Here is John DiNardo’s review of Freakonomics, and here, and here are all three reviews he has written; one version was just published in the Journal of Economic Literature. These reviews struck me as grumpy and unfair, ultimately citing few contrary facts and boiling down to the complaint that the authors have not disproven all competing theories, or that the authors do not have a complete account of what a good explanation would look like. Three separate reviews of one book? And a popular book at that? What is going on? DiNardo is not some guy in his pajamas, rather he is a tenured professor at the University of Michigan with presumably a high opportunity cost. I am reminded of Einstein’s rejoinder. Upon being presented with a book of essays called something like "The critics against Einstein" (that is a paraphrase) he replied with something like "If they were right, one would have been enough." The point is not that Freakonomics is infallible (on most particular issues I genuinely do not know exactly how robust their results are and to know would take a good bit of study), but rather that factual criticism on a single point is usually the best way to make critical progress. Now I would like to read a philosophy of science critique of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
DiNardo is jealous that he does not have a best selling book and that he does not have tenure at UofC.
“the claims about car seats for young kids was just wrong”
Explain.
Here is the link to one of the reviews in the American law journal. It strikes me as misleading to claim that DiNardo is concerned with “error terms” or whether any particular point in the paper is right or wrong. He discusses the question whether the authors of Freakonomics are actually interested in whether something is right or wrong in the first place.
DiNardo has a whole section on “what to expect and what not to expect,” and he certainly does not expect a discussion of error terms in a popularization of science. It is worthwhile to read his (original) review just for this section.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdinardo/Pubs/aler.pdf
I haven’t read DiNardo’s reviews, but I had read in The Economist some time ago that the famous Donahue and Levitt paper on abortion and crime rates did contain some major errors
Here is he link to the economist article, which probably should not exist. But I am not quite sure that this has something to do with DiNardo’s critique, which is not about some particular point being right or wrong. Mistakes happen.
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~alan/law33/Oops-onomics.pdf
I just looked at John DiNardo’s webpage on freakanomics and he explains how he wrote a paper and then decided to divide into three parts that are conceptually different (only two of which are published). I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It would have been a bit more fair to John DiNardo if this explanation was presented in the post.
Freakonomics was such a popular book that nitpicky articles have value.
This part of the review was interesting:
The text goes on to discuss the Romanian abortion ban referring to both popular articles as
well as more scholarly publications. One surprising rendition of the originals includes a pair of
papers by Cristian Pop-Eleches (Pop-Eleches 2005b, Pop-Eleches 2002), which is summarized in
Freakonomics this way on page 118:
Ceausescu’s incentives produced the desired effect. Within one year of the abortion
ban, the Romanian birth rate had doubled. These babies were born into a country
where, unless you belonged to the Ceausescu clan or the Communist elite, life was
miserable. But these children would turn out to have particularly miserable lives.
Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born
after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower
in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove
much more likely to become criminals.
The curious reader who tracked down the relevant papers by Pop–Eleches would be very
surprised to learn that the description in Freakonomics is virtually the opposite of what is
actually claimed.18
On average, children born in 1967 just after abortions became illegal display better
educational and labor market achievements than children born just prior to the change.
This outcome can be explained by a change in the composition of women having
children: urban, educated women were more likely to have abortions prior to the policy
change, so a higher proportion of children were born into urban, educated households.
(Pop–Eleches (2002), page 34)
While Pop–Eleches relates suggestive evidence that conditional on the usual list of demographic
characteristics, a fetus born after than ban is more likely to engage in criminal behavior, Pop-
Eleches’ conclusion is that the effect is second order.
“Freakonomics” made economics sexy. And from someone who hates calling things sexy that aren’t well, sexy, that’s saying something.
I don’t think “Freak” was intended to invoke Michael Oher or the elephant man. It had a great title. It was very easily consumed. It didn’t have numbers or equations, because, well, math sure does kill a mood.
As I recall, Freakonomics basically had broad themes of
Don’t believe the headlines, especially those from policians (i.e., interested parties).
Don’t underestimate the power of incentives.
Beware information asymmetry.
Economics can actually be useful (although it seemed to me mostly about statistics informed by economic questions).
They sexed up the previous “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper,” a book apparently a few years too early and without a catchy title, 6th grade prose, or controversial conclusions.
I think it’s important for us to critically analyze what we read (one of their themes by the way), so critiques of works like Freakonomics are important. Maybe they need additional criticism because they are ambassadors to the general public on behalf of an obscure sect.
But, I don’t think it’s necessary to go so far as to attack the premise. Think of all the books that aren’t as good as Freakonomics and worthy of much greater criticism. It’s fine to say, “hey guys, we need a little better representation here” but I don’t think it’s good (not even from a self-interested point of view) to imply that the alternatives are better when they are not.
People need to understand economics, for their good, not ours (but als ours), and the broad question should be, “does this book help or hurt?” On that score, I think it helps.
Their argument about abortion didn’t convince me. Correlation does not prove causation. And I get the feeling that people who read the book and accept the theory with nary a gimlit eye, kind of missed the point.
As a critique of their economics, it’s good. As a review of popular literature, it does miss the point.
It kind of reminds me of libertarians who attack the most libertarian candidate since Jefferson because he’s not quite their idea of the libertarian ideal. That’s fine, but when election time rolls around, it’s time to recognize the difference between more libertarian versus less libertarian.
