I’m not, for the most part, reviewing his academic work or trying to establish the truth or falsity of the claims he makes; I’m trying to establish a particular point about the book Freakonomics, which is that it’s not a good book. Levitt and Dubner placed this thing into the public sphere, they were not shy with their activity in publicizing it and they have not, at any point which I’m aware of, tried to make it clear that the book cannot possibly stand alone or that its conclusions are tentative and subject to very many or important caveats discussed elsewhere in the literature.
E.g., the stories in the book they tell about the academic work aren’t particularly coherent even if the research is. For example: “the typical prostitute earns more than than typical architect”.
Lorini - it is helpful when you quote something to link to the original.
As it stands, it’s hard to read what you quoted in context, or, in turn, to follow (hopefully) the back link to the article that the thing you are quoting is referring to.
So this has nothing to do with Levitt’s research, unlike the claim that people employed in the lower echelons’ of drug trafficking are not paid much more than the lower echelons in fast food, which is what Levitt claimed in [his research](Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh). As I said before, you’ll note that this dude realizes that he does not have the chops to attack the research so he only attacks the presentation of the results within a pop economics book. Brilliant!
As best I can tell, she is referring an unsigned Investor’s Business Daily editorial that was linked by a reader on the Fox Nation community news portal. Despite its inflammatory initial rhetoric, it seems to actually be about a section of the healthcare reform bill that contains language crafting an affirmative action approach to funding for both medical schools and healthcare outcomes.
rhinohelix - that link does weird things for me, in both IE and Firefox.
It may just be a malfunctioning ad on the site, or something weird about my setup, and it doesn’t appear to be truly harmful, but I just want to caution others about the link.
So sorry about that. The harmful part of the redirect was already removed, I thought it was just a broken page, since it went to google for me. I stopped it before the link loaded the next time and read the editorial. I never considered that it had been a foiled malware attack.
