Twice on planes I’ve saved someone’s life. On both occasions the endangered people were aircraft safety engineers, and during takeoff, just when the plane shuddered as if it would veer and break apart, the guy, seated next to me, started telling me about deadly plane collisions that had happened right on that runway, adding that it was in a plane just like this one, pointing out where it happened just up ahead. Anyone else, I’m convinced, would have throttled him, and jury members would have nodded their heads in understanding. I don’t know why I didn’t, but they got lucky. They were brave enough to tell uncomfortable truths, and you have to be willing to upset your audience if you’re going to do that.

Which is where Freakonomics comes in. Authors Levitt and Dubner claim that they are telling just such uncomfortable truths: that drug dealers are poor, that trying to be a good parent doesn’t alter your child’s prospects, that sumo wrestlers and schoolteachers cheat, and, most contentiously, that legalized abortion has led to a drop in crime. Although the book promises “a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything” (Levitt is an economist, Dubner a New York Times reporter who met Levitt while writing an enthusiastic profile of him), it dodges as many uncomfortable truths as it tells. That’s because Levitt is the Times’s version of a countercurrent thinker: not one who swims against the stream, but one who circles in interesting eddies. Here, what’s hidden isn’t the truth obscured by big business, the government, and corporate media. People who swim in these circles dismiss left as well as right, believing some privileged truth is available to the person talented enough to ignore all that partisan arguing.

As just such a talented person, Levitt is adept at picking odd questions and developing fresh answers. In doing so, he plays both sides of the aisle, either refusing to draw political conclusions from his work or, more often, not asking political questions about who shaped the terrain he’s exploring in the first place. Take his discussion of cheating schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers. Sumo wrestlers, he finds, let a competitor win if the match means a great deal to the competitor’s career but nothing to their own. In a study of Chicago public school testing data, he discovered that when the fad for get-tough education policies tied teachers’ jobs to their students’ standardized test scores, 5 percent of teachers appear to have filled in multiple-choice answers that students left blank at the end of the test. Levitt apparently sat in the room while these teachers were brought in and fired.

It challenges the claim to be “unconventional” that Levitt can so easily think like management: should Board of Education employees be allowed to alter official testing documents without consequences? The alternative is to think the way plenty of people with regular jobs do: do you want to get somebody fired? If the central office institutes another test (without real solutions to improve education or means to fund those improvements, just a love of testing and measuring problems everyone already knows exist) and tells you your livelihood is resting on it, isn’t it understandable—even something worth being proud of—not to take that kind of treatment lying down? In the all-important political question of whom you’d like to have a beer with, is it a teacher who sabotages the latest Bush-style showboat education policy or the economist sitting at administrative headquarters watching that teacher get canned? That also belies Levitt’s claim that as an economist he doesn’t traffic in morality; what the reader sees is the quietly presumptuous management-class morality that is concerned with the rules and not the rule-makers.

Unfortunately, some of the most interesting observations Levitt presents are marred by an effort not to sound liberal—either because he isn’t or because of that central conceit that the facts show that not just conservatives, but liberals and progressives as well, are wrong about plenty of things. Take for instance Levitt’s discussion of an imaginary girl whose parents don’t let her go over to one friend’s house because there’s a gun in that home, but let her visit another friend, who has a swimming pool. Well, he tut-tuts, it turns out that the odds of her dying in that one house with a gun are far lower than her dying in that one house with a pool. Ha ha, imaginary liberal parents! Kids are “roughly 100 times more likely” to die in backyard pools than playing with guns. Except that, buried in his own data we discover, that the risk of that child’s being shot to death is comparable to the risk of her drowning in a pool. Levitt can only make gun control look misguided by talking about how dangerous one pool is and one gun. But, as Levitt points out, because there are far more houses with guns than houses with pools, the girl, if she’s statistically representative, would have one friend with a pool and thirty-three friends with guns in their homes. If her parents banned her from all houses with a gun, then they have saved her from a danger of the same magnitude as drowning. (And the data only measure risks for kids under ten; over ten the risk of being shot presumably rises.) The “100 times more likely” claim is classic statistical manipulation, and Levitt should know it.

OF COURSE, Levitt can populate this lopsided example with silly liberal-minded parents because real liberals have such low visibility these days. Do such parents even exist? No parents of my kid’s friends have ever shown up at my door with a questionnaire about gun ownership, so who is he talking about? And if there are such systematically protective parents, do they let their kids toddle around pools with no oversight? They would likely be concerned about both, and by Levitt’s own data, rightly so. Had the message been to “worry about a pool in the backyard like it’s a loaded gun” it might have been worth sending. But he passed up a chance to publicize valuable hidden wisdom in favor of making fun of some imaginary liberal irrationality. Levitt and Dubner claim the gun/pool example shows that most people are such “terrible risk assessors” that they can’t figure out what’s really dangerous and what’s just hype. The figures suggest that people are doing quite well, even without precise numbers to crunch about life’s dangers.

Meanwhile, Levitt pulls his punches when he has a chance to challenge conventional wisdom. Anyone who’s ever been nervous about flying has heard the airline industry’s assertion that flying is safer than driving. But the books are cooked on that one: when you compare the risk of death per mile, that’s true, because planes cover a lot more miles. But you ought to compare the risk by hour. So, as one of those lucky aircraft safety engineers pointed out to me in flight, it turns out that flying is slightly more dangerous than driving after all. Fear of flying is a rational fear, and, as the engineer pointed out, one that’s unfairly belittled by the airlines. Although Levitt presents the numbers, he glosses over the significance, ignoring another chance to challenge conventional corporate wisdom and note what uncannily good risk assessors people turn out to be.

