[U.S.] Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner: _Freakonomics—A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything_, translated by Liu Xiangya, Guangdong Provincial Publishing Group, Guangdong Economic Press, March 2006, 28 yuan
I generally don’t read popular books, especially the flashy, business-and-management-type titles that seem to be everywhere in the “social sciences” section of Xinhua Bookstore. But recently I decided to take another stab at economics, so I first picked up the lightest thing I could find, partly to whet my appetite and partly to see what these bestselling business-and-management books are really like.
This book is billed as “the No. 1 business-and-management bestseller in the United States in 2005,” and it also says that “for many people, reading this book has already become a fashion,” so I chose it for a try. The result, as expected, was indeed nothing to write home about~
It is called “economics,” but in fact it is just using statistics to look at the world. Of course, since it is economics and not merely statistics, it also adds the crucial premise that people always “seek advantage and avoid harm” (or, more ambiguously, that “human nature is inherently evil”). The cover shows a wolf in sheep’s clothing—that is what this so-called “revealing the real world hidden beneath appearances” amounts to, I suppose.
Of course, some of the surprising things uncovered through statistical analysis are indeed rather interesting. But I’m afraid there are also quite a few problems with the interpretation of the results, since one must remember that the usefulness of statistics is limited. For example, the author mentions that in the United States, the chance of children dying from household swimming pools is far higher than the proportion of children dying from guns, and so the author says that a parent who, for the sake of a child’s safety, arranges for the child to play at a house with a swimming pool rather than at another house where there is a gun is ignorant. But who exactly is ignorant? Is it really learned wisdom to deny the common-sense notion that guns are more dangerous than swimming pools? But did the author consider that the reason swimming pools appear more dangerous than guns in statistical terms may itself be one of the factors behind this result? Precisely because parents always think guns are extremely dangerous, they take care everywhere to keep children as far away from them as possible. Imagine if people managed swimming pools with the same vigilance as guns, while treating the guns in their own homes with the same casualness with which they treat swimming pools—would the number of children injured by guns still be less than the number of children who drown in swimming pools? And according to this so-called “fundamentally transformed” “way of looking at the world,” the standard for how dangerous something is lies in statistics, rather than in the thing itself.
2007-10-29
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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