinionated, politically correct, blinkered, blah blah blah. We all know the attachable labels (which you all have, quite generously, gone out of your way *not* to attach to me in offering your perspectives). Even so, I can’t *not* be the grinch in this instance.
You collectively advise that I ought systematically to take apart the evidentiary and methodological bases of Freakonomics, if I am to critique it at all. But clearly, I’m not going to do that. I know that I am not going to do that, and you probably do too. So, the alternative in your collective scenario is for me to say: well, dang, I sure think Freakonomics is up to no good but I guess if I can’t make that point in generous spirit, I shouldn’t make it at all.
I just can’t bear that option. And it has to do with the really appalling bad faith in which I think the book is served up to — and eagerly embraced by — a popular audience. To NOT comment on that is in my mind to give the whole thing a pass; to say, well, Levitt sure seems to stick his fingers in many pies having to do with race and gender issues in precisely such a way as to give social justice arguments a good poke in the eye. The language and attitude of Freakonomics sure seems to bait people concerned with feminism and racism. But, whatever!
My reaction to actually reading the book, after having heard about it second-hand for some time, was shock: not of the “whoa, you blew my mind!” variety the authors promise but of the “cripes, it’s 2006 and this kind of snarky underhanded poison STILL FLIES” variety.
Responding to bad faith with an excess of good faith — I see, in principle, why it is the more admirable approach. But in this instance I just can’t do it. I don’t get, in fact, why there isn’t *more* anger and why the book hasn’t been called on its politics more emphatically.
John — about Levitt having the same ideas as Margaret Sanger and Heidegger being a nasty guy while John Dewey was a nice one : I think there is an important form vs. content distinction lost here. The ideas about language held by Heidegger and Dewey were formal: they could lend themselves to different sorts of content. But the Sanger-Levitt similarity is a quite basic identity of content.
in re: trying to dominate conversations as standard scholarly practice. Yes, right on. I agree wholeheartedly; and I don’t want Levitt to dominate — I want to push back.
Rex on alienating potential allies: this actually (in my mind) relates to an ongoing debate not so much in scholarship but in what I might call “the current national conversation” (into which I think Levitt’s book is an intentional intervention). you can see where I’m going with this, right?
Ozma: I can’t see where you’re going. Where are you going?
The political economy of civility
Steve Levitt: Aborting blacks brought down the crime rate because, as we all know, black babies grow up into black criminals.
Brad DeLong: Mmmhh — brilliantly provocative thesis, Steve.
Ozma: Steve Leavitt’s thesis is racist because: i)historical evidence; ii) social science evidence; iii)moral philosophical judgment.
Brad DeLong: Crypto-Nazi scum! That’s the discourse of thugs and hacks! You are intellectually jealous! Is that how you play the game?
John McCreery: Ozma, that smacks of McCarthyite guilt by association and has the trademark of Soviet propaganda to intimidate the uninitiated. Besides, isn’t that how the game is played in academia?
Rex: Ozma, don’t make trouble. Please, don’t make trouble.
Tim Burke: Ozma, what a mean, ungenerous thing to say about Levitt’s thesis. Can’t you find something nice to say about it? Besides, maybe the average American is this minute poring over the book for dangling modifiers and this will prompt them to reflect more on MLK’s legacy.
Ozma: (sigh). People. The book itself is an act of bad faith. It pretends to be neutral (or in their jargon, “objective”), but it: i) Is racist and thus harms blacks; ii) Delivers several bad faith swipes at those out there in the trenches trying to struggle against racism and poverty and sexism; iii) Was actually an intervention in raging debates or “conversations” about race (in the academy “the social construction of race” and outside “culture wars,” etc).
Rex: What debate? What conversation? What has this to do with race? I’m confused.
Re: “It’s one thing for [Ozma] to speak from your own positionality and disciplinary perspective about why you think such a book is wrong, wrong, wrong, substantively and morally…”
But she doesn’t speak about what’s wrong substantively with their arguments. She speaks only about what she sees as wrong morally with their arguments. And she doesn’t speak about what’s morally right with their arguments: women with more control over their fertility have their children when they believe they will be able to do a good job of raising them.
Remember what Donohue and Levitt say: “Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states….” It’s hard for me at least to see how a demography- or economy-driven story could produce those patterns.
