Subtitled “A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything”, and having praising quotes from Malcolm Gladwell and the Wall Street Journal on both the front and the back cover, and positive reviews in all sorts of places, this book has certainly gotten a lot of attention. And the premise is an interesting one: an economist points his economist’s way of thinking at problems that aren’t traditionally considered as part of the field.

The economics covered are microeconomics, or how individuals make their decisions (as opposed to macroeconomics, which is concerned with entire nations and economies). Different chapters cover different aspects of economic thinking. One discusses cheating and the detection of it – among schoolteachers cheating their students to better results on standardised tests, and among sumo wrestlers. In economic terms, this is about incentives and statistical measurement. Another chapter covers information asymmetries and the power of having more information than outsiders – exemplified by real estate agents, and the story of how the Ku Klux Klan was more or less destroyed when its secret information was made public. Other chapters examine the economics of crack dealing, what childhood factors affect a child’s success as an adult, and the different distributions of baby names among high-income parents and low-income parents.

I really wanted to like this book. It applies an analytical approach to everyday problems, and that sort of thing always deserves encouragement. And economics is an interesting subject, so if someone can write an interesting and entertaining book about it, that’s a good thing.

But ultimately the book left me unsatisfied. First of all, it was really lightweight. Big type, sparse layout, 200 pages – barely a day’s worth of reading. And while I knew it was aimed at a non-specialist audience, I was expecting a weightier discussion than this. It appears to be aimed at a rather naive audience who doesn’t really question conventional wisdom, or anything much at all. A fair amount of space is dedicated to excerpts from the NY Times essay about Levitt that led to this book, and there is quite a lot of repetition. The book’s magazine-article origins shine through, I guess. Too much entertainment, stories and anecdotes; too little substance.

Related to this problem of light-weightedness (is that a word?) is the unfortunate fact that some of his claims don’t really hold up when you look at them more closely – he presents facts that support his thesis, but doesn’t look for alternative explanations or contradictory evidence. Dave Taylor goes through a bunch of these slips.

And then of course there’s his best-known chapter, about how the decline in crime in the US was due not to gun control, better policing, higher usage of prisons etc, but to the greater accessibility of abortions. That one appears to have been debunked (solid discussion at ISteve; see also articles in the Economist and Wall Street Journal.) The main methodological flaw is that they measured total arrests, not arrests per capita… oops.

On the whole, a relatively entertaining read, but not worth the money if you know anything about economics at all, and won’t leave any lasting memories.