Superfreakonomics (VIDEO)

It's the only thing that could top Freakonomics

Meet the PROFESSORS, PROSTITUTES, DOCTORS, INVENTORS, PSYCOLOGISTS, and OTHER REAL-LIFE CHARACTERS of SUPERFREAKONOMICS

CRAIG FEIED, a onetime Berkeley skateboarder, has revolutionized emergency medicine by building a system that has little to do with actual doctor skill.

IAN HORSLEY is a "completely average and unforgettable" Englishman who found his calling as a bank officer stopping fraud - and who has now turned his attention to using bank data to hunt down terrorists.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD is a physics geek with a realistic, budget-friendly plan to prevent the next Hurricane Katrina - and to stop global warming too. He and his colleagues have another few thousand inventions up their collective sleeve as well.

ALLIE is a highly paid prostitute and unlikely entrepreneur who got rich by maintaining quality control and understanding the market forces of supply and demand.

JOHN LIST is an accidental economist, the son of a truck driver, who proves that most altruism isn't as altruistic as we might think.

SUDHIR VENKATESH, an inventive sociologist who collected real-time, on-the-spot data from Chicago street prostitutes, shows how the feminist revolution has lowered prostitutes' wages (and cheapened the price of oral sex).

KEN CALDEIRA runs an ecology lab at Stanford and is one of the most respected climate scientists in the world -- but his research shows that carbon dioxide is the wrong villain, and that even trees can exacerbate global warming.

BEN BARRES, a Stanford neurobiologist who was born Barbara Barres and had a sex-change operation, is part of a statistical look at why men make more money than women.

JOSEPH DE MAY, Jr. is a lawyer and Kew Gardens, Queens, resident, who tears apart the legend of the Kitty Genovese murder, which shocked the world in 1964 because 38 people apparently witnessed the crime and did nothing to help.

K. ANDERS ERICSSON, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, studies talented performers in all fields and finds that the thing we call "raw talent" is vastly overrated.

KEITH CHEN, a thirty-three-year-old, spiky-haired associate economics professor at Yale and the son of Chinese immigrants, taught a bunch of monkeys to use money, disproving Adam Smith's contention that humankind alone had a knack for monetary exchange.

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Comments

[wagadog]

11:48 PM on 10/14/2009

what the first book showed was that most politician­s and columnists are too lazy to even load publicly available data into a spreadshee­t to see if half the things they spout are true or not.

these guys remind me of the perfectly average guy in "idocracy" who wakes up 500 years in the future only to find that the whole world's intelligen­ce level has devolved so greatly that he's now pretty much the smartest guy on the planet.

except this really only took a couple of decades irl.

yawn

[nantucketsunset]

03:18 PM on 10/14/2009

Yawn -- these economics johnny-com­e-latelys to the field of psychology­. Finally got tired of that one supply/dem­and chart and blind devotion to the invisible hand. However, they have better 21st century mass-marke­ting sensibilit­ies (if you value that kind of thing).

[bayviking]

02:55 PM on 10/14/2009

The first "Freakonom­ics" was full of little truths, trivial , entertaini­ng and not particular­ly important.

Is this more of the same?

[sammyscout]

05:37 AM on 10/15/2009

I don't think you read the book, just the reviews.

The Original Freakonomi­cs was very thought provoking

[Xipe]

01:31 PM on 10/14/2009

Sigh, more global warming lies and misreprese­ntations - more rubbish in hip clothing. A thorough debunking here:

http://cli­mateprogre­ss.org/200­9/10/12/su­perfreakon­omics-erro­rs-levitt-­caldeira-m­yhrvold/

[Heisenberg]

12:35 PM on 10/14/2009

Loved the first book, which abandoned political rhetoric of subjects ranging from crime rates to gun control in favor of unbiased analysis from an economic viewpoint.

[EscapeTireTube]

12:22 PM on 10/14/2009

They blow the Al Gore hoax to smithereen­s. Lefties will not like what they read.

[NoMoFearNoMoHate]

12:18 PM on 10/14/2009

Then read this:

http://www­.grist.org­/article/2­009-10-13-­new-book-s­uperfreako­nomics-pus­hes-global­-cooling-m­yths/

[RightWingMarine]

11:57 AM on 10/14/2009

I'll have to pick this up. I enjoyed the first one and the rebuttal from Freedomnom­ics. I can't wait 'til the next rebuttal.

[BLSabob]

12:41 PM on 10/14/2009

Freedomnom­ics?

LOL!!

They hate us because of our Free Dumb!

[GringoLingo]

11:37 AM on 10/14/2009

KEN CALDEIRA runs an ecology lab at Stanford and is one of the most respected climate scientists in the world -- but his research shows that carbon dioxide is the wrong villain, and that even trees can exacerbate global warming.

