SuperFreakonomics

The sequel to Freakonomics applies the same method: take a question people assume they understand, find data that bears on it, and report what the data says regardless of whether the answer is comfortable. The chapters cover the economics of street prostitution in Chicago, the effect of television on women's status in India, terrorist detection through banking data, hospital and doctor quality measurement, altruism experiments and their design flaws, the history of childbirth and hand washing, and geoengineering as a response to climate change.

The strongest material is on measurement. Levitt and Dubner show that laboratory altruism experiments produce results that reverse when subjects are given the option to take rather than only to give, which undermines a substantial literature. They show that doctor quality varies enormously and is measurable from patient outcomes if the data is examined. They show that simple cheap interventions, including hand washing and seat belts, produced larger mortality gains than expensive medical technology.

The climate chapter caused sustained controversy. The authors present geoengineering through stratospheric sulphate injection as a cheap alternative to emissions reduction, quoting Nathan Myhrvold at length, and climate scientists documented specific errors in the chapter's characterisation of solar power, of atmospheric science and of the researchers quoted. That chapter is the book's main reliability problem. More broadly, the book is a collection of contrarian findings rather than an argument, several of the underlying studies have not replicated, and the willingness to be provocative sometimes outruns the evidence.