Kill our cows – and save the planet

Who would nowadays bother asking an economist so much as the time of day? The popular perception is that the profession and its much-lauded “dismal science” got an F when it came to warning us about the global financial meltdown.

And yet who can begrudge an economist who tells us that suicide bombers should buy life insurance, that pimps are like estate agents, that walking drunk is more dangerous than driving drunk and that eating kangaroo could help solve global warming?

Of the “freak brothers”, Levitt, 42, is a wunderkind economist –- often hailed as one of the most talented of his generation – and professor at the University of Chicago. Dubner, 46, is an award-winning economics journalist from New York who started writing with Levitt after publishers became excited by a profile he had written of the young economist in the New York Times.

As one of the most successful writing partnerships in publishing, they make an entirely complementary and logical team in the same way that Jack Spratt and his wife did at the dinner table. Levitt provides the economist’s methodology and number-crunching skills, Dubner writes it all up so as to make it interesting – and comprehensible – to the layman.

“It would have been impossible for either of us to have done this alone,” says Levitt simply.

Their first book caused a huge stir, not only in casting an economist as detective hero but in showing that even the most deeply-ingrained assumptions about everyday life could be challenged by looking closely at the figures. In discoveries that were regurgitated at thousands of dinner parties, readers learnt that drug dealers were often so poor they had to live with their mothers, that estate agents had too little incentive to get the highest price when selling a house and that parental income and status is a far more accurate predictor of how children will fare at school than what they actually do for their offspring. The book stirred up a particularly fierce hornet’s nest in arguing that US urban crime fell dramatically in the 1990s, not because of better policing but because of abortion being legalised – fewer disadvantaged mothers had babies that grew up to be criminals.

The new book again lobs grenades in all directions. The global warming lobby comes in for particular stick. Levitt and Dubner scoff at the notion that people will altruistically cut carbon emissions. Instead, they point out that methane-producing ruminants such as cows and sheep are a much bigger problem than transport (eating kangaroo would be far less harmful to the environment). Championing the cooling potential of sulphur dioxide, they propose pumping vast amounts into the stratosphere through an 18-mile hose.

There are also chapters on how terrorists can best be identified by their financial activities (big on small, irregular cash withdrawals, poor on taking out life insurance) and why having a pimp in Chicago actually boosts a prostitute’s earnings. The latter would seem like a classic example of the statistics not always telling the whole story, but there we are. Asked where he gets all his research ideas, Levitt says he simply observes the world around him.

As they sit in Dubner’s Manhattan office, it’s impossible to confuse the freakonomics team. Levitt, the son of a psychic and an expert on flatulence, is obviously the academic – sleeves rolled down, sensible shoes, slight lisp, occasionally wispy smile. He lets the more gregarious Dubner – sleeves rolled up, wild hair, Crocs, obviously the journalist –- do most of the talking.

Despite decrying the value of “experts”, the pair has – like their main pop-economics fellow traveller, Malcolm Gladwell – become fixtures on the corporate lecture circuit. And yet they stress that they are not business gurus, but just two guys who look at the world differently to others.

But a lot of people won’t be persuaded. They believe Levitt has a miracle cure, says Dubner. He tells how, after his New York Times profile was published, Levitt was “besieged by callers, ranging from General Motors, to the New York Yankees to the CIA, all of whom really did think he was a magician”. Dubner adds: “He’s not and he’d be the first person to tell you he’s not. But there are problems that if we can sit down and look at them, and most importantly have access to a lot of a data, there may be some insights to be gained.”

Some fellow academics have inevitably laid into Levitt. He is just too flip about economics and, worse, perhaps too successful, for them to ignore. Popular gripes are that he over-simplifies economics, that he picks on trivia and that he never draws any conclusions about his often startling claims. On the last of these, I would say that that is something of a virtue in a world in which “thinkers” tend to do the opposite – constructing sweeping theories on the most scanty of evidence. That Levitt and Dubner leave all their statistical nuggets dangling in the air with no grand theme to link them – other than the abiding importance of incentives – is a big tick against their names on my clipboard.

“Neither of us are the pontificating type,” says Levitt scathingly. “I am sure a different pair of people could take what we do and pontificate all day long.”

“We’re more credible when we’re more honest,” adds Dubner. ”We’re more honest when our proclamations are small.“

Levitt, the economist of small things, argues that economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. Unlike other academics, he looks at the 'what' rather than the 'why' – asking if assumptions are correct rather than why they happen, says Dubner.

I am not entirely surprised to hear that one of their biggest readership demographics is the one that supposedly doesn’t read books – teenagers. They are at an age when they enjoy seeing stripped away the “layers of deceptiveness” that society has used to soften the world for them, says Dubner. Though rather more sophisticated, Superfreakonomics has something in common with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, both tapping into that same conspiracist philosophy that the world is not as it seems.

You can see why other economists might be a little peeved at this relentless quest for counter-intuitiveness. Dubner offers his theory: “What has happened to economics now is similar to what happened to psychology 30 years ago. It went from being a fairly arcane subject to something that the public began to understand and talk about a lot more,” he says.

"There are psychologists who rue that day because it kind of cheapened their work and made people over-simplify what they’re thinking. And, honestly, I think there are a lot of economists who feel that way today. It’s not for me to say whether that’s right or wrong."

If some of the macroeconomists poring over retail price indexes and balance of trade deficits have little time for the Freakonomics duo, the feeling is mutual. Levitt makes no apology for the fact that his latest book contains no insight into why the world was recently plunged into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It’s simply not what he’s about, he says.

Predictions are difficult enough for economists but predicting what will happen to something as big as a country’s economy is "extremely difficult,” he adds.

Meanwhile, what’s next – Superduperfreakonomics? Is there no area of life on which economists cannot enlighten us mortals? Levitt doesn’t miss a beat. “Macroeconomics,” he says with a faint smile.