My inner econo-geek has been a fan of Steven Levitt for a while (see my earlier post on his work with Fryer), so I was more than pleasantly surpised to get my grubby hands on a galley for his new book Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (amazon) written with journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Dubner, you may remember as the slightly star-struck (and who wouldn’t be?) journalist who profiled Levitt for the New York Times Magazine article “The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)” in 2003. The book is a treatment of Levitt’s unorthodox discoveries in the field of economics written for the layman. I’m not one for 8th-grade-book-report reviews, so I’ll just cut to the chase.

#1 Should I buy this book? Yes, yes you should. You should buy it this instant. Put down this blog (figuratively), get up and go to Amazon.com (again figuratively), and buy the book (literally). It pays back every penny, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with Levitt’s work. Truly a brilliant and original thinker in economics today.

#2 If I trust you and I buy the book, will I be disappointed? Hmmmm…. depends. A blurb from Malcolm Gladwell features prominently on the cover and much of the tone and structure of Freakonomics is clearly inspired by the success of Blink, which has crowned Gladwell the current king of long-form journalism and will no doubt inspire many imitators, some flattering, some not so much. Many people, however, have a problem with the fundamental proposition of such a book. Despite his name being listed first on the cover, Levitt seems less the author than the source material. (This is the only way I could reconcile the numerous flattering references as anything short of megalomania) Freakonomics is in many ways an extended version of the NY Times Magazine article. It’s journalism, in other words, so if you’re looking for the real meat on these bones with equations and everything head straight for the notes and check out the original papers, most of which are available online from NBER (nominal $$). That being said, it’s very good journalism, so if you find equations a bit scary or just not so much fun to read, then this is an extremely lucid and accessible snapshot of Levitt’s thinking to date. Let’s say you’ve already read some of Levitt’s papers, as I had; Freakonomics will be a lot of deja vu all over again. They’ve assumed you haven’t read them, and they’re probably right for 99.9% of you, and you 99.9 percenters will find a lot to think about in Freakonomics.

One thing that bugs me: and this may be my own conceit, but I find the term “freakonomics” really annoying. Every time I see it, I want to say, no, it’s just freaking economics, there’s no real break with tradition here. He’s just got more imagination than most. If anything, Levitt is a throwback to the days before the equations took over. Economists, when they’re good, tend to come up with really unusual ways of looking at a problem. Levitt is no different than Smith or Keynes or Ricardo in this respect.