Super Freakonomics

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, “Super Freakonomics (Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance), Harper Collins, 2009, 256 Pages

In 2005 these same two authors published a very successful book, Freakonomics. I posted my notes on that book in February 2009. Freakonomics rightly maintained and documented that people do respond to incentives and many of those incentives have serious unintended consequences. I believe an unintendended consequence of their original financial success is this current book. Super Freakonomics treats too many important subjects in a flippant manner. For instance, they appear to be defending drunk driving as better than drunk walking and appear to have little regard for serious climate scientists. Anyway, the book is entertaining and is thought provoking—it is just not a serious book.

My Notes:
Pg. 20: Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as 1 million European women, most of them poor and many of them widowed, were executed for witchcraft, taking the blame for bad weather that killed crops.

Pg. 44: In 1960, about 40 percent of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8 percent in the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom. Between 1967 and 1980, U.S. test scores fell by about 1.25 grade-level equivalents. (Women now have many more avenues of employment than nursing, secretary, and teaching).

Pg. 63: Crime is primarily driven by personal gain, whereas terrorism is fundamentally a political act. The kind of person most likely to become a terrorist is similar to the kind of person most likely to vote. Think of terrorism as civic passion on steroids. (Remember all 911 terrorist had middle class backgrounds).

Pg. 84: Chemotherapy has no discernible effect on multiple myeloma, soft-tissue sarcoma, melanoma of the skin, and cancers of the pancreas, uterus, prostate, and kidney. Lung cancer kills more than 150,000 people a year in the U.S. A typical chemotherapy regime for non0small-cell lung cancer costs more than $40,000 but helps extend a patient’s life by an average of just two months.

Pg. 128: The Kitty Genovese 1964 New York killing in which 38 witnesses looked-on and did nothing is not true. The witnesses who saw anything at all was 6 not 38. There were two attacks, not three and the 2nd was in a darkened vestibule out-of-sight of anyone. Someone had even called the police but the incident seemed more like a domestic dispute going on than a murder, so the response was slow.

Pg. 158: From the mid-1960s until the mid-1990s, hurricane activity was depressed by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a long-recurring climate cycle of sixty to eighty years during which the Atlantic Ocean gradually cools and then warms up again. The temperature change is not drastic, just a couple of degrees. But it is enough to discourage hurricanes during the cool years and, as we have seen recently, empower them during the warm years. In the space of just two recent years, 2004 and 2005, six hurricanes, including the killer Katrina, did a combined $153 billion in damages to the southeastern U.S.

Pg. 185: Rising sea levels are not being driven primarily by glaciers melting. It is driven mostly by water-warming—literally, the thermal expansion of ocean water as it warms up. Sea levels are rising and have been for roughly twelve thousand years, since the end of the last ice age. The oceans are about 425 feet higher today, but the bulk of that rise occurred in the first thousand years. In the past century, the seas have risen less than eight inches.