Superfreakonomics

I had been wanting to write about this book for quite sometime now, given that I had read it almost a year ago. I had read Freakonomics, the first book by the authors Dubner and Levitt and loved it so much that I blindly ordered a copy of the sequel without even bothering to read the reviews. Perhaps it wasn’t such a wise decision after all.

The basic premise that the authors worked on in the original Freakonomics is “People respond to incentives”; whether it is a suicide bomber, a real estate agent, a drug dealer, a sumo wrestler or a street prostitute. Superfreakonomics was intended as a sequel with the same premise, based on which, the authors have aggregated a number of unrelated topics which are in reality no more than anecdotes, short stories if you will. Somewhere along the entire book, I never got the impression that “People respond to incentives”. Either the authors have completely digressed from the basic premise that they claim to be a unifying theme between both the books, or I have somehow failed to read between the lines.

The very first chapter that gives a detailed ‘analysis’ of the economics of prostitution, is not only quite crude and obnoxious, in my view, but also really tells us nothing significant or interesting. It looks as though the authors have deliberately thrust the chapter right in the beginning of the book in order to engage the reader enough so that he/she will end up reading the rest of the book; this of course is the popular trend these days and it works!

Then there is this other chapter that talks about how the brouhaha over global warming is uncalled for, with only a 5% probability of an actual catastrophe happening, and this number itself is uncertain as well. The authors further say that the issue of global warming has become a ‘religion’ where the true believers are going all out to reduce carbon emissions while the agnostics claim that human activity contributes just 2% of global CO2 emissions, the rest coming from natural processes like plant decay. Obviously, this kind of an assertion had to incur the wrath of the scientist community. A few other smaller stories are thrown in such as about how ‘global cooling’ and not ‘global warming’ was the major issue in the 1970s, and the impact of Mount Pinatubo’s volcanic eruption on the world climate.

Okay, fine. Now while I am still trying to figure out what on earth any of the above stories have to do with economics or have any meaningful data backing them, the authors shift gears. Enter “Intellectual Ventures (IV)” and its founder Mr. Nathan Myhrvold. The rest of the chapter (which is around 60-70%) is all about glorifying the ingenuity of Mr. Myhrvold and how he has found the ‘magical’ solution to the global warming problem at a very low cost – Inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere using a really high hose. The Sulfur dioxide, combined with the water vapor in the atmosphere, has the property of reflecting sunlight back into space. Voila! An alternative solution suggested by IV is to form man-made clouds that would induce a cooling effect in the atmosphere. And how is this done? Use a fleet of boats with underwater turbines to kick up a steady stream of water spray into the air, several yards above the ocean’s surface. Sounds simple enough?

And not just global warming, IV seems to have a solution to every other global problem. For e.g, a simple solution to avert hurricanes in future is to continually keep flushing out the warm surface water of oceans to the bottom, so that the colder water comes to the surface; and this can be done by using huge floating cylinders in the ocean!

The whole chapter was nothing more than a long winding epic story, phew!

Now that was about global warming. There was this other chapter on why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. This topic particularly caught my attention, as the chapter summary hinted at something like “How to catch a terrorist?” which made me quite curious. And instead what do I get? I get to know about some guy called Ian Horsley (“name changed for security reasons”) who mined a lot of data on the terrorists, and created an algorithm that would identify a terrorist with 99% accuracy. And what more, the most potent metric that truly made the algorithm work was “Variable X”, that cannot be disclosed “in the interest of national security”. What a bummer this was!

I do not want to sound overtly critical; the book was definitely engaging to a good extent and does provide good entertainment value. There are also several interesting facts and theories that I learnt from the book. And yeah, the epilogue section on the experiments with monkeys was quite hilarious. But still, on the whole, the book turned out to be far below my expectations and was simply not up to the high standards set by Freakonomics. several claims were either not so believable or were incomplete, and not so much backed by data while some were plain irresponsible. One can read it purely for the entertainment it provides, and not look for applications of economic heories in day-to-day life, unlike Freakonomics which stuck to its theme pretty much.