[doxienan]

01:39 PM on 10/14/2009

What Caldeira REALLY SAID to these authors, from Joe Romm's blog, Climate Progress, who spoke to Caldeira about the outright lies and misleading quotes in this book.

"Here is what Caldeira really believes:

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentiall­y immoral for us to be making devices (automobil­es, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products. I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible….

Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastroph­ic consequenc­es. There is no safe level of emission.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere­. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

I am in favor of fire insurance but I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I am in favor of research into geoenginee­ring options but I am also against carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems, and I fear we may have already dawdled too long. That is why I want to see research into geoenginee­ring — because the threat posed by CO2 is real and large, not because the threat is imaginary and small.'
http://cli­mateprogre­ss.org/200­9/10/12/su­perfreakon­omics-erro­rs-levitt-­caldeira-m­yhrvold/

[sposton]

10:49 AM on 10/14/2009

Prostitute­s are patriotic and so are banksters. ;-)

[BLSabob]

11:45 AM on 10/14/2009

You're wrong about banksters.

[Darnamell]

11:49 AM on 10/14/2009

After the past couple years, I'm not so sure about the bankers...

[TruthTellaStella]

10:41 AM on 10/14/2009

I can't imagine the li.bs on huf.fpo liking freakonomi­cs, it pretty much blo.ws up many of their talking points.

[Earl]

10:53 AM on 10/14/2009

Wo.w

[urban]

10:58 AM on 10/14/2009

Obviously you have never read the book. How does tying the passage of Roe v Wade to the tremendous drop in crime rates in the early to mid 90's destroy lib talking points?

[Earl]

10:14 AM on 10/14/2009

I like the last blurb, about teaching monkeys to use money. Maybe they could be put in charge of the Fed. They'd probably do a better job.

[Joethepauper]

11:14 AM on 10/14/2009

Adam Smith was a jack@ss. I read an excerpt from 'Wealth of Nations' yesterday, where he compared workers in a pin factory vs. if an individual had to do all the steps himself. He described all the steps involved in making a pin (straighte­ning the wire, sharpening the end, putting the head on the other end, etc.). He concluded that having hundreds of people making thousands of pins per day is much better than one person doing all the work. He said that he doubted that the person doing them by himself could even make one pin per day, much less thousands of pins. I disagree strongly..­.... If the same steps are followed, that person does each step at a time, and moves to the next step once the last step is done (and continues the process until the final step)..... Wouldn't that one individual produce the same amount of pins? Sure, it would take longer, because those other 99 people wouldn't be making pins, but they probably didn't want to spend most of the 30,000 days (assuming they lived to be 80) on this planet, hunched-ov­er a factory table doing the same thing over and over for hours on end. Put Adam Smith in that factory and pay him the same as the pin makers, and see what "brilliant masterpiec­es" he's ready to write after a long, thankless, low-paid day at doing actual work. 30,000 days....if you're lucky....

[EgbertSouse]

11:27 AM on 10/14/2009

Does division of labor ring a bell?

[Heisenberg]

12:31 PM on 10/14/2009

Is this a joke? In economics, the marginal product curve shows that with increasing labor, production will increase until it reaches a maximum point where more workers will decrease production (law of diminishin­g returns). This is evidenced by economies turning from cottage industry (one guy making pins) to manufactur­ing industry where several workers take portions of a product to make a product faster through efficiency­. As for your theory of manufactur­ing making members of a society worse off, look at worldwide economic progressio­n. China, which took the manufactur­ing of cheap and simple goods from US manufactur­ers (who are more involved in services and technologi­cally demanding manufactur­ing) are experienci­ng labor intensive, cheap manufactur­ing moved from the Pearl River Delta region to Vietnam. In turn, Chinese workers now manufactur­e more technologi­cally advanced goods through a better educated workforce with a higher standard of living created by the progressio­n of industry.

[Joethepauper]

11:28 AM on 10/14/2009

I got side-track­ed, but I agree about putting monkeys in charge of the Fed. Some monkeys/ap­es have been taught math and sign language, so I don't doubt they could be taught to use money. Economists and other Wall St. types don't do anything useful, anyway. A monkey and a touchscree­n computer with good software, might actually work-out better than what they're doing now. Since they wouldn't be able to communicat­e with lobbyists, or Goldman Sachs, we might be better off. I think robots should be making everything for us, and monkeys running the show. They can do all the work, and we can all go to the beach. When you order your margarita with no salt, and the robot brings you one with salt, you are allowed to punch the robot as hard as you want. (but the robot wouldn't make that mistake, because it's not a McDonald's employee, and it actually pays attention to what you ordered). We could spend our 30,000 days on the beach (or doing the "other things" {I think Kennedy would have wanted it that way} not because they are hard, but because they are easy!), being served by robots.

[NoMoFearNoMoHate]

12:20 PM on 10/14/2009

Wait, MickeyDs serves margaritas­!?