DiNardo was one of my professors at Michigan. Great guy. A minor big-shot in econometrics. He always struck me as a bit of a fundamentalist on whether or not someone has shown causation (but I was a masters student, so what do I know?).
That said, he seemed to think deeply and carefully about econometrics, and who writes stuff like these reviews despite its negligible impact on his career.
Given the impact Freakonomics is having on popular understanding of economics in general and specific subject in particular, I believe the more criticism the better. By the way, the assertion that DiNardo is motivated by jealousy is absurd. He’s tenured at Michigan, for cring out loud.
Ted Joyce has a forthcoming ReSTAT (first entry in his online CV) that is a test of DL based on a similar logic to what Sailer just suggested, for those interested. The use of older (i.e., “untreated cohorts”) is a good way to disentangle the abortion effects from any prevailing period effects. The difficulty in the abortion-crime hypothesis is you have a kind of Hail Mary thing going on – the treatment occurs twenty years earlier, and you’re hoping that treatment in those states will not be correlated with anything else that shows up later. But in the case of abortion and crime, that’s a lot to ask, which is why I like Joyce’s (and Sailer’s, to give him credit) recommendation to use older age cohorts as implicit control groups for state-specific unobservables that could confounding the regressions. After reading Joyce’s two papers on this now (the 2004 JHR paper and the 2008 ReSTAT paper forthcoming) and the Foote and Goetz forthcoming QJE paper, it does seem like the abortion-crime evidence isn’t nearly as strong as we used to think.
But, at the same time, there are corollary studies published that don’t suffer from the same problems as Sailer says the original DL had. For instance, Stephens and Charles (2006) Journal of Law and Economics finds drug use to be lower in the repeal states among the treated cohort than the untreated cohort, using basically the triple difference method that Sailer is implicitly wanting with his “reality checks.” Another by Ozbeklik (unpublished) using the same have found lower teen fertility, too – always comparing the ones born in the years that abortion was legalized to those born one year earlier. And then there is the original Gruber, Levine and Staiger (QJE 1999) on the “marginal child” and living standards of aborted children and an unpublished NBER working paper by Annant, Gruber, Levine and Staiger (2006) that replicates some of the abortion-crime results using state-year fixed effects (I’m not sure if they correct for the measurement problems that Foote and Goetz point to, though).
Sailer, what’s your opinion of all these studies? Are you saying you think they are all dishonest scholars?
My position has always been that Levitt’s theory should not be the conventional wisdom — it might be true, it might not be, but we’re a long way from knowing — but that’s what it has become — in part because of the New York Times’ obvious conflict of interest in both employing and promoting Levitt.
“Jason”,
You surely know you are tilting at windmills with Sailer. He will cite econometric work when it suits his view and then throw out the whole enterprise as bunk in the next breath. All the while he spouts his own theories which he has neither the skills nor the data to rigorously test.
He is right D-L may or may not be right. But this is how science progresses. Theory-Hypothesis-Data-Test-Wash-Rinse-Repeat. It is easy for every professional blog commenter to throw stones at scientific work that flies in the face of their beliefs. However, they have no interest in actually moving the scientific debate forward by rigorously putting forth a theory and then empirically testing its implications.
Sometimes their criticisms are right even when they lack the ability to express them correctly. But more often than not they are wrong based on a complete and total ignorance of the tools being used.
You would think after almost 10 years Sailer would take the time to learn the basics of the techniques he has earned his infamy criticizing. Think how much misunderstanding could be avoided if once in his life Sailer worked through the proofs for consistency and unbiasedness of Ordinary Least Squares.
lol.
sigh.
You may or may not be evil Steve that is between you and your clergy.
I never accused you of being evil. I accused you of:
1) Using claims based on econometrics work to criticize L and D, and in the same breath calling the entire field bunk.
2) Not learning the very basics about applied econometrics so that you can understand why many of your criticisms make absolutely no sense.
You also seem to ascribe group think to the field of microeconomics. You have obviously never once been to a presentation of an economics paper. It is a freaking blood sport. Nobody falls in line and nobody bows to analysis because of a professors fame. If anything it puts a bullseye on their back.
So I don’t know if you are evil. But you are either willfully ignorant or disingenuous.
“He is right D-L may or may not be right. But this is how science progresses. Theory-Hypothesis-Data-Test-Wash-Rinse-Repeat.”
Freakonomics is to science what “Popular Science” is to “Science.”
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>DiNardo is jealous that he does not have a best selling book and that he does not have tenure at UofC. Posted by: allbull27 at Jan 27, 2008 9:24:06 AM< AllBull27 is an apt name to use, because you clearly are full of bull.... DiNardo is co-author on one of the most important econometric textbooks ever written--"Econometric Methods" by Johnston & Dinardo. The book is in its fourth edition and is used around the world to teach PhD students how not to make silly Freakonomics mistakes. (Source: http://www.amazon.com/Econometric-Methods-Jack-Johnston/dp/0079131212/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289170458&sr=1-1)
DiNardo is brilliant, if not a bit off-putting. His work is generally snarky, as his paper “The Returns to Computer Use Revisited: Have Pencils Changed the Wage Structure Too?” (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdinardo/NBER/w5606.pdf) takes to task econometric methods employed linking computer usage to an increase in wages. Dinardo would certainly never be envious of anyone else’s success or wealth. He’s the type of guy who might show up to teach a class still in his pajamas….
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