What happens when the importance of being contrarian overtakes the necessity of making sense? It turns people into super freaks, that’s what. The economist-journalist combo of Steven & Stephen hit pay dirt with their first book, Freakonomics. It was a trivial, entertaining book that stuck to trivial entertaining topics, such as how parents name their kids and why school teachers cheat. It was safely provocative in a way that guaranteed that it will be a good conversation-starter.
In Superfreakonomics, the brand extension of the inaugural offering, the authors foray into territory that’s way out of their league, and it shows. The most astonishing cascade of rubbish in the book occurs in their writing on climate change, which is at places so cringe-inducing it makes you feel sorry for the authors.
In a chapter titled, ‘What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?’, they compare “fear of climate change” to a religion. “Like all the best religions,” they write, “fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods.” Huh? And there’s worse to follow: “While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.” Where? In Superfreakoland?
Of course, the jamboree at Copenhagen that got over last week was just a summit of 45,000 delusional religious fanatics who have nothing better to do than to assemble in Denmark to satisfy their collective need for ‘guilt’ and ‘self-disgust’.
Not content with blundering about in one global issue they are clueless about, they try fingering another big one: terrorism. Even a cursory look at the history of terrorist enterprises in the past century reveals their utter ineffectiveness as per the political goals announced by the terrorists themselves. If anything, terrorism only succeeds in turning the average citizen against its ‘cause’ — whatever it may be — by subjecting everyone to increasing hardship and repression. Yet the authors assert that “terrorism is devilishly efficient”. They write, “The beauty of terrorism — if you’re a terrorist — is that you can succeed even by failing.” They don’t care to explain how they sourced information on terrorists’ understanding of beauty, success and failure. Did they carry out a survey among terrorists?
While Freakonomics was driven by solid data on unusual subjects, this book is driven by a raging need to be counter-intuitive for its own sake, probably because it’ll make for an intriguing tagline on the cover, such as “global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance.”
Global cooling was never an issue, notwithstanding the solitary Newsweek article the authors quote and the publication would rather forget; they totally misread the social history of prostitution; and as for suicide bombers, their solution is to mine banking data (of millions of customers) to zero in on “suspicious individuals” through an “algorithm”.
This “algorithm”, which combines demographic profiling (jargon for racial profiling) and behaviour metrics (act normal, or we’ll shoot you!) with a mysterious “Variable X” (it is never explained and is supposed to be taken on faith) will, we’re told, generate a small group of “highly suspicious individuals.” Now, what will then befall these “suspicious individuals” is, of course, totally irrelevant. This is the level of thinking of two of the purportedly finest, best-sellingest minds on the planet.
Buy this book, and read it — read it no matter what. It is the best illustration of a simple truth: if you are extraordinarily good in one field (say, economics or journalism), it is no guarantee that you won’t make a fool of yourself when you venture into domains where you have no training or expertise.
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