文章简介

《怪诞经济学Freakonomics.-.Steven.Levitt》

作者:[美]斯蒂芬·利维特【完结】

芝加哥大学年轻的经济学教授“挑战传统智慧”，一改传统经济学家的研究方式，将视角落在人们日常所见的种种“琐碎”问题及其背后的因果。他与斯蒂芬·达纳合写的此书可读性强，很多读者读后感觉自己的视角开始改变。利维特毕业于哈佛大学，获麻省理工学院博士学位，对政治学、社会学和法律皆有涉猎。

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded young scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life-from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing - and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: Freakonomics.

FREAKONOMICS

A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of

Everything

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

CONTENTS

AN EXPLANATORY NOTE

In which the origins of this book are clarified.

INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything

In which the book’s central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how

people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does

work.

Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong…How “experts”—from

criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists—bend the facts…Why

knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding

modern life…What is “freakonomics,” anyway?

1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?

In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side—

cheating.

Who cheats? Just about everyone…How cheaters cheat, and how to catch

them…Stories from an Israeli day-care center…The sudden disappearance of

seven million American children…Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago…Why

cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win…Could sumo wrestling, the

national sport of Japan, be corrupt?…What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be

more honest than we think.

2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?

In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially

when its power is abused.

Going undercover in the Ku Klux Klan…Why experts of every kind are in the

perfect position to exploit you…The antidote to information abuse: the

Internet…Why a new car is suddenly worth so much less the moment it leaves

the lot…Breaking the real-estate agent code: what “well maintained” really

means…Is Trent Lott more racist than the average Weakest Link

contestant?…What do online daters lie about?

3. Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?

In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-

interest, and convenience.

Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic

halitosis…How to ask a good question…Sudhir Venkatesh’s long, strange trip

into the crack den…Life is a tournament…Why prostitutes earn more than

architects…What a drug dealer, a high-school quarterback, and an editorial

assistant have in common…How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the

invention of nylon stockings…Was crack the worst thing to hit black Americans

since Jim Crow?

4. Where Have All the Criminals Gone?

In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions.

What Nicolae Ceau?escu learned—the hard way—about abortion…Why the

1960s were a great time to be a criminal…Think the roaring 1990s economy put a

crimp on crime? Think again…Why capital punishment doesn’t deter

criminals…Do police actually lower crime rates?…Prisons, prisons

everywhere…Seeing through the New York City police “miracle”…What is a

gun, really?…Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later

crack dealers were like Pets.com…The superpredator versus the senior

citizen…Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed

everything.

5. What Makes a Perfect Parent?

In which we ask, from a variety of angles, a pressing question: do parents really

matter?

The conversion of parenting from an art to a science…Why parenting experts like

to scare parents to death…Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming

pool?…The economics of fear…Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture

quagmire…Why a good school isn’t as good as you might think…The black-

white test gap and “acting white”…Eight things that make a child do better in

school and eight that don’t.

6. Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as

Sweet?

In which we weigh the importance of a parent’s first official act—naming the

baby.

A boy named Winner and his brother, Loser…The blackest names and the

whitest names…The segregation of culture: why Seinfeld never made the top

fifty among black viewers…If you have a really bad name, should you just

change it?…High-end names and low-end names (and how one becomes the

other)…Britney Spears: a symptom, not a cause…Is Aviva the next

Madison?…What your parents were telling the world when they gave you your

name.

EPILOGUE: Two Paths to Harvard

In which the dependability of data meets the randomness of life.

AN EXPLANATORY NOTE

The most brilliant young economist in America—the one so deemed, at least, by

a jury of his elders—brakes to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago’s south side. It is

a sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy Cavalier with a dusty

dashboard and a window that doesn’t quite shut, producing a dull roar at

highway speeds.

But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets: gas stations, boundless

concrete, brick buildings with plywood windows.

An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless right on his sign,

which also asks for money. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day,

and a grimy red baseball cap.

The economist doesn’t lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go

scrounging for spare change. He just watches, as if through one-way glass. After

a while, the homeless man moves along.

“He had nice headphones,” says the economist, still watching in the rearview

mirror. “Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn’t look like he has

many assets.”

Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person. Differently,

too, than the average economist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling

one, depending on how you feel about economists.

