Freakonomics

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt reportedly "accepts the standard neoclassical micro-economic model of rational utility-maximization". He should: his collection of sociologically interesting chapters on pop economics, Freakonomics, was a best-seller in 2005 (shifting over 4 million sales units). Co-written by New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, and developed from articles they'd published in the newspaper, the book considered economics to be a study of incentives. Aptly, it spawned its own money-earning mini-industry of business consultancy.

In 2010, a movie version appeared, collating the efforts of six indie documentary-makers to dramatise and visualise some of the book's contents. My copy of the book had sat unread on the shelf for years, and the film has given me a strong incentive to read it and see if it's useful. The movie isn't.

The fact of it being co-produced by the two authors, who appear as a scripted pair of layman-friendly experts introducing and linking the segments, suggests they had their own incentive for making it. It's surely designed to be a sales tool for their consultancy business.

"If you have a good idea what a person's incentives are, you have a good idea how they're going to behave", one of them says. They say that economics (i.e. human life) is all a matter of "causality", "correlation" and challenging convention. Prior to their book's publication, such an attitude used to be called "thinking outside the box", so they haven't invented a wheel.

Only one of the segments was worth seeing on the two levels that matter for a documentary: content and style. Veteran documentary-maker Alex Gibney delivered a handsomely-filmed and glossily-edited review of cheating, corruption and crime in Japan's supposedly sacrosanct sumo wrestling set-up. The American authors didn't seem to have done any research themselves; they'd collected harsh facts revealed by whistle-blowers and journalists in Japan.

Elsewhere, there were few of the Eureka! moments that publishers' PR for the Freakonomics volume had led me to expect, and some of the authors' conclusions have been challenged. One of them is so simplistically wonderful that one wants it to be true: legalised abortion in the USA drastically reduced crime rates a generation later, just as enforced pregnancy in Romania led to a future crime wave and revolution (both government moves confirming that wanted children get better care). Although "cause and effect" is an ancient correlation, it's cheering to be shown such modern "proofs" that do-gooders may well do bad.

"Incentives", as illustrated in the movie, is an academic word for bribery. The documentary's segment reporting a project (at the University of Chicago of course) to improve high school students' grades by means of monthly incentive payments only proves another ancient adage: a horse can be taken to water, but it can't be forced to drink it. The two male students chosen as Grade C and E models were clear examples of documentary-makers' incentivisation too: they'd chosen to track a pair of theatrical personalities (one black, one white) with equally talkative single moms in order to make their segment audience-pleasing.

"Causality" etc is common sense dressed up in pop economic verbiage. As Dubner jokes in an aside to his co-writer at the end, after a bit of hyperbole, "That was total bullshit, wasn't it?!" Much of their movie really was.