A few years ago I tried to read Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner’s bestseller, Freakonomics. I didn’t get very far. I was put off by the book’s bittiness, its chirpy American tone and uncertainty about what the authors’ research was intended to achieve in the bigger picture. Much the same goes for the film based on the book.
The subtitle of the book is A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, but the “everything” really means “anything” — or a variety of little bits of anything. The authors look at why estate agents argue for an early sale at a lower price in one instance but not another, whether financial incentives can improve the performance of high school students, and so on.
They may call themselves economists but that seems wrong, or at least not quite right, even in that confusingly multifarious field. More precisely, they work in econometrics, which is a form of statistics.
Taking economic activity to encompass pretty much all human endeavour, they analyse the numbers describing forms of human behaviour to find out what may be the real and what may be the fake causes of certain events.
For example, in what is probably the most interesting part of the film, Levitt examines the big drop in crime in many parts of the United States in the 1990s. People such as Rudi Giuliani, then mayor of New York, took much credit for this — better policing, stricter laws and so on were praised as causes. But looking at the data, and a broader field of data over a longer time, Levitt argues convincingly that the drop in the crime rate has, in fact, more to do with abortion. Yes, it’s rather shocking. But it makes sense, apart from the fact that the numbers and time frames correlate.
Correlations from causes
In every area in which crime fell, Levitt shows, abortion had been made more accessible about 15 to 20 years earlier. Basically, unwanted children often grow up to be criminals, and if women (particularly poorer women) are free to terminate unwanted pregnancies more readily, fewer potential criminals come into the world.
That seems to apply in the US, at least. Someone should be studying the situation in South Africa, where abortion is legal and at least theoretically available to all. If it became so in the years after 1994, we should be about to reach the point at which crime declines because the unwanted children who might have become criminals simply aren’t around. Obviously there are other factors at play, but what are they and how to measure them?
What Levitt and Dubner are doing, they say, is sorting mere correlations from causes: they want to “get at causality”. It’s all very well to find myriad correlations between processes, events and behaviours, but one cannot always be certain that the correlation is a causative one.
This looks like a fruitful area of study. After all, we’d like to know more about why people do what they do, in small numbers or large — often, the larger the group, the harder it is to work out why it’s behaving as it is. And, given the state of the world economy, it would be good to know what works to produce growth and stability and what doesn’t. In capitalist terms, that means which incentives work and which don’t.
You can’t help feeling, when it comes to Levitt and Dubner’s studies, that in the US at least many may find their research most important when it comes to buying patterns and the like, and here it’s appropriate to note that the broader context for such studies is entirely lacking. Then again, the more context is added to the study of any particular problem the more confusing it gets: the simple numerical clarity of statistics disappears in a fog of multiple causes.
The movie of Freakonomics presents Levitt and Dubner’s research and reasoning in what, presumably, is deemed to be an accessible way. That is, the two of them are presented explaining themselves cheerily and chirpily — and they do seem like nice guys. They may even be doing valuable work.
But the movie, if you can call it that, feels like a study aid for undergraduates who need their facts and arguments given to them in a welter of ugly cartoons, graphics and illustrative tableaux. It is composed in short sections, during which we are whisked through whatever the issue at hand might be: a bit of introductory chat, then some gaudy graphics, a brief wrap-up, and then it’s on to the next thing. It’s very hard to add it all up and come out anywhere in particular. You walk away with fragments only.
Freakonomics is at least something different from what is usually on show at cinemas such as the Nouveau complexes, and that’s good. The new digital-projection technology should be making a much wider variety of filmic material available to us, and certainly it’s growing. Maybe we could investigate the incredible wealth of non-Anglophone cinema out there?
Unfortunately, Freakonomics looks like it is best seen on a television screen, so whether it’s worth seeing in a cinema is doubtful. And what it all means I couldn’t possibly say.