Steven Levitt: Asking Different Questions

        If you asked the average person on the street to describe a creative person, not many people are going to answer with “an economics professor.”

        But, then again, Steven Levitt is not your normal econ professor. After getting his B.A. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from MIT, Levitt went on to be a professor at the University of Chicago. Despite those rather impressive credentials, those are the most normal things about Dr. Levitt’s style of economics, largely due to one major factor: this MIT grad has “never been accused of being good at math.” For those of you who are familiar with the field of economics, you know that this is a bit strange. For Levitt, it meant that he was never going to be the best at traditional economics, so instead, he decided to find an area of the field that was “so devoid of research that even someone of [Levitt’s] limited talents might be able to make a difference.”

        This realization kicked off a decades-long quest of “asking the ridiculous questions that no self-respecting economist would be caught dead asking.” These questions lead to paper titles as disparate as:

- White-Collar Crime Writ Small: A Case Study of Bagels, Donuts, and the Honor System
- Corruption in Sumo Wrestling
- The Case of Penalty Kicks in Soccer
- An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances
- The Role of Skill vs. Luck in Poker
- Evaluating the Effectiveness of Child Safety Seats and Seat Belts in Protecting Children from Injury

        Needless to say, these are not your average economics papers. While he uses standard methods, his topics of study are unlike those of effectively any other economist, largely because Levitt is unafraid to ask just about any question that pops into his head.

        Those unique topics gained him the attention of then-New York Times writer, Steven Dubner. While you’ve likely never heard of the article he wrote, you probably have heard of the best-selling book that came out of it: Freakonomics.

        Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything dug into many of the more counterintuitive, controversial, or downright surprising results that Levitt had found in his years of research. Their problem was not finding interesting material, but rather deciding which fascinating findings to put in the book, and there were plenty of papers to choose from. Levitt is a voracious writer and experimenter, having written well over 100 journal articles, not to mention the countless articles that he has written for numerous different newspapers and publications.

        Because of this wide range of data to choose from, Freakonomics quickly turned into a book that “proudly boasts that it has no unifying theme,” however I disagree with that assessment. I think the real theme is the thing that Levitt seems to enjoy more than anything: overturning conventional wisdom. Whether it’s showing that child car seats might not be as useful as you might think to looking into how little your name could actually affect, Levitt thrives on finding results that seem to go against the grain.

        Since the publication of Freakonomics, however, Levitt has not slowed from his busy pace, writing three additional books about his work, while continuing to study the unstudied world. This work has earned him numerous awards, having been given the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal, named the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, and was one of Time’s 2006 "100 People Who Shape Our World."

        While there is no easy way to describe Dr. Levitt, a 2005 Time magazine piece has perhaps the best summary of this rather unique econ professor: “imagine a whip-smart economist with a sprawling imagination. Now imagine he's 9 years old and wants to know everything. That is the basic profile of Steven Levitt.”


http://freakonomics.com/
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/
https://www.ted.com/speakers/steven_levitt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmo9YsNXWCc
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/review/freakonomics-everything-he-always-wanted-to-know.html
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1975813_1975844_1976457,00.html