Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?
Andrew Gelman, Kaiser Fung,
American Scientist,
Dec 20, 2011
A lot of what was published in Freakanomics turned out to be wrong because, as summarized by Alexander Russo: "the authors of Freakonomics have been presenting research -- in part because they seem to rely on trusted colleagues and friends without 'adequate vetting of research.'" On the one hand, popularizers make research more accessible to the public. On the other hand, when they do it incorrectly, it all goes wrong. "In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt’s friends and colleagues. This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative."
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