I finished reading Freakonomics a mere forty-eight hours after bringing it home. My husband was pleased, because he was eagerly waiting his chance to read it. “Was it good?” he asked me. “Did you learn about the future of the dollar? Gas prices? The national debt?”

I had to stop and think for a minute. “No,” I finally decided, “it didn’t talk about any of those things.”

My husband groaned.

He was probably justified in his disappointment; all of these are important economic issues of our time. The questions that Freakonomics tackles are not quite so, well, economic. Steven Levitt freely admits that he knows next to nothing about the future of the stock market, the pros and cons of deflation, or the problem of taxes. Instead, he’s interested in an assortment of random topics that have little or nothing to do with money, from abortion to crime to drug dealers to the Ku Klux Klan to parenting. But the wonderful thing about Levitt is that he comes to these topics with no agenda. He has no theory to prove, no axe to grind; he simply applies his keen observation to the actual facts.

This, of course, is the real trait of the economist: not that he necessarily deals with finance, but that he deals with facts. What’s different about Levitt is that he applies the hard science of numbers to issues that are generally far outside the purview of economics. The winner of the John Bates Clark Medal for the best economist under forty is not so much an economist as he is a detective. He solves mysteries, and he does it by the hard application of fact.

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