Let me try to explain a little about “Freakonomics,” one of this week’s new movies: When I was in college, a prerequisite for journalism students was a 7:30 a.m., three-day-a-week course called Economics 51, taught by a professor named Harry Gunnison Brown. Brown was a fan of an economist named Henry George, a man who believed that a tax on land was the only necessary tax. That’s what he taught. All I learned, which I promptly forgot, had to do with the single tax.
So I know almost nothing about economics, but I do know economists are strange, and when they’re trying to be funny, as in “Freakonomics,” they’re stranger still, and less funny.
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner wrote the book, looking at some economic anomalies and some funny/silly theories. So we have five segments, with Levitt and Dubner taklking and introducing each, talking about various theories. Some make sense to me; others do not. It’s like sitting in a boring lecture hall.
One segment debates names and what attributes they give off (racial stereotyping here), another discusses whether bribing a child makes him/her do better in school (paying for grades and does it bring results; sometimes yes, sometimes no). Alex Gibney looks at the sumo wrestling culture in Japan and its supposedly rigged results.
In all these little vignettes, I don’t see enough evidence to come to a conclusion. As usual, figures don’t lie, but liars figure, and we are left with a feeling that if these guys are trying to explain what is happening in the world today, no wonder we don’t understand and no wonder things are not getting any better.
Freakonomics opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
—Joe