Authors Purpose
The
author’s purpose in Freakonomics:
A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven
Levitt and Stephen Dubner is to-yes-explore the hidden side of everything, and
to dig below what is available at the surface. This purpose is stated
clearly in the introduction, “What this book is about is stripping a layer or
two from the surface of modern life and seeing what is happening underneath”
(Levitt and Dubner 12). This purpose is achieved through the analysis of
conventional wisdom which is used extensively throughout the book.
“Conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn’t keep soaring in the 1990’s,
money alone doesn’t win elections, and-surprise-drinking eight glasses of water
each day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health” (Levitt
and Dubner 13). Conventional
wisdom is defined as what people generally believe to be true. The authors of this book analyze conventional
wisdom or what is stated at the surface to determine its validity. By doing this, they achieve their purpose of
determining whether conventional wisdom is true or false. They are able to determine the validity of
conventional wisdom by digging below the surface. Every chapter in the book
provides a look at different cases of conventional wisdom in the world, and
then attempts to look beyond the conventional wisdom at what is hidden beneath.
One such attempt to analyze conventional wisdom was when Levitt and Dubner
looked at TV's affect on test scores. Conventional wisdom says that watching
hours and hours of TV has a negative effect on a child's brain, and therefore
their learning, which lowers test scores. However, Levitt and Dubner looked
past the conventional wisdom and found in analyzing a study by the
ECLS that there is “no correlation between a child’s test scores
and the amount of television he watches” (Levitt and Dubner 172). Another commonly
held presumption is that pools are safer than guns in reference to the danger
presented to a child under the age of ten, but Levitt and
Dubner's research reveals “the likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000)
versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close” (Levitt and Dubner
150). Finally, the authors looked at crime in the 1990's. "It (crime) had
been rising relentlessly...And things were about to get even worse. Much worse.
All the experts were saying so" (Levitt and Dubner 3). But, going against
all theories, "instead of going up and up and up, crime began to
fall...The magnitude of the reversal was astounding...By 2000 the overall
murder rate had dropped to its lowest in 3 years" (Levitt and Dubner
4). Many of the theories for the drop were (and still are) revolved around new
police technology and tactics. But, Levitt and Dubner found "There
was a different factor, meanwhile that had greatly contributed to the massive
crime drop of the 1990's" (Levitt and Dubner 5). This factor was abortion
that had been legalized 20 years earlier in the Roe
v. Wade case. "Decades of studies have shown that a child born
into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to
become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in
the wake of Roe v. Wade-poor, unmarried, and
teenage mothers...whose children, if born, would have been much more likely
than average to become criminals" (Levitt and Dubner 6). Yes, abortion is
touchy, but Levitt and Wade's position that abortion affected crime
demonstrates their purpose of digging below answers on the surface
(conventional wisdom), for it is a position few, if any, have taken. The
authors of Freakonomics support their purpose
of digging below what is on the surface by citing numerous examples of
conventional wisdom proven false or only partly true. Levitt and Dubner’s
stance on many common beliefs in our society frequently go against the grain of
popular support. Digging below the
surface, their research often exposes things in such a way that the evidence
for conventional wisdom breaks down. In the words of the authors, “…the aim of
this book is to explore the hidden side of everything” (Levitt and Dubner 14).