Ozma writes,
Why not something along the lines of
“Freakonomics is a dangerous book. It purports to provide evidence that aborting unwanted children lowers crime rates and asserts that competing explanations (demography, economy, more effective policing, etc.) do not provide as strong an explanation of why crime rates were down in the 1990s and lower in states that legalized abortion earlier than in those that legalized abortion later, following Roe vs. Wade. This is uncomfortably close to the thinking of late 19th and early 20th century eugenicists who argued for weeding out the genetically defective, which, when coupled with racist ideologies, led to Nazi and other horrors. Not exactly the same, of course, since the argument is consistent with the notion that a propensity to crime is increased by growing up unwanted instead of a basic genetic flaw. Nonetheless this argument bothers the hell out of me. Does anyone here know of evidence to demonstrate that one of the alternative hypotheses is better than Levitt’s?”
I’m still not sure what the “ongoing national debate” is that Ozma is alluding to. However, I do wonder if I could hire Ptochos to summarize my dissertation!
Ozma, maybe you could explain your position to me by way of example. For instance, how does your position differs from the following statement: “I periodically experience the uncontrollable urge to contemptuously trash people I don’t like in public. Get used to it.”
Maybe a bit more information on Levitt’s and Dubner’s persistent interests are in order. Please flip back to a “post”:http://savageminds.org/2005/05/26/missing-women-found/ put up by Kerim several months ago, to which I responded before becoming invited to join Savage Minds.
A female protege of Levitt’s found an alternative explanation for Amartya Sen’s social justice hypothesis about “missing women” that was epidemiological; a black protege of Levitt’s found an alternative explanation for the social justice hypothesis about the high rates of hypertension among American blacks that was genetic.
The good faith approach would require that I take these alignments to be merely coincidental, but I prefer not to leave my brains lying on the floor where just anyone can step on them.
There is a persistent selection bias in the kinds of questions Levitt finds interesting, and in the kinds of explanations he puts forth as definitive. Note in every case he takes a complicated (ie, irreducibly multi-causal) social phenomenon, with a strong social justice dimension, and purports to SWEEP ASIDE that dimension in favor of a single cause having nothing to do with social justice.
Yes, I do feel an unconquerable urge to point that out. Please, Señores DeLong, Burke, and Golub — explain to me why I should refrain.
and give me a break about “it’s not what you are saying, it’s how you are saying it” — a reaction this strong is self-evidently about the former and not the latter. There is a problem here, but I don’t think it’s mine.
Ptochos — thanks for making me feel slightly less isolated.
Two researchers from the Boston Fed have questioned whether the abortion-crime drop correlation (which, keep in mind, is DIFFERENT THAN A CAUSAL CONNECTION) even exists, see this “article”:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113314261192407815-HLjarwtM95Erz45QPP0pDWul8rc_20061127.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top in the on-line WSJ.
Am I surprised that my suspicions about the validity of the proposition are being confirmed? Ummm, no. Is one precluded from using one’s critical faculties when evaluating propositions about which one does not have all the relevant evidence in hand? Ummm, no.
Am I starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld? Time to get back to my real work…
Re: “a black protege of Levitt’s found an alternative explanation for the social justice hypothesis about the high rates of hypertension among American blacks that was genetic. The good faith approach would require that I take these alignments to be merely coincidental…”
If this claim that Roland Fryer is an Uncle Tom is your real argument, I’m just going to laugh my ass off…
Dear Professor DeLong — for heaven’s sake, keep your ass on. You’ve responded in two different places, but to take them one by one:
I’m not sure how Emily Oster’s paper on witchcraft has anything to do with her claim that Amartya Sen mis-attributed the cause of the “missing women”. Please to explain. I *do*, however, see a similar kind of causality operative — the emphasis in her title is placed on weather, not culture, so that the impetus for an outcome which was particularly punitive toward women is located in nature rather than in culture/politics/history. My question is *why* she and her colleagues favor these kinds of explanations.
As for Roland Fryer: I think “where blacks went wrong” (his question, by self-report) starts, again, an important inquiry off on exactly the wrong foot: in such a way as to have the emphasis fall in a particularly-invested place and to selectively determine the results. I don’t think he’s an Uncle Tom nor that Emily Oster is a right-wing nut nor that Steven Levitt goes home at night and torments small fuzzy animals. However, I do think they are all heavily invested in a mode of argumentation that is extremely disingenuous. How about explaining why you think otherwise?
