I finished Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, last week but, with the president’s visit and increasing election coverage, haven’t had time yet to give you an update.
So here it comes, though I’m not going to review it, per se. As you may know, the book’s stirred some controversy because the scientist quoted in the final chapter on climate change told a climate blogger that he was misrepresented in the book. That’s a really serious charge against the authors, one of whom, Dubner, is a journalist. And many other scientists have come out against the conclusion in the book that geoengineering is the best way to combat climate change.
I don’t think the chapter would have stirred so much controversy had the authors not appeared so certain about topics outside their realm of expertise, which is what the book is doing in the first place. Perhaps it would have worked better had the idea that geoengineering is a better approach to curbing global temperature increases been approached as a question rather than presented as an uncertainty. In general, the authors can seem openly hostile to ideas that don’t fall within the book’s point-of-view. For ex ample, you don’t get the sense that these guys think much of government at all. The follow excerpt was the kind of aside that was typical:
The Department of Homeland Security recently solicited hurricane-mitigation ideas from various scientists, including Nathan (Myhrvold) and his friends. Although such agencies rarely opt for cheap and simple solutions — it simply isn’t in their DNA — perhaps an exception will be made in this case, for the potential upside is large and the harm in trying seems minimal.
How efficient government agencies are is certainly open for debate, but to assert their anti-efficiency so baldly is a bit heavy-handed.
My bigger problem with the book, as I’ve said before, is how liberally they borrow from other writer’s discoveries. Whether you think Malcolm Gladwell is good or not, he at least presents you with research you might not have encountered before much of the time. But I had read about Myhrvold before in the New Yorker, in a piece by Gladwell. I’ve written on the blog before about how I encountered two of the big ideas — those of Sudhir Venkatesh and Joseph De May — in other venues. They also clearly read Atul Gawande’s Better, because that’s where I first read about Ignatz Semmelweiss, who plays a significant role in Chapter 4. It’s completely fine for authors to learn about something from another writer and then do their own research and writing on it. It just seemed to me that Dubner and Levitt had been reading the same things I’ve read.
Either way, it’s destined to be a blockbuster.



