Book Review: Superfreakonomics

After writing the review for Freakonomics, I thought that I would take a stab at the authors' new book Superfreakonomics which is heralded by numerous critics as being better than the original. Better than the original? I couldn't remember a time when a sequel was better than the original, so I knew I had to read it. Well, sadly, these critics were misleading for (as is typical) the original still outshone the sequel.

In the first Freakonomics, Levitt and Dunbar received great acclaim for challenging previously accepted reasons for drop in crime rate and the importance of reading to one's child. They turned such correlations on their head for many laymen readers. However, Superfreakonomics does none of that. In many ways, it falls right into the patterns that Levitt and Dunbar worked so hard in their first book to refute. Their research does not seem fresh and their perspective is not different from the mainstream. Such issues as how TV has changed the lives of Indian women and eating less red meat cuts greenhouse gas emissions are old news. This would all be fine if the book was written five years ago when we knew less about greenhouse gases and global warming, but it was written last year and already tastes a bit stale. One chapter focused on what kind of cancer responds best to chemotherapy. Though this is interesting, I didn't believe it deserved an entire chapter. Instead, it seemed to be material for a short magazine article. Unfortunately, that's how much of this book came off. That the information was not revolutionary and did not make my mind explode the way that their former book had. In addition, this book has faced a great deal more controversy over some of the evidence used in the global warming chapter. Honestly, I didn't think there was anything that out of the ordinary that needed disputing. Overall, I thought that it had grown a bit hackneyed and the research had lost the edge that good ol' Freakonomics has. I guess the "rogue" economist is rouge no more.

-DLP