“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work. Economics represents how it actually does work.”
I read Freakonomics a very long time ago. Most of the chapters faded into general background memory (sumo wrestlers, real estate agents, the economics of crack dealing). But two ideas stuck so hard they still shape how I think about cause and effect.
The first was the claim that legalised abortion in the United States and Romania reduced crime, roughly eighteen years later. The second was the question of whether parents matter as much as parents like to think they do, or whether the school you walk into (and the kids you sit next to) does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Both chapters were uncomfortable. Both of them changed me.
Abortion, Crime, and the Eighteen Year Lag
The argument is simple enough on paper. If a child is brought into the world unwanted, into an emotionally and economically broken environment, that child has, probabilistically speaking, a much higher chance of ending up in jail, on drugs, or otherwise off the rails. Legalise abortion, and you reduce the number of unwanted children entering the pipeline. Eighteen years later, when that cohort would have hit peak crime-committing age, the crime rate drops.
People hate this argument because it sounds cold. But I don’t like the conclusion is not the same thing as the data is wrong.
What I found compelling is that the same pattern shows up outside the United States. Western European countries that legalised abortion early appear to show a similar lagged crime decline. I’d be curious to watch Latin America over the next two decades, since several countries there have recently expanded access. The track record of persistently high crime in places like Colombia, Mexico, and parts of Brazil makes the region an unintentional natural experiment. If the eighteen year lag holds, we’ll see it.
None of this makes abortion a moral good or a moral evil. It just makes it a variable that moves another variable. That’s economics doing its job, regardless of how it makes anyone feel.
The discomfort is the whole product. People want a tidy moral story where the heroes and the villains are well lit. The data does not owe them one. The book taught me to sit inside that uncomfortable gap between the answer I would prefer and the answer the numbers actually point to. Most of the people who refuse to sit there end up confidently wrong about a lot of things, for a very long time.
Did My High School Change My Life?
The chapter on parents versus schools hit me even harder, because I lived a small version of the experiment.
For the first two years of high school, I went to a rougher school in the kind of neighbourhood where ambition was not the local sport. I didn’t care about grades. Most of my time was spent either getting harassed by other guys looking for a fight, or chilling inside an internet cafe playing video games. Achievement was not in the air. Effort felt embarrassing. My average grades sat around 60 percent and I didn’t really care.
Then I moved. I ended up in a completely different region of the province, inside a completely different cultural pocket of schooling. At the new school, the popular kids were not the kids who skipped class. The popular kids were sporty, social, fit, and academically sharp. The valedictorian was not a stereotype, he was someone everyone genuinely liked. The bar was high, and the bar was being set by the social environment itself, not by the teachers.
My average went from 60 percent to 85 percent. Same brain. Same parents. Same DNA. Different room.
What’s strange is that nothing about me had changed structurally. I had not suddenly become smarter. I had not had some big personal awakening. I had simply been deposited into a room where the gravitational pull of the social environment was tilted in a different direction, and I drifted in that direction the way a leaf drifts in a current. The new water happened to flow toward effort, and I floated downstream.
Levitt and Dubner spend a chapter pulling apart how much of the difference between kids comes from who their parents are versus what their parents do, and the data leans heavily on the former. But once you zoom out from the parents and start including peers, schools, and the cultural water you swim in, you start to realise just how much of who you become is osmosis. You drift in the direction of the people surrounding you, almost passively, almost helplessly.
I think about this a lot now. About where to raise kids one day. About which cities to spend time in. About which conversations I let myself sit inside of.
The Marketer Lens
I came into this book as someone who already worked in internet marketing. The Freakonomics frame, look at incentives, not at intentions, was already half-built into how I made decisions. But the book sharpened it.
Every business problem starts looking like an incentive puzzle. Why are your support agents closing tickets too fast? Probably because someone is measuring close rate. Why are your affiliate partners promoting low-quality offers? Probably because the commission curve rewards it. Why is your team disengaged on a Friday afternoon? Probably because somebody designed a recurring meeting they secretly resent.
The world doesn’t run on people’s stated values. It runs on the things they get rewarded for, and the things they avoid getting punished for. Once you internalize that, you become a far less moralistic person, and a far more useful one. You also stop trusting press releases.
Why The Book Still Holds Up
What makes Freakonomics work, even decades later, is that it doesn’t lecture you. It just keeps asking the same question, over and over: okay, but what does the data actually say? About cheating teachers. About drug dealers living with their mothers. About what a baby’s name predicts, and what it doesn’t. The conclusions are often counterintuitive, sometimes uncomfortable, occasionally funny, but always honest about what the numbers show.
It also reads fast. Levitt and Dubner trade pages well. Levitt is the economist, Dubner is the storyteller, and you can feel the handoff in every chapter. Some sections I read in one sitting without putting the book down.
Final Thoughts
This is a gateway drug of a book. Once you start asking questions this way, you can’t really stop. You start questioning your own confident explanations. Your inherited opinions. Your tidy moral certainties. That’s a valuable habit in a world where most beliefs are absorbed rather than examined.
Solid A. I already have the sequel queued up.
If you’ve never read it, this is one of those books I’d push on anyone who likes to think they think clearly. It’s a humbling read in the best possible way.
Thanks for reading.
— Leonidas