Can someone tell me where this “good faith” thing came from? I see it introduced by Ozma in message 6, but it seems to be carrying more weight than I saw in it when I read that message. In Ozma’s latest message it seems to mean a kind of “Yes, massa, I do trust you” simplemindedness of which I, for one, am no partisan.
In the oldest systematic reflection on rhetoric of which I am aware, Aristotle identifies three ways to argue: (1) use facts and logic to appeal to reason; (2) use metaphor or other tropes to appeal to emotion; (3) attack your opponent’s character.
The “smirking,” “slithery,” “sticky” tropes are plainly attempts to arouse derision and revulsion (2). The central assertion in the message is that,
is equally plainly an attempt at character assassination(2). It implicitly depicts the author and his readers as rejects and bullies.
This line has been continued by pointing to two instances of students who happened to pick topics close to those that their professor works on and generated results like those their professor seems to favor. Oh, my Lord, how crass! How appalling! (As if it weren’t the norm in academic relationships.)
The overall thrust has been to attack the author’s motives.
Contrast the way in which the Wall Street Journal article Ozma so usefully cites concludes.
This hardly seems the sort of thing to justify the “See, I told you so” tone of the comment in which this article is cited. Neither does the earlier statement that,
do much to reinforce the notion that the invective levelled at Mr. Levitt should be taken more seriously than what the man himself has written.
Were I to conclude, then, with no further qualification that Ozma is right, I would, indeed, be guilty of that “good faith,” of which I in no sense accuse her.
Let’s assume that Levitt’s data holds up under scrutiny. Does this really negate sociocultural explanations of the phenomena? What is the “crime rate,” after all? Why not ask whether more abortions lead to a reduction in white collar crime? I think it is a mistake to ascribe to Levitt’s work more power than it really has.
Brad DeLong says “….I’m just going to laugh my ass off….”
No, you are lying. Even standing this far off from you, I am having trouble keeping the spittle from showering my face.
Kerim asks,
Not unless the data in question substantially undermine the competing hypotheses. Ozma is right to point out that Levitt’s strategy is not simply to assert that the data supports his hypotheses but to make the stronger claim that it is inconsistent with competing hypotheses (demographic, economic, policing, etc.).
But even if this is true, the possibility of stronger explanations incorporating sociocultural factors cannot be ruled out a priori.
The problem is whether such explanations exist and demonstrably fit the data better. Neither impugning Levitt’s motives nor handwaving in the form of claims that the situation must be more complicated than Levitt’s hypothesis allows for, a no-brainer in a world in which reality is always more complex than models that purport to explain it, is a satisfactory answer.
P.S. Let’s explain these data.
Check out the near-perfect correlation between average new house sizes and obesity rates at Alchemic Spot.
Re: “Levitt’s strategy is not simply to assert that the data supports his hypotheses but to make the stronger claim that it is inconsistent with competing hypotheses (demographic, economic, policing, etc.)…”
Ummm… If you ask Levitt why crime in America has fallen over the past decade http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf, he will give you a multi-stranded multi-causal interpretation, consisting of four factors that he believes have a significant effect reducing crime:
1. Increased numbers of police
2. Increased numbers incarcerated
3. Declines in the numbers addicted to crack
4. The decline in the numbers of young males raised as “unwanted” induced by the legalization of abortion.
And six factors often claimed to be responsible that he believes have not had a significant effect:
1. Capital punishment
2. Concealed-carry laws
3. Gun-control laws
4. Smarter policing strategies by Rudolph Guiliani
5. Changing demography
6. The strong economy of the late 1990s
Whatever happened to reading what people have written before you trash them?
I can’t speak for John McCreery, but I did read the entire book and I think Levitt’s 4 “significant factors” and, particularly, the splashy emphasis he places on the abortion hypothesis speak for themselves.
Checking out the defense of Bill Bennet entry on your blog, I’m curious — what is it you’d like to say about human genetics that you feel you can’t put on your weblog?
