BOOKENDS: ‘Dismal Science’ Gets Freaky

What’s in a name? According to University of Chicago Professor Steven D. Levitt ’89: not much.

Levitt, along with Roland G. Fryer, an economist at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, examined large data sets to find that a baby’s name has less of an influence on his life prospects than earlier studies suggested. Sure, Temptress turned out to be a bit of a tramp, but Loser Williams grew up to be far more successful than his older brother Winner.

This is good news for Levitt, since the title of his new book, “Freakonomics,” is—quite frankly—just awful. However, like Loser, who has risen through the ranks of the New York City Police Department (his colleagues now call him “Lou”) “Freakonomics” overcomes its name.

And unlike Loser Williams’ name, Levitt’s title is—to some extent—fitting. Levitt’s book probes a cornucopia of freakish everyday anomalies. Doesn’t it freak you out that eight percent of men on dating websites are married? It’s also pretty freaky that when the U.S. tax code began to require Social Security numbers for listed dependents, seven million American children “disappeared.” Who knew that such fun and interesting questions could be solved through incredibly difficult multiple regressions? Or, for that matter, that an economist could write an easy-to-read book with such mass appeal?

On this last front, it’s worth noting that Levitt gets help—from co-author and former New York Times magazine editor Stephen J. Dubner. Is that cheating?

Well, no. But Levitt does expose a coterie of cheaters, from Chicago public school teachers to Sumo wrestlers to millions of tax filers.

To analyze Chicago’s test scores, Levitt looked for trends typical of a cheating teacher and developed an algorithm to identify them. Levitt—working with Kennedy School Assistant Professor Brian A. Jacob ’92—flagged classrooms in which students’ exams evinced unusual strings of identical answers in the middle of the test. The researchers found that some teachers were actually altering their students’ tests—erasing wrong answers and filling in the correct bubbles themselves—to boost scores. The study resulted in six teachers being fired and three principals being strongly reprimanded. As students prepare for final exams, let them be forewarned: with an economist like Levitt on your case, any monkey business in your blue-books will get you caught.

It’s not only teachers that cheat. Turns out that Sumo wrestlers try to game the system as well. You see, a Sumo wrestling tournament involves 15 bouts, and a wrestler must win a majority to avoid dropping in the rankings. It doesn’t materially affect him whether he wins 14 matches or eight—just that he emerges with a better-than-even winning percentage. Knowing this, Levitt looked at the last matches in tournaments—when a wrestler with a 13-1 record going into the final round was matched with a 7-7 wrestler on the edge. He found that the 7-7 wrestlers, with more at stake, prevail far more frequently than one would expect—indeed, the winning percentage for 7-7 wrestlers is so improbably high that it suggests foul play.

Don’t worry though: Levitt finds that most people don’t cheat. He made friends with an entrepreneur named Paul Feldman, who, over eight years, trustingly placed over a million bagels in D.C. offices next to a box asking for an “on your honor” payment. He kept incredibly accurate records, and now we can see how cheating—in the form of “white collar crime”—varies over holidays (stealing increases dramatically over Christmas and decreases on the 4th of July) and during times of national crisis (the stealing rate dropped after 9/11 and has remained at a constant level since). Even though teachers and Sumo wrestlers cheat sometimes, 89 percent of bagel-eaters left a buck behind.

Levitt himself is a heavyweight—of Sumo-sized proportions—in the world of economics. A one-time resident of Wigglesworth H-entry, he excelled academically as an undergrad here, making Phi Beta Kappa his senior year. In 2003, he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the top American economist under age 40. Past winners include current Harvard faculty members Andrei Shleifer ’82, Martin S. Feldstein ’61, Dale W. Jorgenson, and Lawrence H. Summers.

One of Levitt’s most famous papers—on the link between legalized abortion and crime reduction—generated a torrent of indignant criticism that perhaps Summers would be familiar with. In the early 1980s, crime rates reached an all time high—and then dramatically dropped. One explanation for the drop, argues Levitt, is that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s kept a whole generation of unwanted babies from being born—babies who could have grown into a generation of street criminals 15 to 20 years later. Sounds like a pretty edgy hypothesis, but Levitt backs it up with cold hard numbers. The four states that legalized abortion several years before Roe v. Wade were also among the first to see their crime rates drop in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Even if these topics seem far from the realm of economics, well, they’re not. As Summers explained to me, anything which “involves the choice or allocation of resources or incentives” can be defined as economics. Summers also called his fellow Clark medal laureate Levitt “superb”—in case you’re wondering what the University president is reading.

He’s not the only one. “Freakonomics” has catapulted to number two on the New York Times bestseller list. Levitt joins a rising tide of economists—from Columbia’s Jeffrey D. Sachs ’75 to MIT’s Paul Krugman—who are making their “dismal science” accessible to psych concentrators and pre-meds like me.

It turns out that economics is less about preparing for a job in I-Banking and more about learning to utilize numbers to find truth. Even when that truth turns out to be…freaky.