There's been a whole lot of controversy about this follow-up to the original Freakonomics, largely because of two words in the subtitle that got attention: "global cooling". Along with the referred chapter on climate science, Levitt and Dubner have been assaulted with charges that they ignore the true state of the science, starting with the cries from the 1970s that the Earth was cooling. The shrill tone of the opposition was enough that Amazon stopped the ability to do text searches from their website (though I don't know what party was responsible for that.)
And all I can say to Levitt and Dubner is: you lucky bastards.
I'm afraid to say that the Steph/vens' new product would have been a victim of their previous success, as the market has been flooded by imitators in the past 5 years (just search Amazon). Combine this with a classic case of "sophomore slump" regression to the mean -- when a very entertaining book hits the jackpot and its title enters the zeitgeist, how could its successor top it on its merits alone?
This book is as exceptionally well written as the original, mainly in that the storytelling is as compelling as ever. But even as the authors admit that their overriding theme "people respond to incentives" leads directly into "beware unintended consequences", their own speculation on issues is rife with unaddressed consequences. As much as I think that geoengineering is an issue we should consider to mitigate the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, I come away feeling that we could be doing a lot better thinking of those unintended consequences.
I found their attitude toward skepticism in their first book to be much healthier, in particular with their controversial suggestion that Roe v. Wade was a contributing factor in lowering the violent crime rate, because they were advancing it as a hypothesis while still addressing the fact that an 18-year gap between cause and effect is big enough to cause a lot of problems with verifying it. They do not seem to show the same perspecuity when considering the smokestacks-to-the-sky or Salter Sink concepts and the dangers that could lie 25 years down the road because we didn't brainstorm hard enough.
In the end, a book that matches up with the original only in its writing style is probably going to outsell the first one because of a public relations media storm, and I can't help but think that some editor at William Morrow/HarperCollins is laughing, and enjoying a healthy bonus, for suggesting that "global cooling" might be prominently featured in the subtitle.
And all I can say to Levitt and Dubner is: you lucky bastards.
I'm afraid to say that the Steph/vens' new product would have been a victim of their previous success, as the market has been flooded by imitators in the past 5 years (just search Amazon). Combine this with a classic case of "sophomore slump" regression to the mean -- when a very entertaining book hits the jackpot and its title enters the zeitgeist, how could its successor top it on its merits alone?
This book is as exceptionally well written as the original, mainly in that the storytelling is as compelling as ever. But even as the authors admit that their overriding theme "people respond to incentives" leads directly into "beware unintended consequences", their own speculation on issues is rife with unaddressed consequences. As much as I think that geoengineering is an issue we should consider to mitigate the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, I come away feeling that we could be doing a lot better thinking of those unintended consequences.
I found their attitude toward skepticism in their first book to be much healthier, in particular with their controversial suggestion that Roe v. Wade was a contributing factor in lowering the violent crime rate, because they were advancing it as a hypothesis while still addressing the fact that an 18-year gap between cause and effect is big enough to cause a lot of problems with verifying it. They do not seem to show the same perspecuity when considering the smokestacks-to-the-sky or Salter Sink concepts and the dangers that could lie 25 years down the road because we didn't brainstorm hard enough.
In the end, a book that matches up with the original only in its writing style is probably going to outsell the first one because of a public relations media storm, and I can't help but think that some editor at William Morrow/HarperCollins is laughing, and enjoying a healthy bonus, for suggesting that "global cooling" might be prominently featured in the subtitle.