The Boy Who Could Change the World (32 page)

Freakonomics

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001688

April 23, 2005

Age 18

I happen to be taking a class on sociological methods. The other day we had a section where the TA showed us how to use SPSS, a GUI statistical analysis program. Usually such computer demos are pretty boring—pull down this menu here, click this button here, and so on—but this demo was magical: it used real data.

The TA downloaded a listing of venture capitalists from the state of California. Then he downloaded the records of political campaign contributions from the Federal Election Commission. He merged the two files and calculated an index of party loyalty—how likely each person was to donate to the Democrats or Republicans. Then he graphed it. He found an anomaly in the data and went back and investigated it.

The whole performance was oddly enthralling, and I went up to ask him questions afterwards. “So you're interested in statistics?” he asked me, and I said yes, and began to think about why. I've decided it's because I like truth. If you like finding out the truth—which is often surprising—the best technique to use is science. And if you want to do serious science, sooner or later you'll probably need statistics.

In the field of surprising statistics, one name comes up frequently: Steven D. Levitt. And—surprise, surprise—Levitt has a new book out,
Freakonomics
. (As an aside, Levitt must have a great publicist, because the book has been receiving tons of hype. It's a good book, but not as good as the hype would make it seem.
^*
*
Nonetheless, I will put this
aside in reviewing it.) The book consists of a popularization of the papers of Levitt and other interesting economists.

As a result, the book doesn't have much of a theme but covers a bunch of bizarre topics: how school teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat, how bagel eaters don't, how real estate agents and surgeons don't have your best interests at heart, how to defeat the Ku Klux Klan, how
The Weakest Link
contestants demonstrate racism, how online daters lie, how drug dealing works like McDonald's, how abortion overthrows governments and fights crime, how to be a good parent, and what you can learn from children's names.

Despite his unusual interests and open mind, Levitt remains an economist and has the economist's typical right-wing assumptions: most notably, a strong commitment to incentives and an unquestioning faith in societal order. For the former, it makes fun of criminologists by insisting the evidence that punishment deters criminals is “very strong,” but fails to provide a single citation (almost everything else in the book, even well-known facts, is scrupulously cited). For the latter, they simply assume that IQ is an accurate and inherited measure of intelligence, despite a rather glaring lack of evidence for this.

Furthermore, in a section that uses parental interviews to pick out which parenting techniques are most effective, the authors almost entirely ignore the possibility that parents are lying—an omission they don't make elsewhere. For example, they find no correlation between saying that you read to your children and your children
doing well in school. From this they conclude that reading doesn't matter; a far more likely explanation seems to be that nearly all parents
claim
they read to their children. (Thanks to Brad Delong
for this criticism
.)

But it's still a fun and interesting book. However, I believe its most important point is one that's not stated explicitly: that through the proper investigation of the numbers we can better understand our world.

The Immorality of Freakonomics

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/immoralfreaksDate
June 17, 2005

Age 18

As the hype around the book
Freakonomics
reaches absurd proportions (now an “international bestseller,” the authors have been signed for a monthly column in the
New York Times Magazine
), I think it's time to discuss some of the downsides that I mostly left out of my main review. The most important of which is that economist Stephen Levitt simply does not appear to care—or even notice—if his work involves doing evil things.

The 1960s, as is well-known, had a major civilizing effect on all areas of American life. Less well-known, however, was the immediate pushback from the powerful centers of society. The process involved a great number of things, notably the network of right-wing think tanks I've written about elsewhere, but in the field of education it led to a crackdown on “those institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young,” as a contemporary report (The
Crisis of Democracy
) put it.

The indoctrination centers (notably schools) weren't doing their job properly and so a back-to-basics approach with more rote memorization of meaningless facts and less critical thinking and intellectual development was needed. This was mainly done under the guise of “accountability,” for both students and teachers. Standardized tests, you see, would see how well students had memorized certain pointless facts and students would not be allowed to deviate from their assigned numbers. Teachers too would have their jobs depend on the test scores their students got. Teachers who decided to buck the system and actually have their students learn something worthwhile would get demoted or even fired.

Not surprisingly, as always happens when you make people's lives depend on an artificial test, teachers began cheating. And it is here that Professor Levitt enters the story. He excitedly signed up with the Chicago Public School system to try to build a system that would catch cheating teachers. Levitt and his co-author write excitedly about this system and the clever patterns it discovers in the data, but mostly ignore the question of whether helping to get these teachers fired is a good idea. Apparently even rogue economists jump when the government asks them to.

Levitt has a few arguments—teachers were setting students up to fail in the higher grade they would be advanced to—but these are tacked on as afterthoughts. Levitt never stops to ask whether contributing to the indoctrination of the young or getting teachers fired might not be an acceptable area of work, despite being an economist, he never weighs any benefits or even considers the costs.

Levitt, by all appearances, was not, like some of his colleagues, a self-conscious participant in this regressive game. He was just a rube who got taken in. But surely preventing others from the same fate would be a more valuable contribution.

In Offense of Classical Music

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/classicalmusic

June 20, 2006

Age 19

I recently had to sit through a performance of Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier
at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (it was the conductor's farewell concert). At first it was simply boring, but as I listened more carefully, it grew increasingly painful, until it became excruciatingly so. I literally began tearing my hair out and trying to cut my skin with my nails (there were large red marks when the performance was finally over). The pianist, I was certain, kept flubbing the notes and getting the timing off. But few around me seemed to agree. “Well, he certainly plays it differently from Gould,” was the most they could say.

The audience, like that of private libraries and the Fox News Channel, was decidedly old. I don't recall seeing
anyone
who looked younger than thirty. And, aside from thoughts of this whole orchestras-playing-classical-music thing dying out, it made me wonder: what's so great about classical music?

Ask the old folks there and they'll tell you that nothing really compares. Listen to the stuff on the radio today and it's all simply repetitive melodies with stupid lyrics. And the thing is, they're right: the stuff on the radio does suck for the most part. But that's not really a fair comparison.

When I listen to good modern music, it takes my heart in its hands and plays with it as it pleases—makes me soar, makes me sad, excited, and mad. But when I listen to classical music, at most it simply occupies my brain for a while. Is this simply a flaw in my perception or has music really improved?

I think it's possible to argue that music is actually getting better. As humans, we clearly share a number of genetically encoded similarities, perhaps with some variation. For example, we almost all have two eyes, although in different shapes, sizes, and colors. Imagine that we are similarly endowed with some shared sense of musical appreciation (or, put another way, emotional susceptibility). We all fall for the same musical things, again with some variation.

If this is the case (and while I can't really prove it, it seems at least plausible to me that it is), then there would indeed be objective standards for measuring music: better music would be more appreciated by the “average person” or the majority of people or some such. And if there are objective standards for measuring music, then music can get better.

And, if we again imagine that what's appreciated in music isn't simply random, that it involves certain traits (which seems pretty clear, although again hard to prove), then not only can music get better, but it probably
will
. Musicians will listen to old music, the majority of them will enjoy the good songs of the past, and they'll try to build upon and improve that good material, following its patterns, creating even better music. And the next generation will do the same, from a further along starting point.

Does this prove that the latest Aimee Mann album (
The Forgotten Arm
) is the best work of music yet to be created by humans? Of course not. But it does mean it's at least
possible
, that I'm not completely crazy for thinking so.