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September 26, 2005
Freakonomics
I finished reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and have mixed reactions to it. I think that Levitt did a good job with showing how to look at problems from an economic standpoint, but there are a few problems with the book. Most of his reasoning is fairly amoral and unemotional, which reminds me why I know longer watch TV news, which tends to be overly moral and emotional and devoid of cold reasoning. His footnotes are decent, but it would have been better to include some more information from the studies he is citing. He asserts for instance that crime dropped in the late nineties because of legalized abortion and although he cites papers to back this up he could have gone into more detail since the book barely clocks in at two hundred pages. I ended up agreeing with most of his reasoning about the crime rate drop of the last decade. Like many major trends I think there are likely multiple causes, most notably increased prison sentences for repeat offenders, increased numbers of police, and changes in demographics, which might be in part be because of increased abortions among women who are likely to give birth to eventual criminals as Levitt argues.
Levitt does a good job laying out arguments for why information is valuable and when he does lay out an argument he does a good job of explaining his reasoning. He repeatedly reminds readers that correlation does not equal causation, but I wonder if he always follows that advice himself. My other quibble with the book (which may be the fault of the editors) is the recurring quotes praising the author that make him sound arrogant. Even if you are extremely smart, you put the quotes that say that on the back of the book or at the very beginning, not every thirty pages or so.
I am continuing to get through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the Nazis are still not in power. Some interesting facts about Hitler I did not know: Hitler was in love with his niece, who either committed suicide or was murdered by other Nazis. The second interesting thing is that after his failed beer hall putsch Hitler was determined to take control of Germany through legal and non-violent means. One weird thing about the Germans that I have noticed from this book, from the history of Germany I learned years ago, and from current events like the recent German elections is that for a nation known for its work ethic and discipline the Germans sure do expect the government to have lots of welfare programs to take care of them.
I also recently finished Elements of Murder: A History of Poison and have found it to be morbidly interesting, although not what I had hoped for. I would not have thought of intentionally using lead as a poison, but some people have used it successfully to poison others. I also never thought of tin or nickel as poisons, but they can be poisonous although they probably have never intentionally been used as poisons. I have started reading A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa, a philosophy of history book which so far has tried to describe recent history in terms of energy flows. For instance, agriculture represents an energy flow in the form of calories from the countryside moving to the cities. Money works as a reverse energy flow as it gets energy to move from one place to another in the opposite direction the money goes. One of the main points of the author is that it is a mistake to assume that history is in anyways progressing or that history is headed to an ultimate or necessary end.
Posted by Pete at September 26, 2005 02:26 PM
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