SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

You've only to check out the inches of copy and the hours of air time dedicated to the book's take on global warming to see that Levitt and Dubner are back in the eye of the storm – no doubt to their publisher's delight.

You may not agree with their theory on global warming but you'll probably want to read it, and the same goes for the rest of the book. It'll make you stop and think about how you process information fed to you by the media, the government, companies, and so-called experts.

It'll also make you laugh out loud. "SuperFreakonomics" is as entertaining as its predecessor, if not more so. It's a page-turner, a compulsive read.

And if it doesn't make you laugh or smile, it'll make you wince or rail with anger. It's guaranteed to provoke some kind of reaction.

So who's this book for? Well, it covers such a wide range of topics that there's something for everyone. The authors cast a critical eye over areas like the real estate market, healthcare, prostitution, terrorism, behavioral experiments and children's car safety seats.

But that doesn't mean everyone's going to love it. In fact, you'll probably love it or hate it. If you're an old-school economist, you might think its theories are fluff. If you're a climate change activist, you'll likely come away incensed.

If you're looking for more than provocation or entertainment, you may be wondering why you should spend your time and money on this book. Well, we think there's value in it for Mind Tools readers.

In business, we hear a lot about "thinking outside the box". "SuperFreakonomics" encourages us to do just that, but in ways some might describe as completely off the wall. Applying similar thinking to a problem you're struggling with might just help you unravel it. What's really behind those statistics? What am I missing?

"SuperFreakonomics" could also help develop critical thinking. Should we just take what we're told at face value? The book encourages us to dig deeper and this has to be good for any business or individual.

So who are these two men who've proved such a winning combination? After "Freakonomics" was a runaway success, they were dubbed the rock stars of economics.

Levitt teaches economics at the University of Chicago – economics with a difference that is. His career is as illustrious as any traditional economist, but he looks at things differently from his peers, or the average person for that matter.

Since he began publishing his research into topics like guns and game shows, he's never been far from controversy. But he's also hugely respected. He's the recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal – awarded every two years to the best American economist under 40.

Dubner writes for the New York Times and the New Yorker, and has published two other books. In August 2003, he wrote a profile of Levitt for the New York Times Magazine. The extraordinary response to that piece gave birth to "Freakonomics."

Now, there's a downside to success, of course, and some commentators have called "SuperFreakonomics" a poor imitation of the original. It depends on what you're looking for, but in terms of entertainment value, we disagree. "SuperFreakonomics" is funnier and more polished than its forerunner.

So keep listening to hear why it's more dangerous to walk drunk than to drive drunk; why you might be wasting your money on children's car seats; and to hear the authors' much-debated cheap fix for global warming.

The book is divided into five chunky chapters, sandwiched between a lively introduction to the type of "freaky" economics the book deals with and a cute epilog about training monkeys to use money.

Taking a broad-brush approach, the five chapters cover prostitution, death, apathy and altruism, cheap and simple fixes, and, finally, global warming.

Three of the chapters have rather odd questions for their titles, epitomizing what Levitt does best. He's a master at posing questions few other people would think of.

So how exactly is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa? Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance? And what do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?

We'll look at the Gore-Pinatubo question a little later. You'll have to find out whether the authors manage to answer the others yourself.

There are countless other questions too, along with amusing anecdotes, reams of data and interesting factoids from the past and present.

Levitt is famous for finding the facts behind the statistics. So, let's see how he does this, taking a simple example from the book's introduction: walking drunk versus driving drunk.

Imagine you're at a house party and having a great time. The party's winding down and you reach for your car keys. But you're in no condition to drive home.

Now, this is the very tone the authors employ in their writing. It's a chatty, informal style some readers will find engaging. Others may find it grates after a while.

On reflection, you decide to walk home. But is this really the safer option? More than a thousand drunk walkers die in traffic accidents every year. Now, that's not many compared with the 13,000 people killed annually in alcohol-related traffic accidents. But what about on a per-mile basis?

By looking at the statistics on how many miles Americans walk outside, the number of Americans of driving age, and the number of miles walked drunk – assuming they're the same as the number of miles driven drunk – the authors find a drunk walker is eight times more likely to get killed than a drunk driver.

Even factoring in the number of people killed by drunk drivers, walking drunk still leads to five times more deaths per mile than driving drunk, the authors say.

All sound a bit trivial? Maybe it is. And are the authors really encouraging readers to drive under the influence? No, what they're really doing is asking us, in all situations, to take a look at conventional wisdom and think again.

The authors play the numbers game throughout the book, applying it to the real estate market, to hospital deaths, to cancer treatment, and to prostitution, to make us question what we think we know and what we're told.

We see this in one of the most controversial sections of the book, about children's car seats.

This fits into a chapter about cheap and simple fixes. One of these is the car seatbelt.

Do you know that seatbelts, at about $25 a belt, are one of the cheapest life-saving devices invented? So why aren't they designed for children? Especially since half of all passengers who ride in the back seat of cars are children.

Why, instead, do Americans spend more than 300 million dollars a year buying four million children's car seats, and car seats that are notoriously difficult to fit? More than 80% of car seats are improperly installed, statistics show.

