In with a bang, out with a whimper

So yeah, the back half of Freakonomics really didn’t land with me at all. The last two chapters, especially. The sumo and real estate pieces flowed with a sense of confidence, and the bit about using insider information as a means to dispel the KKK was fascinating. The student who spent so much time with the gang in Chicago . . . just incredible. But after that things started to fall off the rails.

The thing that really cautioned me as I moved through the text was the increasing number of tables being put on offer. To me those are a signifier that an author can't make their argument cogently and confidently in prose, and thus rely on numbers to force the reader to do their work on their behlaf or are trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Lazy or dishonest is not a good look. If readers need or want to see the raw numbers, that’s what an appendix is for. But in the body, that’s you—author—distilling and interpreting that information. And it’s always better to call out where things are a little thin.

In any case the more those tables came into the play, especially when coupled with gradiose statements about really complicated sociocultural phenomenona—well my confidence in what was being suggested and the methods they were employing took a serious hit. I finished. I enjoyed parts of it, those parts that were really dialed, but the rest felt like pure incoherent fluff.

And that is generous compared to the If Books Could Kill podcast that covererd it. I shared that episode with the brother who suggested the read to me, and he remarked afterward, “Is there anything that’s actually true in this world? I think not. Everything is a structure built around what we want to believe.”

Yeah, escaping that dynamic is no easy feat, and these authors seemed to actively work the other way. A learning opportunity here, but certainly not the ones that was being proferred.