I am not surprised to find that a little intellectual garbage pickup is needed here…
What Ozma calls my “defense of Bill Bennett” begins:
“Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics, a man who has worked unceasingly to make America a worse place–when he’s not publishing the work of others under his own name, or rolling the dice at Las Vegas while claiming that America’s poor would be rich if only they had the righteousness and moral fiber than he does. But Bill Bennett is not afflicted with genocidal fantasies about ethnically cleansing African-Americans…”
Ozma’s implicit claim that I have views about human genetics that I do not dare say is equally mendacious. Here’s the context she does not quote:
“(And, while we’re at it: never get involved in a land war in Asia; do not read My Pet Goat when death is on the line; never play poker with a man named ‘Doc’; never accept a battle of wits where iocane powder is a factor; never blithely download and install a file from Microsoft without carefully, carefully researching what it will do beforehand; never get involved in an argument over Noam Chomsky; and never post about human genetics on your weblog.)”
Hi, Brad.
Just for the record, I did buy and read the book. I read it quickly, and while aware that factors 1-3 were included in the analysis do agree with Ozma that the overwhelming emphasis was on the abortion thesis.
That said, any notion that I am out to trash the book bespeaks a touch of paranoia. My assessment is that Levitt, who is clearly an ambitious young man (I can call him young because I am 61), did some interesting research, found what was sure to be a controversial result and successfully hyped it, selling a lot of books and zooming to the top of the table in terms of academic/pop culture notoriety. Since I’ve worked in advertising for over two decades, I actually admire his chutzpah and the skill with which he has executed his strategy.
I do not see him as deliberately attempting to reinforce prejudice. It is, after all, to his credit that, as the Wall Street Journal points out, he has put backs up both left and right. The left is up in arms because of “eugenics.” The religious right is upset because he seems to be saying that abortion might be a good thing. That both sides are so upset suggests to me that he might be on to something looking more closely at.
he who has eyes, let him see; he who has ears, let him hear.
I want to push this another way, maybe in a way that brings it into line with some of the things I imagine Thomas will be talking about during his foray here. Levitt explicitly wrote a book that aimed to make economic arguments relevant to some of the current debates in our society. And he’s done that — dude was on the Daily Show! And made a pretty good showing for himself. Now, in Engaging Anthropology, Eriksen asks repeatedly what lessons we can learn from such successful works. The question Levitt’s work raises to me is whether it is successful because it’s written in an engaging style (I haven’t read it, but he seemed pretty approachable in the couple of public appearances I’ve seen) or because the arguments “click” with some strain of cultural belief that pre-exists Levitt. Or both, I suppose. Ozma seems to lean more towards the second — Levitt’s work reaffirms something, or provides support for something, that people want to hear. And we know they want to hear this because they’ve been wanting to hear it for well over a century. Granted, Levitt seems to pull some surprises out of his bag of tricks, to present familiar arguments in new and, apparently, exciting ways, but basically the message isn’t that much different, as Oz points out, from what Sanger said nearly a century ago — if the wrong kinds of people don’t reproduce, their will be fewer of the wrong kinds of people around.
But set aside the argument itself — what abot the style? What Levitt has in his favor is that he’s taken several debates out of the economic departments where they have an effect (through work with government agencies, think tanks that produce policy recommendations, etc.) but are isolated from the public debates, and presented them directly to the public. But what I wonder is, would an equally engaging counter-Freak work be as successful? This is where Eriksen comes in, because as I read his book, I couldn’t hep but feel that while the examples he holds up are all unquestionably successful — Pinker, Diamond, Mead, etc. — they are, for the most part, second-rate in terms of research in their respective fields. I wouldn’t want to practice an anthropology defined by its most popular works, and I have to wonder if the strategy of “hooking” an audience with, say, Mead and hoping that, later on, they’ll be interested enough to find out where Mead was wrong is a very strong strategy. (The interesting exception here is Ashley Montagu, whose work wouldn’t seem to be particularly accessible — Montagu wasn’t a great stylist, and having heard some of his lectures, I’d add not a super-engaging speaker — but which despite its style managed to shape debates over race, sex, gender, and other key topics for the last half-century.)
I guess at heart I’m asking if there’s something about writing for a popular audience that precludes first-rate work from being produced and/or successful. Could a writer like Levitt produce a successful work that says the opposite of what Freakonomics says?
That is a great, great question and gets right at the problem of audience reception.
I kid you not, I just checked my email and the first message was from the college bookstore informing me Keith Hart’s _Money in an Unequal World_ is out of print.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
sad.
Oneman beat me to the punch. I still have more to say on the topic, but it will likely have to wait till I’m back home.