The Freakonomics follow up, Superfreakonomics, contains a chapter on climate change that lives up to the best selling contrarian style of authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. However actual climate scientists were not pleased with the chapter. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the book "repeats tired global cooling myths," "unfairly trashes climate models" and "advocates rolling the dice on unproven technology" among other faults. They have also been accused of misquoting climate scientist Ken Caldeira. Levitt and Dubner respond to their critics, Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear. [more inside]
posted by afu on Oct 18, 2009 - 128 comments

Steven Leavitt and Sudhir Venkatesh, of Freakonomics fame, investigate prostitution. According to the working paper [pdf], prostitutes in Chicago are more likely to sleep with the police than get arrested by them.
posted by Sticherbeast on Jan 12, 2008 - 27 comments

Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan (50 page pdf). Steven Levitt, of freakonomics fame, along with Roland Fryer, has just released a new academic paper that assesses the rise and fall of the KKK from a variety of perspectives. From one of the authors ...It details the rise and fall of the Klan in the 1920s. Incredibly, the Klan had millions of members at that time, and most of them were reasonably well-educated. Based on a variety of data sources, we argue that, despite its size and education levels, the group nevertheless had little measurable impact on society or politics...
posted by jourman2 on Sep 18, 2007 - 12 comments

Freaks and Geeks keeping it real. [TNR login=metafilter pwd=metafilter] In late March, New Republic columnist Noam Scheiber posted an article strongly criticizing, among other things, Chicago Economics Professor Steve Levitt's "cute and clever" approach to the dismal science, now famously known as Freakonomics. Levitt replied last week with a post of his own. And now, Scheiber has appears to want some more of this.
posted by psmealey on May 3, 2007 - 40 comments