Stephen D Levitt Views

General Goods

Levitt was born in 1967 and attended St. Paul Academy and Summit School, graduated from Harvard University in 1989 with his B.A. in economics, and received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1994. He is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor and the director of The Becker Center on Price Theory at the University of Chicago. In 2004 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded bi-annually by the American Economic Association to the most promising U.S. economist under the age of 40. In April 2005 Levitt published his first book, Freakonomics (coauthored with Stephen J. Dubner), which became a New York Times bestseller. Levitt and Dubner also started a blog (www.freakonomics.com).

On April 10, 2006, John Lott (another economist) filed suit[9] against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers for defamation. In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott's research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. Also, in a series of email communications to an economist, John McCall, who pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt said that Lott's work in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer reviewed, that Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue.[10]

All this introduction is meant to contextualize the place of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics (published 2005) and Superfreakonomics (2009) in my continuing education. Freakonomics sets the tone for both books as an exercise in curiosity, employing the tools of research and economics to explain human behavior. (Each book stands alone, however.) While economics is perhaps one of the fields traditionally distrusted by Liberalism (and indeed, many items of conventional wisdom buoyed by Liberals are sunk by the facts in these books), the principles that inform Levitt’s inquiries are both sound and useful. The worldview of the his work is described in the following fundamental ideas:

In 2005, Freakonomics exploded in the culture, forever changing our understanding of how the world works, how we really make decisions—even how we name our children. This revolutionary book spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than 3 million hardcover copies, single-handedly spawned a new genre of books, and led to a column in the New York Times Magazine and a blog on the New York Times website. Now, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and award-winning writer Stephen J. Dubner return with this all-new book that is bigger, more provocative, and sure to challenge the way we think all over again.