Freakonomist Levitt -- a One Dimensional Idiot

The recovered history of Steven D. Levitt, courtecy of SHAME project (shame the hacks who abuse media ethics):

• While a PhD student at MIT, Levitt published a counter-intuitive masterpiece whitewashing corruption in politics by "proving" that corporate campaign donations do not influence election outcomes. Levitt argued that “campaign money has about one-tenth the impact as was commonly accepted,” according to a 2003 New York Times Magazine profile—a stance that helped land him a tenured job at the University of Chicago.
• At the University of Chicago, Levitt's mentor was Gary Becker, another of the “Chicago Boys” who supported Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Gary Becker developed the theory of “human capital” which treats human labor as just another resource to extract profit from. Levitt's mentor also proposed the creation of a deregulated human-organ commodities exchange, arguing that it would actually help the poor. Levitt said of Becker, "More than any other economist, he has been my inspiration and role model."
• In 1999, Levitt co-authored a paper arguing that an increase in abortion rates for black women in the 1970s was the reason for falling crime rates two decades later. "Basically, we had aborted the generation of criminals who would have been active in the 1990s," he told Esquire magazine. His research led to accusations of racial eugenics, according to the New York Times. The study has been debunked and exposed in numerous academic studies over the years—one study by Federal Reserve economists proved Levitt used badly flawed data, forcing Levitt to apologize for the "embarrassing" errors. Nevertheless, Levitt stuck to his original conclusion linking race and crime: fewer African-American children correlates to a drop in crime.
• In 1999, Levitt presented a paper for privatizing prison labor at a symposium hosted by a private prison consulting firm, arguing: “I would privatize prison industry. As long as the government is in charge of prison industries, it will be difficult if not impossible to avoid decisions being made with political rather than economic justifications.” Thirteen years later, Levitt’s privatized-prison-labor dream is a reality: Some 1 million state inmates are slaving away for wages averaging between $0.93 and $4.73 a day. African-Americans make up over 40% of the U.S. prison population.
• In 1995, Levitt published a paper which "proved" that packing prisoners into increasingly-overcrowded prison cells translates into a net $15,000 positive effect on society per overcrowded cell inmate.
• Levitt has played a role in busting teachers' unions by devising a method that claims to catch teachers cheating on standardized test results. Levitt took personal credit for firing at least a dozen teachers he claims to have “caught,” gloating in his book Freakonomics that, as a result of his method, “Chicago Public School system began to fire its cheating teachers. The evidence was only strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned.”
• Levitt is a paid corporate speaker regularly hired by investment banks, financial services companies, venture capital firms as well as various anti-labor "human resource" outfits. One corporate union-busting association, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), gushed over Levitt's performance: "We received numerous compliments about your remarks from our attendees, well over 500 participants . . . We applaud the valuable work that you are doing." Recently, SHRM opposed legislation that would have made it easier for workers to join union and lobbied to defeat a law that would have protected women against gender-based wage discrimination.
• Levitt's second book, Superfreakonomics, contained a section that "debunked" climate-change science, asserting that CO2 does not cause global warming. One of the scientists cited and used to back up Levitt's climate-change denialism, Jeffrey Severinghaus, accused Levitt of "flat-out misrepresentation" of his work, telling the Boston Globe, “Asserting that CO2 doesn’t cause warming at this point is tantamount to saying cigarette smoking doesn’t cause cancer. It’s just laughable.” Levitt responded with a bizarre non-retraction: "The sentence may be poorly written, but I do not think it is factually inaccurate.”
• In 2011, Levitt published a paper proving that poker is a game of "skill" and not "luck," and used the Freakonomics website to advocate for legalized online gambling. The Chicago Tribune noted that Levitt's support for the industry coincided with a federal crackdown on online gambling companies for fraud and money laundering, noting that Levitt's "research could not be more timely." Levitt did not disclose his financial relationship with the online gambling industry, which included working to develop a set of tools to catch cheaters for an online poker company in 2007.
• Levitt came out in support of the hugely unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), RIAA-backed legislation that would have given U.S. law enforcement unprecedented power to shut down and censor websites without due process. The reason Levitt supported SOPA? Because he believes one of the few things that government should do is "protect property rights."

NEWS CONTENTS

• 190424 : Steven D. Levitt - S.H.A.M.E. Profile ( Steven D. Levitt - S.H.A.M.E. Profile, )
• 190424 : Chicken Little ( Chicken Little, )

Old News ;-)

Steven D. Levitt - S.H.A.M.E. Profile

Named one of Time magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World," Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, is generally assumed to be a harmless, quirky pop economist for trivia nerds. However, Levitt has a history of attacking teachers' unions, advocating for the privatization of prison labor, defending online gambling and occasionally crossing over the fringe-right line by promoting climate change denialism and, some have argued, racial eugenics. A dyed-in-the-wool Milton Friedman neoliberal from the same "Chicago Boys" network that brought you the "shock doctrine," Levitt's idea of economics Utopia is a world in which "the market" solves all our problems and government is restricted to protecting property rights.

Chicken Little

Paul Krugman links to an excellent take-down by Elizabeth Kolbert of the notorious climate change chapter in Superfreakonomics.

what's most troubling about "SuperFreakonomics" isn't the authors' many blunders; it's the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible-have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?-their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain.

Kolbert's closing words are, however, a little unfair.

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that "SuperFreakonomics" takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Not unfair to Levitt and Dubner, mind you, but to science fiction. After all, two science fiction authors, Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, had their number down way back in 1953 with The Space Merchants (Pohl, amazingly, is still active and alive).

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way "plundering" our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

musical mountaineer 11.11.09 at 12:45 am

One other thing from that article caught my eye:

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science-or, for that matter, in science of any kind.

Mitchell Freedman:

Hail to "The Space Merchants"! That book should replace Orwell's "1984" as "TSM" is about the United States, and "us." It is not a book about "them" and "Oh, are THEY bad!"

Pohl, an ex-Red from the 1930s, had a fairly unique perspective about the absurdities of the Cold War, and far more faith in American capitalism to prevail over communism than the Red Scare mongers. That is a true irony. The book is clever, funny and above all profound in anticipating a corporatized culture.

Bravo for mention that wonderful book.

bad Jim:

There's nothing like a global warming post to bring out people anxious to demonstrate the Dunning–Kruger effect, particularly in the comments to Krugman's piece.

If we are in fact at the point of peak oil production, as some are now alleging, it will be interesting to see how the global warming dialogue changes.

Phillip Hallam-Baker

I find the geo-engineering approach as somehow an alternative to slowing carbon emissions to be bizarre. If we were going to attempt geo-engineering at any level, the first essential foundation would be vastly better models of the effect on the atmosphere. After all we have empirical evidence to check our CO2 models against, it took us thirty years to get where we are today. How do we predict what happens when SO2 is being spewed out?

Its not just the global warming you have to get right, you have to make sure that you do not cause another environmental catastrophe that you hadn't expected.

There is a reason we no longer favor using introduction of non native species to control some pest. Too many histories of habitats destroyed introduced species by well meaning types who trusted that no bad results could come of good intentions.

It really isn't that difficult to meet the C02 targets, wind power is capital intensive but dirt cheap to run. We currently have an economy that has huge amounts of unoccupied capital. If worst comes to worst they can always shut down on fifth of the Pentagon and the redirect the resources to renewable power. How many wind, solar power stations can you build for $150 billion/year? More than enough I suspect.

Why is the idea of returning the military budget to the same level it had before the neocon crazies took over somehow more ludicrous than the idea of constructing 18 mile hoses?

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