Getting freaky with SuperFreakonomics

Note - I will not actually be having sex with a book. Sorry for the misleading title.

However, I will say that I highly enjoyed the latest book from Steve Dubner and Steve Levitt, SuperFreakonomics, which is a "super" follow-up to their earlier work. I am coincidentally selling the book on eBay as we speak. Don't take my selling of it as a negative endorsement though - It's simply a financial motive on my part, since the wait was too long to get it from the library, and it did cost me $20, and I want to recoup some of that. My only regret with the book is that it is barely more than 200 pages.

Those 200 pages sure are splendid though. For those unfamiliar with the premise, the authors - a journalist and an economist respectively - take a look at several issues that seemingly aren't connected, but secretly are. For example, the introduction of the television to parts of rural India has caused violence against women in those areas to fall. In the initial book, the authors were able to prove that sumo wrestlers threw matches, which was similar to... Chicago-area teachers cooking the results of state testing.

The most controversial research in the previous book was that the legalization of abortion (Roe v. Wade) led to a reduced crime rate in the 1990s. Paraphrasing their reasoning: Women who got abortions were normally poor and not really fit to be parents yet, so their potential children were more likely to get arrested young, and thus more likely to commit violent crime. If they didn't have their kids - and they didn't - then the crime rate would fall - and it did.

Sure, other efforts, like pumping money into enforcement and crime deterrent, had an effect. But the point of Freakonomics is that some decisions have very, very unintended consequences. It's almost important to note that the authors do NOT take a moral stance on the issue - They don't say this is a reason to endorse abortion, but rather, they say that this is an effect of it.

The most controversial stance in the new book is that the solution to global warming and pollution is to... commit more pollution. Huh? Basically, the authors talk to a group of rogue inventors who have determined that the easiest way to lower global temperatures back to what they once were would be to simulate a big volcanic explosion. When the last one when off in the early 1980s, it basically undid years of pollution up until that point. Using that as their premise, the easiest way to undo years of pollution would be to snake a hose up into the stratosphere that would periodically release small amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere, blocking out some of the Sun's rays.

It is a completely wacky idea, and I doubt we'll ever see it. Environmental lobbyists in the book scream that it won't work, and I've heard the idea has elicited even more critical scorn after the book's release.

However, I do think we have to start thinking this way in terms of solving pollution. People are NOT going to cutback on consumption, and thousands more are getting added to the grid everyday in developing third-world countries. It seems unfair to say to them, "Well we got ours, and because we know how bad that is now, I'm afraid you're going to have to wallow around in shit for a few more years."

Therefore, I'm taking the Bill Nye approach. One time on Loveline, he was asked by Adam Carolla why it was important to go to the Moon when you had problems like the war in the Middle East and the economy here to solve on Earth. Nye rightly pointed out that you have to work toward solving ALL of these problems ALL the time - You can't just standstill completely on any one issue. As a society, yes, we should be looking at ways we can lessen our reliance on fossil fuels and to use alternative energy sources... but we should also be looking at aggressive solutions like terraforming and geo-engineering, in case we do need to use them.

I have some other thoughts on some of the other essays of the book, which I might give at a later date.