There's been a riveting storm all week-end in the US eco/env blogosphere about Dubner and Levitt's Superfreakonomics, especailly a chapter, now available and scanned by Brad de Long.
Levitt, supposedly the most talented economist of my generation, exemplifies all that is wrong with the discipline: academically, he specialises in clever answers to questions that can be answered because there happens to be data, rather than in trying to develop answers to important questions. This is how economics ended up spending its talent on looking at such pressing questions as the correlation between given names and educational success while the banks were left alone to blow-apart society.
And here we have what happens when this style of economics does tackle an important question --- climate change. Like almost everyone else in the world, I have no idea about the science of climate change and I take the consensus on trust, on authority, and on my understanding of how science and policy works. If the science were wrong but had gone this far without being shown up, my understanding of society and the institutions of knowledge would have to be completely modified.
Dubner and Levitt, it seems, are similarly ignorant, but decide to harvest what contrarian positions they can. There are real pleasures to contrarianism: it offers the hope of disturbing the smug assurance of the clericy. But it does not come for free: if you get caught, as Dubner and Levitt seem to have been, your authority is trashed and the clericy's reinforced.In this case, this is all to the good.
