Freakonomics Revisited

I picked up the hardcopy of Freakonomics from Mom while in Naples, after Keith's recommendation. She said she thought Levitt was "just wrong" about some things. My main reaction is that the whole thing was just too glib, a problem with a lot of the science-for-the-layman books as a category. You're not an economist, and you have to trust someone, and since I have a popular book out and great credentials you're in no position to question, trust me!!! Same goes for political crap -- caveat emptor. Just as a reminder of how you shouldn't necessarily trust what you read, and that -- we can always hope, in spite of the last five years -- science is an open process of continued questioning and review, I noticed this article in the Economist (you may have to put up with an annoying advertisement before getting to it). A couple of economists looking into the claim that abortion is the root cause of crime reduction inspected

the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an "inadvertent but serious computer programming error"

Ah, the old garbage-in-garbage-out problem. That wasn't all that was wrong, either.