Think Like a Freak

Chapter 4 begins with the following assertion: “It takes a truly original thinker to look at a problem that everyone else has already looked at and find a new avenue of attack” (65). Because people often look for more obvious causes, they can miss the real (more arcane) cause of something and instead treat its symptoms.

Levitt and Dubner give an example from their first book, Freakonomics. They had examined the decrease in crime rates that started in the 1990s. Several factors could have played a role, like a good economy and more police, but one they felt was overlooked had more distant origins: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. The root cause of crime, they posited, was that “too many children were being brought up in bad environments that led them to crime” (69). After abortion became legal, fewer children were brought up in such environments, causing crime rates to fall.

History often provides answers to contemporary problems if you look far enough back. One study done in Germany showed that present-day inequality could be traced back to Martin Luther. Simply put, the predominantly Protestant areas were richer than the Catholic areas due to, among other things, working longer hours and being self-employed. In the United States, Harvard economist Roland Fryer traced the higher incidence of heart disease among African Americans to the Middle Passage of the slave trade. He argues that the Africans chosen to make the arduous trip were those with higher salt content in their blood (traders literally licked enslaved people’s faces to determine this) since this meant they were less likely to become dehydrated en route.

The chapter ends with a lengthy example of finding the overlooked root cause of ulcers. For years doctors thought ulcers were caused by excessive acid in the stomach and, lacking a cure, essentially treated the symptoms. When some wondered whether bacteria could be the cause, the conventional wisdom that stomach acid killed bacteria put an end to the discussion. In the 1980s, however, an Australian researcher named Barry Marshall followed up on this theory. Despite being ridiculed by the medical establishment, he and his colleague Robert Warren stuck with it and ultimately proved that the bacterium H. pylori was indeed the cause. Ulcers could be cured with an antibiotic, and Marshall and Warren’s work opened up a whole new area of medical research on the possibilities of gut microbes.

Chapter 5 reviews the advantages of thinking like a child—or thinking small, not fearing the obvious, and having fun. Most of the big issues have not been solved despite many “big thinkers” trying to tackle them. Thus, addressing smaller issues is more likely to succeed and lead to change. And because big issues are composed of interconnected smaller issues, solving the latter one at a time can help work toward solving the former. One example the authors give is how improving students’ sight with cheap eyeglasses led to a jump in their performance in school.

Being willing to address the obvious is also thinking like a child because adults tend to want to appear sophisticated—or at least not naïve. This sometimes blinds them to what is right in front of them. The authors’ earlier example about tying falling crime rates to rising abortion rates came from an obvious observation they made. In reviewing the Statistical Abstract of the United States, they noted that in the span of 10 years, the US “went from very few abortions to roughly 1.6 million a year” and concluded that a jump of that magnitude was likely to impact some part of society (93).

Finally, the authors suggest that having fun can lead to better ideas. This is a third quality of children, as so many adults in “serious” fields feel compelled to tackle “serious” issues, whereas kids just do what they like. Recent research indicates that becoming an expert in any area is not the result of any innate talent but rather the result of years of practice and repetition. It naturally follows that doing something fun—something one truly enjoys—provides the motivation to keep at it and persevere. The same goes for the result of all this research: forming public policy. People don’t like being told what’s good for them (e.g., “eat your vegetables”), threatened, or cajoled. If more public policy was created with an element of fun, like a game, it would be more effective, as with prize-linked savings accounts, which are set up like a lottery. People place money in one of these interest-bearing accounts and agree to pool a fraction of the interest with others. A periodic lottery is held to determine which account wins the pooled interest. Whether or not an account holder wins the pooled interest, they still retain the majority of the interest earned on their account. The authors cite this as an example of how proper incentives can encourage beneficial behavior. These accounts harness the lure of a lottery to help people save their money more responsibly.