[PandaRider]

What I wanted (from Freakonomics) was to peer through "the hidden side of everything"... What I needed was the serenity to accept that causality is too damn hard.

I appreciated the attempts by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner to communicate with layman non-economists like me. I think The Economist article was, as always, too harsh and nitpicky. I think Freakonomics holds a special place in the "intellectual" and "rationalists" community. I cannot verify the flaws in techniques and conclusion as stated in this article but I would still recommend reading Freakonomics first over the dry economics textbooks or MIT OCW courseware.

[skybrian]

I think that, much like with Thinking, Fast and Slow, anyone recommending it needs to add a caveat that some of the results didn't hold up.

Ideally, there were would be revised editions with mistakes corrected.

[seewhydee]

The trouble with doing that for Freakonomics is that the work on abortions reducing crime, which has been proven wrong, is the first chapter and the centerpiece of the book. It's the thing that they use to exemplify the "freakonomics" approach in the rest of the book.

[skybrian]

Yeah, it would be a major revision.

[snapplebobapple]

do you have links to the papers disproving that? That result is kind of the basis for the moral argument for allowing abortion for consensual fetuses for me. Without that result the cost/benefit looks terrible because the deflationary death spiral of the below replacement birthrate it helps cause is really, really bad.

[endominus]

Per Wikipedia [0], the Freakonomics analysis holds up. Levitt addressed the disagreement on a podcast as well [1].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...

[1]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...