Freakish Numbers

I finally sat down with Freakonomics, the intensely popular "look at everyday phenomena in a different light" book of 2005. Economist Steven Levitt and New York-based writer Stephen Dubner collaborated on a popularization of some of the studies that have made Levitt a darling of the academic world.

(Note: is he really a "darling"? They make it sound that way, but if I were old school, I'd find him pretty annoying.)

I enlisted Michael to write a review since he read the book first, but he has missed several deadlines, so you'll have to check the comments for his take.

This was our April book club selection, and I think that overall it went pretty well. We are a tough crowd. General thoughts: it was a pleasant and quick read, but not well-enough written. It didn't go in depth enough on each topic (maybe because details would be boring for non-economists?). Levitt seems to cherry-pick his data and doesn't always back up conclusions. Several of the stories, however, we rather interesting. (The group especially liked the drug dealers and the grad student embed. I preferred the bits on parenting and children's names.)

It was surprising to me that my fellow clubbers (Michael excepted) hadn't heard much about the book before we chose it. As I mentioned above, it's been quite the "It" book in certain circles. For my money, I prefer Malcolm Gladwell. Of course, since I don't actually have to choose, I'll enjoy them both.

And man, are there ever opportunities. A quick trip the Freakonomics web site reveals a fountain of information, including free study guides (see! I knew they'd be using this in college econ courses) and info on the "Freakonomics" column at the New York Times. There's even a blog! Here's an example post from Dubner, from earlier this week:

The National Association of Realtors has started a blog. The lead item today is headlined “The Cost of Selling without a REALTOR®: $31,800.” Pretty scary, huh? Here’s the lead: “Real estate professionals do more for sellers than make the transaction easier. They make them money. In fact, the average seller who uses a real estate professional makes 16 percent more on the sale of their home than do sellers who go it alone. That’s an average of $31,800 per home.” Unfortunately, there’s no supporting data. So it could be that a Realtor actually brings in, on average, $31,800 more per home sale. Or it could be that a few dozen, or few hundred, or few thousand Realtor-sold multimillion-dollar homes skews the average very high compared to FSBO’s, which tend to be cheaper. Or it could be a few dozen other factors.

Take that, Realtors! Or another, by Levitt:

An article in yesterday’s USA Today reports on a recent survey of health care providers. The study asked them whether or not they would report to work in a flu pandemic. Nearly half said they would be no-shows.

If there is one thing economists have learned, it is that what people say and what they do are often not the same. And the way words and actions diverge is easy to predict. I am much more likely to tell a survey-giver that I will show up at the ER in the next pandemic than I am to actually be there. With that in mind, the problem of health-care providers playing hooky is certain to be worse than even this study suggests.

(And, for the record, if you are a student in my class and a bird flu pandemic hits, class is cancelled.)

If only bosses were as sympathetic as professors...

Anyway, it's a fun read. If you like kooky statistics, check it out. If not, hang on for next month's book, set in turn-of-the-century Turkey...

UPDATE: Be sure to check out Rahul's thoughts in the "comments" - he argues forcefully that the book fails to live up to its promises.

The Joys and Despairs of Reading

A few fun recent articles from the LA Times:

Nicholas Brisbanes unearths an attempt to make books available to the Iraqis living near Camp Anaconda (a.k.a. Mortaritaville). Some of the same former soldiers (now in their 80s) who brought libraries back to Germany after World War II are behind the 10,000 volumes that recently arrived in Iraq. Brisbanes arrived to write about it

on one condition. Would the Army help me visit Ur, the Sumerian city in lower Mesopotamia where the Old Testament tells us the prophet Abraham was born, where writing as we know it began to take shape about 5,000 years ago, where humanity's first literary text, the "Epic of Gilgamesh," may have been composed, and where some of the world's first libraries were located? Yes, came the answer.

Books may not be the top priority for either soldier or civilian in Iraq today, but at the same time, I am pleased to read that even in the military, there are people who recognize that reading is important, that books make a difference.

Since we enjoyed her so much last year, I'll be seeing Jane Smiley on a panel at next weekend's Festival of Books at UCLA. So it was a pleasant surprise when halfway through this review, I discovered that the reviewer was none other than Smiley.

Most readers would agree that there are plenty of books. After you've read all the great ones once or twice, you can begin on the semi-great ones or the mere fluff, and you can spend several lifetimes doing it. But in "The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Will Never Read," Stuart Kelly reminds us that the glass of books is half empty rather than brimming full. Not only are we missing the second part of Dickens' "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" but also the whole second volume of "The Brothers Karamazov," the entirety of Herman Melville's proposed collaboration with Nathaniel Hawthorne, titled "Agatha," and 73 of Aeschylus' 80 plays.
[snip]
Personally, after reading "The Book of Lost Books," I began to wonder: If I had to pick one or two of my own books to be preserved, which ones would they be? Would I claim the serious works, as Algernon Charles Swinburne did, and risk coming to seem, like him, overwrought and overwritten, even though the record of his life shows considerable traces of a satiric, irreverent and playful gift? Or would I preserve the funny efforts, knowing that humor is perhaps the most time-bound and ephemeral form of all? What if all the books were lost and only that screenplay was left, the one I wrote for television that was entirely rewritten by the producers before it aired under my name?

Smiley has excellent credentials for such a review - she spent years after 9/11 in a philosophical exploration of the novel while dealing with a disaster-related, writer's block existential crisis. (Or this was how I understood it from her words last year - I may be overstating the case.)

Anyway, yet another reminder of book and libraries, and the roles they play in our lives...

Frustrating "Travelers"

Despite newspapers and all the other claims on my time, I was able to finish a book today. Unsure what to tackle next, I went bookshelf hunting and came up with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Travelers, which explores the lives of four wandering souls who converge in India.

I found the book unsatisfying, and I'm not entirely sure that that wasn't the author's intent. It ends without resolution - okay for a short story, but not after the investment of reading a novel. Moreover, the characters are opaque, and don't seem to know themselves very well. You learn more about them from the way they see one another than from the chapters "about" them. How do you sympathize with a character that remains profoundly unreal? And yet, their circumstances - for the most part self-inflicted - provoke sympathy. This complexity drives the book, as do an array of relationships that consist of dominant and submissive parties. [I paused in typing for an extended reverie on whether I was judging sadomasochism and claiming it was incompatible with healthy loving relationships.] The games that characters play to exert control over others are uncomfortable and do not - it hardly needs to be said - make for pleasant reading.

So in the time it's taken to write this, I've decided that the dissatisfaction and discomfort were intentional. Jhabvala could be commenting on the paradoxes of modern (Travelers was published in 1973) India, as well as the lengths people will go to in the attempt to find - or keep from finding - themselves. A dark and unsettling read.

Busy, like a bee

It's been a little hectic around here in Libraryland, so there hasn't been much time for reading.

I did, however, come across this interesting review in the LA Times Book Review. California: America's High-Stakes Experiment, by Peter Schrag, offers the take "of a disappointed liberal, a believer n the Golden State's vaunted postwar promise who has watched the dream drift out of reach." Schrag addresses the paradoxes and "uncomfortable truths" about my unique home state.

The reviewer, Kevin Roderick, is an interesting character in his own right as the force behind LA Observed, which is currently heading my list of favorite LA blogs. (I am oddly fascinated by his ability to make the local news sound relevant.) Local readers should check it out.

Also, I have started a new book, so more posts are coming.