A couple of weeks ago, I got my hands on an advance copy of SuperFreakonomics, the follow-up by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to their 2005 bestseller.
I wanted to have a review for you by tomorrow, when it’s due to go on sale, and I’m oh-so-close to having it done. First, I wanted to point out how common a genre, we’ll call it social science lite, this has become. There may be few adults in the country who read this type of non-fiction, but among them books like this are increasingly popular, witness: Nudge, also by two economics who explore areas where behavioral economics and public policy meet, Malcolm Gladwell’s popular distillations of the latest thinking in sociology, and books by economists like Paul Krugman. And there are more books in which economists discuss the perils of non-rational humans, versus the supposedly rational homo economicus.
When Freakonomics came out, it might have been the first time non-economists saw economic techniques applied to everyday questions, but now I wonder if nonfiction readers are too used to the idea for the sequel to make a big splash. In addition to all these new books, Levitt and Dubner have a blog at The New York Times. In fact, they mentioned they had to leave out discussion of one topic they introduced in the Times about birthdates and the relative advantages they carry in sports because Gladwell, and others, have covered it so well.
Most importantly, you’ve probably already heard about a bit of a controversy on the fifth chapter about global warming. I’m not going to weigh in yet, except to say that controversy is probably what you get when non-scientists weigh in on science.