This is a shame, because it fits one of the most attractive elements of the book, Levitt’s concept of people and his work. In the case of the sumo wrestlers and the cheating teachers, Levitt points out, he’s used his research to figure out some neat stuff—but it’s nothing the wrestlers and teachers themselves haven’t already figured out. People, he recognizes, are complex thinkers, and the challenge for someone like Levitt is to understand their motivations and strategies, not assume he knows better. The shame is that he doesn’t apply that realism more consistently—to teachers, gun-averse parents, and the flight-phobic.

Letting people make their own choices takes a lot of the painful sting out of Levitt’s hot-button chapter, on abortion. Levitt contends that the dramatic decreases in violent crime seen nationwide in recent years is to a great extent the result of the post–Roe v. Wade cohort. That is, after abortion was legalized, many more poor, teenaged, single mothers terminated pregnancies, and because being the child of a poor, teenaged, single mother who didn’t want to have a child makes one more likely to be a criminal, an unintended consequence of legalized abortion was to reduce the number of kids born likely to become criminals. Twenty years later, as that cohort reached the age of young toughs, the level of crime dropped precipitously. States that legalized abortion earlier experienced crime drops earlier, states with more abortions experienced more dramatic crime drops, and the drops were among younger criminals, not older ones. There is not space here to consider the veracity of Levitt’s claim; and others have done so in more detail. Suffice it to say that the data Levitt uses are compelling enough to require the implications of this troubling claim to be taken seriously.

Levitt is right to claim his findings shock both left and right. Conservative prolifers promote crime, liberal-minded prochoicers promote eugenics. At first this seems like one more startling but not very useful observation. Abortion opponents won’t switch sides on the basis of the data; abortion rights proponents would never approve of using this fascist news bite to forward their case. But some consideration of what this means for public debate must be made. Otherwise, for instance, prochoice advocates risk being tainted as dangerously Malthusian.

For progressives, of course, the problem is merely one of appearances. There’s no actual, inherent conflict in letting people make their own choices. The key is that women then have control over their own reproduction, which is far different, for instance, than the periodic efforts to force certain groups of disadvantaged women to use birth control. You guarantee people the right to control their own destiny and make their own decisions. The point, of course, is that a prochoice position, unlike the mandated birth control idea, is not manipulative. This is key, because choice and consent are the central elements of freedom that right wingers have a hard time comprehending. Forcing people to limit their reproduction is fundamentally wrong, but right wing. Letting them make up their own minds is fundamentally right.

THE DILEMMA is real for conservatives. As an economist, Levitt is familiar with the classic “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which prisoners have to decide whether or not to cooperate with authorities while not knowing what the others are doing. For a conservative Republican, this is a case of the Prison Guard’s Dilemma: if right-wing conservatives hate women’s rights and feminists—but hate criminals and poor people, too—whom do they want to repress more? Do they repress women, by denying them the right to abortion or criminals who grew up poor and disadvantaged, by promoting it?

Amusing though it might be to see conservatives caught up in their own webs of hate, it’s an argument we can’t—and don’t want to—provoke. But we can use Levitt’s findings to push the discussion forward. Because the issue for prolifers could be brought back to that question we prochoicers often raise to a thundering silence: what about after the kids are born? Now it’s no longer rhetorical, because if prolifers ignore children’s welfare, to the degree that they’re successful in restricting access to abortion and shaming and scaring people out of having abortions, the outcome could be a spike in crime. Could be, if prolifers dodge that “what next” question, which may not be politically feasible anymore. If you say you want to restrict abortion, people may wonder, what are you going to do to stop some of those kids from becoming criminals? In the shadow of the voting booth curtain, who’s going to vote for the politician who wants to produce a larger generation of criminals? The solution is that anti-abortion politicians can still be anti-abortion politicians, but they have to first introduce convincing programs like universal child care, poverty reduction programs that work, universal high-quality education. And that’s not bad for prochoicers, because until all mothers have secure income, a year paid parental leave, and good child care, they are being denied the right to choose in the first place. The battle for abortion rights would continue as it has—but the right to make reproductive choices more broadly would expand. Rather than the despicable strategy of tarring prolifers as criminal-promoting, let’s allow our opponents to dig out of Levitt’s findings and develop a prolife position they can still defend publicly—and being prolife can only be politically defensible if solid prochild policies regarding health care, poverty, and education come first. Then we can go back to fighting over abortion rights.

LEVITT LIKES the counterintuitive finding: pools are more dangerous than guns, cars are safer than planes, naming your children DeShawn and Shanice will have no effect on their future income. As Levitt suggests, most people already have good reasons for doing what they do; he’s just able to discover what those motivations are. To examine the contexts in which people make those decisions—about how to raise their kids, how to buy and sell a home, whether to fly or own a gun or even how to beat real estate agents or the Ku Klux Klan—is to engage in politics. Without engaging in politics, without tying those observations to policies that matter, these facts flutter like bright scraps of paper in the wind. Levitt and Dubner have collected the scraps, but are ready to let them blow away again. The work that remains for the reader is to apply them in useful ways. Levitt and Dubner haven’t, but regular people have good reasons to.

Greg Smithsimon is an assistant professor of urban studies at Barnard College.

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