Freakonomics: The Movie

Jacob Sullum from the August/September 2011 issue

Like the book that inspired it, the 2010 movie Freakonomics, now available on DVD, is an intermittently entertaining hodgepodge unified by no theme except the interests of University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner.

“The closest thing to a worldview in Freakonomics,” Levitt suggests in the film, “is that incentives matter.” Well, they do in Alex Gibney’s compelling segment on cheating in sumo wrestling and in Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s treatment of an experiment aimed at bribing high school students to get better grades. Incentives are far less obvious in Morgan Spurlock’s amusing look at the meaning and impact of people’s given names and Eugene Jarecki’s bizarrely animated explication of Levitt’s theory that abortion accounts for much of the recent decline in crime.

Dubner brags that “we give people permission to challenge conventional wisdom.” They certainly challenge the conventional wisdom that a movie (or a book) should be coherent. —Jacob Sullum

Comments

Sean Mack|8.8.11 @ 7:38PM|#

I'm not sure if there is an off-the-shelf logical fallacy to describe this, but...that entire section on abortion and crime consists of debunking a series of very weak claims about the drop in crime, and then throwing abortion out as if it were the only possible explanation remaining at the close of a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Of course it isn't, and at no point do they offer anything more to support the idea than saying 1973 + 18 years = 1991. They don't even bother to mention, still less to prove, that live births actually declined after Roe vs. Wade. They just assume as much, and surge forward.

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|8.22.11 @ 12:50PM|#

Genocidal governments are effective at limiting civilian crime, or at least moving it further underground. Why stop at the unborn?

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