26 July 2005 FREAKONOMICS: A ROGUE ECONOMIST EXPLORES THE HIDDEN SIDE OF EVERYTHING by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, HarperCollins/William Morrow, May 2005, ISBN: 0-06-073132-X

I'm a little sore this morning, having been immersed in my favorite swimming hole up at the Eel River, for the better part of yesterday, one hour of which I swam back and forth nonstop with my eyes closed playing Marco Polo with Katie, Lacey, and Katie's friend Emily. (Shari, on the beach, would occasionally yell when I was about to crack my head on one of the perimeter boulders.) I got frustratingly close, but never did succeed in tagging one of the girls.

There is nothing with which I associate summer more than swimming. I spent my childhood and adolescence back East within a short drive of some beautiful Long Island Sound beaches where I would practice the strokes and lifesaving techniques that I had mastered over previous summers at day camps and Scout camps, and get to swim around underwater, exploring. In addition to those frequent visits to the Sound, and occasional weeks when we'd vacation on the beaches in the Hamptons, I grew up with a series of larger and larger swimming pools in the backyard.

It could well be that the most memorable summer of my life was the one that followed eighth grade. It was 1969, and my parents had just purchased one of those rectangular vinyl pools with a diving hole on one end and an expansive deck around the whole thing. I recall many days that summer when everyone else was gone and I got to splash around in the pool all day by myself, accompanied by a portable radio with MusicRadio 77WABC blasting out "The Israelites," "Crystal Blue Persuasion," "What Does it Take (To Win Your Love for Me)," and "These Eyes."

"If you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is."

Damn! And I'd just been dreaming of actually getting one here at the farm. (A pool, not a gun.)

After our picnic lunch at the river yesterday, I found a bit of shade and finished up the amazing book I've been reading. Steve Levitt, a professor who has won some sort of award as the nation's best young economist, and Stephen Dubner, a New York Times writer who'd originally interviewed Levitt a few years ago, have put together a book in which very interesting and sometimes controversial topics (such as comparing incidences of accidental child shootings versus accidental pool drownings) are analyzed "by the numbers."

"What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe v. Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three. What sort of future might her child have had? One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the early years of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors--childhood poverty and a single-parent household--are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.

"In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives...

"Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion...and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years--the years during which young men enter their criminal prime--the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime."

In a book that has a lot to teach adolescent and adult readers about objective examination of motivations, cause-and-effect, the frequently self-serving proclamations of experts, information literacy, crack dealing, and mathematics, Levitt and Dubner ask such questions as "What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?," "How is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?," and "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?

As the authors explain about the nature of economics:

"Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work--whereas economics represents how it actually does work. Economics is above all a science of measurement. It comprises an extraordinarily powerful and flexible set of tools that can reliably assess a thicket of information to determine the effect of any one factor, or even the whole effect. That's what 'the economy' is, after all; a thicket of information about jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the tools of economics can be just as easily applied to subjects that are more--well, more interesting.

In applying economics to such subjects as cheating, parenting, polling, Klanning, buying term life insurance, and selling bagels, the authors repeatedly utilize the following fundamental ideas:

"Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life."

"The conventional wisdom is often wrong."

"Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes."

" 'Experts'--from criminologists to real-estate agents--use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda."

"Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so."

It is the manner in which the authors apply these ideas that makes the book funny, fascinating, and well-worth teaching. When they use the numbers to show how a well-know advocate for the homeless was once, in effect, claiming that one-third of all deaths in the U.S. were of homeless people; when they reveal by the numbers how (based on the bookkeeping of a real crack-gang in Chicago) street-level dealers were constantly risking their lives to make less per hour than "a McDonald's burger flipper or a Wal-Mart shelf stocker;" when the authors utilize algorithms to catch teachers cheating; and when they explain the art of regression analysis to answer the question of "What Makes a Perfect Parent?," they are teaching a powerful new way of thinking that will be of significant value to all readers.

Meanwhile, I'm still thinking seriously about exposing our kids to the relative dangers of a swimming pool in the backyard (but with the all safety precautions the authors advise taking).

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com