—The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003

In the summer of 2003, The New York Times Magazine sent Stephen J. Dubner,

an author and journalist, to write a profile of Steven D. Levitt, a heralded young

economist at the University of Chicago.

Dubner, who was researching a book about the psychology of money, had lately

been interviewing many economists and found that they often spoke English as

if it were a fourth or fifth language. Levitt, who had just won the John Bates

Clark Medal (awarded every two years to the best American economist under

forty), had lately been interviewed by many journalists and found that their

thinking wasn’t very…robust, as an economist might say.

But Levitt decided that Dubner wasn’t a complete idiot. And Dubner found that

Levitt wasn’t a human slide rule. The writer was dazzled by the inventiveness of

the economist’s work and his knack for explaining it. Despite Levitt’s elite

credentials (Harvard undergrad, a PhD from MIT, a stack of awards), he

approached economics in a notably unorthodox way. He seemed to look at

things not so much as an academic but as a very smart and curious explorer—a

documentary filmmaker, perhaps, or a forensic investigator or a bookie whose

markets ranged from sports to crime to pop culture. He professed little interest in

the sort of monetary issues that come to mind when most people think about

economics; he practically blustered with self-effacement. “I just don’t know very

much about the field of economics,” he told Dubner at one point, swiping the

hair from his eyes. “I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics,

and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock

market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to

grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me

about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any

of those things.”

What interested Levitt were the stuff and riddles of everyday life. His

investigations were a feast for anyone wanting to know how the world really

works. His singular attitude was evoked in Dubner’s resulting article:

As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers

but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to

ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do

they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a

swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past

decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do

black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do

schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling

corrupt?

And how does a homeless man in tattered clothing afford $50 headphones?

Many people—including a fair number of his peers—might not recognize

Levitt’s work as economics at all. But he has merely distilled the so-called dismal

science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want.

Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and

curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (but he is afraid of

calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that

no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an effect that veteran

economists had declared unmeasurable. His abiding interests—though he says

he has never trafficked in them himself—are cheating, corruption, and crime.

Levitt’s blazing curiosity also proved attractive to thousands of New York Times

readers. He was beset by questions and queries, riddles and requests—from

General Motors and the New York Yankees and U.S. senators but also from

prisoners and parents and a man who for twenty years had kept precise data on

his sales of bagels. A former Tour de France champion called Levitt to ask his

help in proving that the current Tour is rife with doping; the Central Intelligence

Agency wanted to know how Levitt might use data to catch money launderers

and terrorists.

What they were all responding to was the force of Levitt’s underlying belief: that

the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright

deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are

asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of

looking.

In New York City, the publishers were telling Levitt he should write a book.

“Write a book?” he said. “I don’t want to write a book.” He already had a million

more riddles to solve than time to solve them. Nor did he think himself much of

a writer. So he said that no, he wasn’t interested—“unless,” he proposed, “maybe

Dubner and I could do it together.”

Collaboration isn’t for everyone. But the two of them—henceforth known as the

two of us—decided to talk things over to see if such a book might work. We

decided it could. We hope you agree.

Levitt had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the venerable intellectual

clubhouse at Harvard that pays young scholars to do their own work, for three

years, with no commitments. Levitt felt he didn’t stand a chance. For starters, he

didn’t consider himself an intellectual. He would be interviewed over dinner by

the senior fellows, a collection of world-renowned philosophers, scientists, and

historians. He worried he wouldn’t have enough conversation to last even the

first course.

Disquietingly, one of the senior fellows said to Levitt, “I’m having a hard time

seeing the unifying theme of your work. Could you explain it?”

Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme was, or if he even

had one.

Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in and neatly

summarized what he saw as Levitt’s theme.

Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that’s my theme.

Another fellow then offered another theme.

You’re right, said Levitt, my theme.

And so it went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher Robert Nozick

interrupted.

“How old are you, Steve?” he asked.

“Twenty-six.”

Nozick turned to the other fellows: “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he

need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people

who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer

it, and it’ll be fine.”

—THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003

INTRODUCTION:

The Hidden Side of Everything

Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper

of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having

been scared out of his skin.

The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime

rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—

and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by

gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had

carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome,

constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All

the experts were saying so.

The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere.

Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-

thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun