Ravens are like Writing Desks

OlderKid has recently discovered the joy of titles. Until a few months ago, he regarded titles of books and songs as functional utterances to be pronounced phonetically until the desired object appeared. But now he's realized that oftentimes the words that are in the title also crop up in the text or lyrics, sometimes repeatedly, and figuring that out has made every piece of music a delightful treasure hunt. The conversation in our car on the way to daycare, multiplied by a million, goes something like this: OK: Mama, what's this song called? Me: Down by the Riverside. [Music continues...] OK: [with extreme delight] Mama, he said Down by the Riverside! He said it again!

All of this is just to say that the book I'm reading right now has a singularly unappealing title and one which by all right should not appear anywhere in the text. It's everyone's favorite work of rogue economics, Freakonomics. Let it be known that I am a ginormous fan of popularized science--I'm perfectly content to learn about linguistics from The Language Instinct, evolution from Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and quantum physics from The Elegant Universe. So I approached Freakonomics with great hopes. But, after making my way through the incredibly off-putting and self-congratulatory "Explanatory Note" which begins the book, I began to wonder. Shouldn't this book really be called "Patterns of Social Practice Which Should Be Obvious to Everyone Except You Guys Are Such Dumbasses You Need Me to Explain It"? Could we take a break from hearing about the Harvard Society of Fellows and how much cooler the author was than all of those coneheads and instead, you know, consider some of the social contexts? Take the chapter on "Why Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers." I got the basic point, that rank and file gang members don't actually make much money; but couldn't stop thinking how much more interesting that point was in The Wire, or Random Family; big, hefty works that respect the huge, unwieldy complex of issues at hand. Freakonomics loves to pose the wowee-matchup--the Klan is like real-estate agents! Gangs are like fast-food franchises! Doodlebugs are like smarty-pants! (okay, I made that one up)--and then immediately walk away whistling, all "I'm just the freaky economist! All of life's contours are just number patterns to me, you guys take it from here--" I hate to be old-school humanist about it, but I just think that's kind of immoral.

The book smacked of the same things that bug me about Gladwell's writing, though I think this book was much worse; a tendency towards smugness and a willingness to play fast and loose with the reliability of the academic sources it draws on. It doesn't work to say, as I think Blink does, that standard research doesn't understand how to interpret these problems, while right at the same time drawing on standard research to support your conclusions. Maybe my problem is that I don't have any inherent interest in understanding cultural relations as data-sets, but isn't the bridge that the popularizer is supposed to build? I don't have any inherent interest in quantum physics either, but I like hearing arguments about how and why I should. All Freakonomics has really done for me is given me a lot of cocktail party anecdotes (which, given my current rate of cocktail party attendance, are going to last for a long time) and remind me that a lot of academics are blowhards.

On that note, and returning to the theme of problematic titles: I wonder why no one has wanted to be hired for this job?