The Contrarian Mode and Freakonomics Self-Destruction

I've hesitated to recommend Freakonomics or speak about it to anyone. When I covered economics back in the late aughts I caught the edge of the blog-based economists' and scientists' dispute and arguments over the inaccuracies in the 2nd Freakonomics book and the authors' issues with framing and sourcing. Enough to think about the series as untrustworthy but not enough to explain why. Unlearning Economics fixes this issue with a deep dive into the problems of the Freakonomics approach and general philosophy.

This video revisits those blog discussions in-depth. The view back on intentional contrarianism in the works is especially upsetting in light of the modern political situation in which similar contrarianism has become such a common mode that its cuteness, if it could ever claimed to have such a property, has long faded.

These days the Freakonomics contrarianism--which includes some rather nasty points on race, sex work, and climate change--is so much the norm that it is basically how our country is being run. The "economic way of thinking" that Cahal Moran identifies is basically Trump policy these days: an attempt to reduce everything to simple math, a preference for punishments over incentives, and an incurious approach to the work of experts in the field. The Freakonomics guys may not be alt-right or MAGA, but they are clearly involved in building the intellectual and commercial-media underpinnings for what would emerge there.

In his conclusion Moran notes that the biggest problems in Freakonomics come from a 'smarter-than-thou' nerd culture mindset that puts the authors in the same category of many tech CEOs, and leaves them unwilling to interrogate their own biases or lack of knowledge. Freakonomics comes then from the zone of 'I'm smart therefore I'm right', a mindset that has spun off too many terrible people lately.

Our modern, crisis-filled age should be the death of cutesy pop economics books. After all, we need to spend our time on the works that really help us through this moment.