Author: SuperFreakonomics Has No 'Moral Or Policy Perspective'

10/26/09: SuperFreakonomics author Stephen Dubner on the Diane Rehm show claims his book does not have a "moral or policy perspective," without "endorsement or a condemnation" of policy related to global warming, terrorism, or prostitution.

However, the book itself condemns current climate policy efforts and policymakers as part of a "religion" while providing a ringing endorsement for geoengineering as a "cheap and simple solution" to global warming.

Transcript: Just in case you're happening upon this conversation in the middle and haven't grasped the kind of perspective that we're coming from -- we don't write about prostitution, or terrorism, or global warming or any of these things, really, from a moral or policy perspective. We just try to lay out what's going on and from that let people proceed how they want to think about it or how they want to draw conclusions. So this is not meant to be an endorsement or a condemnation of any of these things. We're just trying to figure out what's going on.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• SuperFreakonomics
• Freakonomics
• global warming
• climate change
• geoengineering
• Dubner
• Levitt
• Stephen Dubner
• Steven Levitt
• NPR
• prostitution
• terrorism
• news
• politics

[codediporpal]

I read it. They repeat talking points of deniers in over a dozen places.  The do not point out that that talking points are irrelevant or inaccurate. So why did they include them?

Those "hit pieces" are completely logical.

[fjfjvmvm]

They didn't deny that global warming was underway - on a decades/centuries level . Have you even read the chapter? The chapter is focused on responding to the purportedly negative phenomenon of climate change. And they do so not from a moral or policy perspective.

The people who have been attacking them have (like the EDF, Krugman, DeLong, etc.) have done nothing but demagogic, illogical hit pieces. As for factual disputes, the one's I've seen are triffling.

[TempestStormwind]

I have been collecting responses to Superfreakonomics since before it came out. The vast majority of the complaints are based on factual or journalistic errors in the book, not moral or religious grounds. However, Levitt and Dubner are defending themselves by saying "we're not denialists" instead of addressing these claims.

For instance, Levitt recently told the AP that he "eyeballed the data" when he wrote that the globe had cooled. Why would a trained economist not run a simple regression?

[fjfjvmvm]

No it's precisely the opposite. The Discovery Institute rejects evidence and reason on moral and religious grounds. The people how are attacking Dubner are doing so moral and religious grounds.

[TempestStormwind]

This is exactly the same reasoning used by the Discovery Institute for teaching intelligent design as science, by the way.