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Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything: Despite the self-satisfaction of the subtitle, repeated in the text, the book is a readable series of set pieces applying economic theory, broadly construed, to various questions of social behavior. Example: Are real estate agents good representatives? (No; they have incentives to make quick sales at your expense, as shown by the fact that when they sell their own houses they wait longer and get a 10% higher sales price. But the magazine-level treatment of each problem that makes it interesting also has serious limitations: The next question to ask is whether real estate agents are worse than other agents – like employees, who often do not fully identify with employers’ goals. Separately, one might ask whether it is nonetheless a good idea to use a real estate agent if you don’t have the time or the skills to sell your own house. Real estate agents may be able to go 10% higher on their own homes – but could you?) Other topics: cheating by sumo wrestlers and by teachers whose students take high-stakes tests; why drug dealers don’t make much money; how legal abortion is responsible for much of the decrease in the crime rate; how parents’ ability to influence their children is limited, including by giving them a funny name. The abortion piece is obviously the most controversial, but they’re all diverting, if marred by a tendency to brush aside evidence inconsistent with the theory of the market as made of rational actors. The authors argue, for example, that giving a child a “black” name isn’t responsible for discrimination against her, because both LaKeisha and Madison do about the same in life if they’re born in the same neighborhood, but they have nothing responsive to say about the evidence that Madison’s resume gets many more callbacks than LaKeisha’s, even when Madison’s is identical or worse than LaKeisha’s.
Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons: I’ll read just about any nonfiction, so on someone’s recommendation I picked up this 1984 volume on the importance of design, which Caplan uses to refer to the design of situations as well as of things. There are scattered interesting observations in the book, but it’s not held together by any theory more sophisticated than “design is important,” and it’s incredibly poorly organized. Paragraphs just tumble one after the other like gumballs out of a machine, as if someone put Caplan in front of a tape recorder and asked him to spill out his thoughts on design, prodding him with “anything else?” when he slowed down, but there aren’t even any structuring interview questions.
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays: I admit it, I have yet to finish Infinite Jest, though it’s not out of lack of interest. I will get there this summer. I think Wallace is an incredible writer, one who knows all the rules well enough to break them with his incessant footnotes and footnotes-within-footnotes. Practically every essay here has sentences that just made me reread with astonished pleasure, even the knowingly pretentious one about English usage – which includes an extensive discussion of the relationship of usage to class, and how Wallace is a prescriptivist even though he recognizes that the rules are arbitrary. The titular essay is about a lobster festival and also about the morality of boiling your food alive, and whether the all-but-undeniable pain involved should weigh against the human pleasure produced. I’m with Bentham on this one, so I wasn’t deeply shaken, but it’s still a good read. The essay about John McCain on the 2000 campaign trail has current relevance, though it’s much more about political reporting and the weird self-insulating world of journalists than it is about McCain. Wallace is someone whose shopping lists, I suspect, really are worth reading; so is this book.