Armed with data on crashes going back to 1975, the authors set out to discover whether a child is better off using a car seat or wearing a normal seat belt, designed for adults.

Car seats are logically the best way to protect children under two years old, but what about older children? In many U.S. states, car seats are mandatory until children are six or seven years old.

The authors found the data didn't prove car seats were better for saving children's lives than seat belts. In fact, in some crashes, car seats performed worse than seat belts.

But maybe this didn't allow for poor installation. So the authors set out to find crash-test data. Here, we see evidence of the authors' rigorous research and attention to detail.

When they couldn't find the data they needed, they did their own tests at a crash-test center. They made a direct comparison between the effectiveness of seat belts and car seats for children, or crash-test dummies, aged three to six.

Guess what? The adult seat belt passed the crash test with flying colors. The seat belt exceeded every requirement for how a child safety seat should perform.

They went on to look at data from more than nine million crashes, to make sure they weren't overlooking chest and abdomen injuries.

Once again, traditional lap-and-shoulder belts performed better than child safety seats for kids aged two to six – in preventing serious injury. For minor injuries, car seats did a better job, the data found.

Now, the authors – with six young children between them – aren't advocating chucking out car seats. But they are asking why the world isn't trying to design seat belts that can be easily adjusted to fit children, rather than toughening laws on car seats and forcing older and older children to use them.

It's a fair question, and an example of what the authors call a cheap and simple solution, versus the more cumbersome, costly and complicated one we're often sold.

We're told car seats are safer, so we believe it's true. Car seats buy peace of mind. But what if they also breed complacency? What if there is a cheaper and simpler solution that actually saves more lives?

No doubt car manufacturers will have their own arguments, and there'll be other studies that contradict the authors' findings. But it seems a fair question to ask, and this way of thinking can be applied positively to other aspects of life.

So what about the authors' much-debated cheap and simple fix for climate change? Or rather, what do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?

Unsurprisingly, knowing the authors' contrarianism, Levitt and Dubner suggest the threat of climate change has been exaggerated, and argue the solutions we've come up with so far to mitigate it aren't going to work or are too costly.

Their research has found we'd be better off looking to geo-engineering for a solution, instead of jeopardizing economic growth by cutting carbon emissions.

This is where Mount Pinatubo comes in.

The dormant volcano of Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted on June 15th, 1991, spewing more than 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.

The sulfur dioxide acted like a layer of sunscreen, reducing the solar radiation reaching the planet, and cooling off the earth over the next two years by an average of nearly one degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius.

For a couple of years Pinatubo's eruption practically reversed the cumulative global warming of the previous 100 years. Scientists concluded the planet could be saved by a series of severe volcanic eruptions that would block the sunlight and cool the earth.

Crazy idea, right? But what if the Pinatubo effect could be somehow mimicked?

To answer this, we're taken to a non-descript office building in a suburb of Seattle. This is the home of Intellectual Ventures, an invention company packed with scientists, technology experts and off-the-wall thinkers.

The question this eclectic team is asking is this: if human activity is warming up the planet, could human ingenuity cool it down?

In a nutshell, they say we could recreate the Mount Pinatubo effect by sending up sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere through 18-mile-long hoses stationed at intervals and suspended from high-strength helium balloons. Winds would take the sulfur mist around the world in about ten days. This would copy the Pinatubo effect, with similar cooling results.

One hose could be located in the southern hemisphere and one in the north, focusing on the poles, which are more vulnerable to global warming.

To the average reader, this all sounds a bit farfetched. But the authors ask all the questions you'd expect two highly acclaimed critical thinkers to ask. Would it work? Wouldn't messing with the climate in this way have negative effects on the rest of the planet?

They answer them all, albeit rather vaguely in places, and come out quite satisfied that geo-engineering is a cheap and simple fix to global warming.

They put the total cost of reversing global warming through spraying sulfur dioxide into the sky at 250 million dollars, comparing this with the 1.2 trillion dollars economist Nicholas Stern has proposed spending – every year – to tackle climate change.

So we're back to the question posed at the start of the chapter. Gore and Pinatubo both suggest ways to cool the planet, but their methods are a world apart when it comes to cost-effectiveness.

This chapter is a lively and fascinating read, but it's possible that the authors may have come unstuck here. Levitt is famed for his attention to detail and rigorous research, but many climatologists and activists have panned the authors' theories.

They've been accused of irresponsibility, of rehearsing old arguments that have long been debunked, and of not doing their homework. They've been slammed for taking on a hugely complex topic they know little about.

The war of words surrounding this chapter has taken on a life of its own, but we don't think that detracts from the rest of the book, or should stop you from reading it.

The authors may or may not have been a bit too ambitious with climate change, but much of the rest of their research is meticulous and valid. "SuperFreakonomics" is also witty and engaging, and the authors make some serious points, in between all the humor.

You may want to try out the original book first, but it's really a question of taste. "Freakonomics" is much denser than its sequel, in terms of statistics and the kind of microscopic examination Levitt is famous for. This second book is a lighter, funnier read.

"SuperFreakonomics" is published in hardback by Allen Lane, part of the Penguin Group.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.