GSB Mennonite

I hadn't checked the freakonomics blog in nearly a month, so I was surprised to come across 3 posts by levitt regarding the oakland a's. as both a former employee of the a's and former student of levitt, I have to mostly disagree with levitt. I don't think he fully buys the ignorance and inefficiencies that existed among baseball executives several years ago. since then, a few other teams have adopted the moneyball philosophy, fully eliminating the a's advantage. a positive for the a's -- they have recently adapted by hiring a PHD economist.

I am running some advanced regressions (that I consider to be kinda freaky) on gradschools, including MBA's, at gradschoolnumbers.com. We are hoping to eventually create a predictive model for MBA admissions, among others. It's kinda freaky. We would appreciate any feedback/imput for survey methods, we're in a beta version at the moment.

Have you read the excerpts of Chapter 4 of "Freakonomics" that he posted on (sorry, don't have the link in front of me)? He argues that legalizing abortion in the 70's is the reason that crime rates dropped a generation later.

He seems to present a convincing argument, but I didn't read very far into it, so I don't know if he addresses the ends/means question. We can eliminate a lot of society's problems by knocking off unproductive and unwanted people -- God forgive us that we even have such phrases in our vocabulary -- but it's not really a solution to the problem, imo. I'll probably post about this when I have time.

On a related note, I heard the NPR interview with Levitt in which he discusses the relative danger of guns vs. swimming pools. I think we need to put this book in a brand new category, alongside pop psychology: pop statistics. In which someone collects a lot of irrelevant statistics and writes a book about them to sucker people out of their money while at the same time making them think that they are now better-educated than the Joneses for having read the book.

Yes, some of his studies are very 'academic' in the sense that he writes and researches based on the data and after the fact gets attacked from both sides...one side because it seems to promote abortion and the other side because it implies that abortions have some link to crime (i.e. that those that have abortions are linked to crime levels).

I have another article about him that I can forward to you. Much more personal about him and his work; I think you'd enjoy it.