Ostrom, Williamson win Econ Nobel

“I bet the Political Scientists are very, very happy today.”

This one is, especially re: Ostrom. A great choice!

Compare and contrast. Kieran Healy on Freakonomics and Steven Levitt, October 12 2009:
‘(Ostrom is) at the other end of the spectrum defined on one side by Freakonomics. Which is to say her work is not flashy, it’s very thorough, and it arrives at, you know, correct answers.’

Kieran Healy on Freakonomics and Steven Levitt, May 23 2005 (post title: ‘A Wealth of Notions’):
‘Steven Levitt does first-class work that’s reliably provocative in the most productive sort of way…
‘His knack for finding striking answers to tricky problems using recalcitrant data is remarkable…
‘In an ideal world, Levitt would represent a new breed of empirically-oriented researcher working across the boundaries of social science disciplines, expanding our knowledge of a wide variety of social processes and perhaps laying the foundations of a new kind of social science, alongside people working at equivalent boundaries in other fields, like cognitive psychology and economic sociology…
‘it may be that the trend toward rewarding a more interesting empirically-minded socioeconomics (evinced by recent Clark medal winners like Daron Acemoglu and Levitt himself) will provide incoming graduate students with, well, an incentive. This can only benefit economics and social science in general.’

I generally admire people who change their minds. But what’s laughable about Kieran Healy’s performance here is not so much his original love letter to Levitt as the way in which his later put-down contains not the slightest hint that he himself might once have seen Levitt’s work a little differently.

‘Too generous’? Ya think? The title of your post was a paraphrase of ‘The Wealth of Nations’, you compared him to two Economics Nobel Laureates, and you said in an ideal world he would represent a represent a new breed of researcher…? Reads like a tough critique to me. Ahem. Those interested should go to the source material: https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/23/a-wealth-of-notions/

To be honest, Kieran, compassion kept me from including all your most egregious suck-ups, like ‘Levitt is the successor of people like George Akerlof and Thomas Schelling, thinkers with a broad interest in social processes and a creative approach to understanding them that is rooted in their training in economics but not limited by it.’

I saw this one and also thought “yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing that Freakonomics ought to have been doing”. In fairness to both Steven Levitt and Kieran, 2005-era Steven Levitt’s work looked a lot more like Elinor Ostrom’s (and SL is still very thorough when he needs to be, eg the Levitt & Fryer paper on Ku Klux Klan membership, although this thoroughness is applied to some pretty odd questions these days). Back in 2005 it wasn’t obvious that the success of Freakonomics the book was going to take Levitt and Dubner down the route that they in fact travelled down. That’s why the best way to assess the book was to take four and a half years to write a review of it in stages, in order to make sure that the potential problems implicit in the work did in fact turn out to be serious.

I mean, the first edition of Freakonomics had the abortion/crime thesis in it, which was and remains an interesting an rigorous piece of work. Superfreakonomics, when it comes out, is apparently going to devote a chapter to the desirability of pumping sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, via an 18 mile long hosepipe held aloft by balloons. (what, do you think I’m lying or something). I think it is pretty fair to say that there has been some development there.

(about the only thing I’ll lay claim to analytical win on was noticing the assertion in the first book that “the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect”. Spotting the twin tropes of ‘ludicrously counterfactual assertions’ and ‘a really juvenile attitude toward sex workers’ were both highly predictive of volume 2).

Barry at the Big Picture has a nice post on the fact that Eugene Fama was the 2 to 1 favorite in the betting on the next Nobel in Economics, so that this prize is a twofer – a small disproof of the EMH, as well as a good choice in general.

Obviously the optimum allocation of resources here is to spend some time reading Ostrom and Williamson, having a short chuckle at what was written about Levitt back in the day.

But there is one serious point to take away: If someone is getting uncritical praise, then almost certainly they don’t deserve it. The Crooked Timber seminar on Levitt contained posts about as uncritical as this blog has ever had, alas.

There is always, in every field, some guy who will tell you he is the new Messiah, and it is a good idea to ask a few sharp questions before you start chanting Hosannahs.

‘Superfreakonomics, when it comes out, is apparently going to devote a chapter to the desirability of pumping sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, via an 18 mile long hosepipe held aloft by balloons. ‘

Compared to the idea of piping supercritical CO2 underwater at a depth where the CO2 would be denser than water, , or scrubbing CO2 from the air using giant towers shaped like cooling towers (in case we fart around so long that even if we go to zero emissions that we’re still fucked, and have to go to negative emission), both which are being talked about seriously as a solution to the AGW problem, the 18 mile hosepipe is pretty mild stuff.

Daniel, you really need (or rather, we really need for you ) to put your Freknomics destruction series on CT, in one post of mass destruction.

Blimey. Levitt on ethnic profiling:

“Isn’t everyone in favour of that? How could you not be in favour of that? I’m not saying we should lock them up,” he says. “But would it not make sense for MI5 to take a close look at those people? Of course, it’s a slight inconvenience to those innocents who have MI5 scrutinise them. But economics is all about trade-offs.”

It’s the last sentence that really grates with me – as if looking in the mirror and saying “economics” three times could make law and political theory go away. Jeremy Waldron’s written about that particular ‘trade-off’, and not favourably; Dworkin’s written about it, come to that. (So no, not everyone is in favour of that.) And the argument doesn’t even make sense in its own terms: Burkeman himself makes the point that the data Levitt’s relying on for his profile of those people derive from police arrest figures.

Pumping sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, via an 18 mile long hosepipe held aloft by balloons? I didn’t expect Levitt’s fame to turn him into a Bond villain.

Question: The main page shows 21 comments to this post, but only 13 when you open the comment thread. Is this a function of teh editing of unwelcome comments into the metaphorical round filing cabinet, or some other server issue?

Sock Puppet: How odd. I see 21 (now 23) comments.

disregard my previous comment – I read your previous entry about the amendment so we must agree about this, but FYI I think your blog’s position has been mis-represented elsewhere on the web

(To clarify, ‘they’ would appear to refer to anyone unfortunate enough to score above a determined level on a list of criteria which includes ‘rent their home, have no savings account or life insurance, be a student, and have both Muslim first and last names’.)

Tim Lambert on the global warming bits of Superfreakonomics:

I reviewed Freakonomics when it first came out and really liked it. So I was looking forward to the sequel Superfreakonomics. Unfortunately, Levitt and Dubner decided to write about global warming and have made a dreadful hash of it. The result is so wrong that it has even Joe Romm and William Connolley in agreement.