Superfreakonomics, and the times we live in
Posted by Samanth Subramanian on Friday, November 6, 2009
Ever since Superfreakonomics, the sequel to Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s galactically successful Freakaonomics, was released, there has been a spate of articles rubbishing the pair’s new pop-economic hypotheses. Most of these have attacked the research in the book’s section on global warming, which proposes that we just geo-engineer a cooler earth by injecting aerosol suphur into the atmosphere. (The premise: When Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, erupted in the early 1990s, it spewed a whole lot of sulphur and ended up bringing down global temperatures a little. Ergo, clearly, that is the most sensible way forward.)
But Dubner and Levitt are apparently being more than just audacious. Many scientists have accused them of simply misrepresenting research. This article in particular I found extremely persuasive, citing as it does the original research to then show how DubVitt have distorted it. (If you have an hour or two to spare, go through the comments. They’re very interesting. When a scientific subject attracts this many fiery comments on a bulletin board, you can be sure it has Arrived.)
This morning, I read a review of Superfreakonomics by a former classmate, Justin Vogt, in which he cannily proposes that all this outrage plays right into DubVitt’s hands and sells more books. Think about this for a minute. If you’re a shrewd author, you can now publish a non-fiction book that is factually wrong and that misrepresents research — and you can make more money. In fact, there is apparently an “incentive” to do so, the incentive system being the bedrock of DubVitt’s own thought framework. Extrapolated, the more bizarre your distortions of facts, the more shrill the outrage — and so the more your book gets reviewed and covered (because it’s easy to pinpoint what’s wrong with it) and the more it subsequently sells.
Does this strike you as just plain wrong? Shouldn’t there be an incentive to write more accurate books rather than less?
Filed under book news · Tagged with superfreakonomics
Reading, writing about reading, writing about writing
It is true that bigger the controversy, the bigger a book/movie sells. This isn’t something new. The authors are simply exploiting human nature. Wishful thinking maybe, but I suppose humans will stop trusting what they see in print over time and start requiring strong proof. Maybe.
Anirudh: Controversy is one thing, and I agree, that isn’t new. But this section of Superfreakonomics has been shown to be just plain wrong / dishonest. That’s what’s disturbing about this.
Shouldn’t there be more incentive to actually read the book and then write about it…
It does not follow directly from the premise : “the more inaccurate your book is, the more it gets covered and lambasted” to the conclusion :”the more it sells”.
Would it not be the other way round that the more people point out factual errors in your book, the less encouraged you feel to buy it out of your own money. Unless there is equal weight to the sides that support or trash the book.
In this case, it seems the weight of general online opinion is heavily weighing against the book.
Avik: Glad you brought that up. I did actually read a pdf of the climate chapter, which was posted here – http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/12/superfreakonomics-errors-levitt-caldeira-myhrvold/ – before the publisher made Joe Romm take it down. But you can get a taste of what that chapter contains in this Sunday Times extract: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6879251.ece
Navin: That’s my point exactly. You’d think that if there were factual errors, people would buy fewer copies. But the counter-intuitive process seems to be happening here. The book has been declared riddled with errors, but it sits close to the top of the Amazon bestseller lists. And at least from what I’ve gathered from reading about it – because really, how can you measure these things? – the fact that it has flown into a storm of declamation has actually helped its sales rather than hinder it.
There is a price to be paid and the currency is academic and journalistic reputation for Levitt and Dubner, respectively.
Levitt has a reputation to protect as an academic economist and, in the long run, that might be worth much more to him than royalties from his *freakonomics books. He is already a John Bates Clark medal winner, which ups his chances for a Nobel greatly. Willful distortion to sell a few more copies of a book would be a bad bet indeed, in the long run. Dubner too has a day-job as a reporter and widespread accusations of “distorting the facts” do not auger well for him either. I think they wanted to be interesting and provocative but chose the wrong topic to do it in. The climate debate touches a lot of raw nerves.
there is a short story by stephen king called ‘The end of the whole mess’, about a guy who discovers that the water in a particular area reduces violent tendencies in humans. He takes a large amount of the water and dumps it in a volcano, with the expectation that it will spread over the world……
M/s Levitt and Dubner might have got the idea from the story