Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?

[salvorhardin]

5. A brief followup from one of the authors of the article in the OP

We kept our article short because of space restrictions at American Scientist magazine. Now I want to do a follow-up with all the good stories that we had to cut.

P.S. Let me remind everyone once again that Freakonomics (the book and the blog) has some great stuff. Kaiser and I are only picking on Levitt & co. because we know they could do so much better.

P.P.S. Just to emphasize: our point that Freakonomics has mistakes is nothing new—see, for example, the articles and blogs by Felix Salmon, Ariel Rubenstein, John DiNardo, and Daniel Davies. The contribution of our new article is explore how it was that all these mistakes happened, to juxtapose the many strengths of the Freakonomics franchise (much of the work described in the first book but also a lot of what appears on their blog) with its failings. In some ways these contrasts are characteristic of social science research in general: a mix of careful assessment of assumptions (for example, in the use of instrumental variables analysis rather than simple comparisons to estimate causal effects) and casual storytelling.
Link: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/12/freakonomics-what-went-wrong