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.

Dear Economist: Should my useless but sexy PA stay?

Samantha, my PA, is so very unreliable. For example, she failed to pass on your invitation to feature as a responding correspondent in your recent “Dear Undercover Economist” plug article. However, she does have a fantastic pair of, er … feet. Should I fire her?
Bob Casablanca

That’s a relief.

The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist. She is a political scientist, both by training and her career — one of the most decorated political scientists around. So the fact I have never heard of her reflects badly on me, and it also highlights just how substantial the boundaries between social science disciplines remain.

So the short answer is that the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than Republicans hated the Peace prize going to Obama. Economists want this to be an economists’ prize (after all, economists are self-interested). This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics.

I don’t mean to imply this is necessarily a bad thing — economists certainly do not have a monopoly on talent within the social sciences — just that it will be unpopular among my peers.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/what-this-years-nobel-prize-in-economics-says-about-the-nobel-prize-in-economics/

Some element of the pundit fallacy appears to be there i.e. the projection of one’s own opinions as those of a larger group.

I didn’t expect Levitt’s fame to turn him into a Bond villain.

Though it’s Nathan Mhyrvold’s scheme, and he once said (of himself and Bill), “We are no longer megalomanics … we are gigalomaniacs.”

“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.