Telling critique from Umair Haque of the book du jour (or maybe even de la semaine). Let's aim higher, and deeper, than pop culture (even supposedly literate, New York Times-approved pop culture) allows.

re: economics, popular culture

Andy:

[O]ne of the fundamental problems with [economics] is this: “because it seeks to describe an ideal world, much of it has little relevance in terms of helping build a better one.” Take, for example, the famous observation in the first Freakonomics book that legalizing abortion led to a decrease in crime a generation later. What policy recommendations should we infer from this “relationship”? Should we strive to (ahem) minimize birth rates among the poor? Or should we shift to a Philip K Dickian precrime model, because we now “know” that children of poor mothers are likelier to be criminals? It’s a slippery slope, which leads ineluctably to criminalization or eugenics.

I enjoyed Freakonomics, as I enjoyed the fifty or so imitators that followed. Yet, they are to economics what Friends is to culture: pop. And ultimately, though Levitt’s academic work is stellar, the Freakonomics genre represents the trivialization of a great system of thought. Instead of improving that system of thought, it applies already questionable assumptions to what are socially the lowest-value uses.

Those assumptions are what demand reinvention — not broader application. Economics needs fundamental reinvention — not trivialization. That’s going to take a new era of geeking out, getting philosophical, and re-examining the basic assumptions on which econ is founded. Freaking out is fun, but getting constructive is where the future of economics lies.