But I was way ahead of them.
Some background: In my November 8 article, I noted how Levitt and Dubner claimed a lack of a unifying theme in Freakonomics. Instead, they took what they called a “treasure-hunting approach” that allowed them to admit any number of disparate topics into their tent.
Then, in my previous article (November 17), I zeroed in on one statement in Freakonomics that seemed particularly salient to me: “People respond to incentives.” I then noted how these incentives complicate the quest for the ideal set out in the book The Three Laws of Performance: “Seeing [and saying] things as they are.”
Last week I eagerly started to read Levitt and Dubner’s sequel, SuperFreakonomics, and was greeted with the following first sentence:
"The time has come to admit that in our first book, we lied."A preemptive strike before an upcoming Oprah appearance? I wondered. They went on to explain:
"The … lie appeared in the introduction [to Freakonomics], where we wrote that the book had no ‘unifying theme.’ … But in truth, the book did have a unifying theme, even if it wasn’t obvious at the time, even to us. If pressed you could boil it down to four words: People respond to incentives." [emphasis in original]Ahem. Well, yes, of course – perfectly obvious.
It's obvious too (I hope) that I have tongue planted firmly in cheek as I write this. Yet I do think that Levitt and Dubner's point about incentives was a revelation as regards the reasons why we cooperate and collaborate with each other – and why (as I described in my previous article) taking such a “Yes And” approach can only go so far.
Of course, maybe I really wasn’t so far ahead of Levitt and Dubner at that. After all, in my first Freakonomics article, I grabbed onto their coattails and claimed not to have a “unifying theme” for The Daily Improviser blog either. I now feel challenged to see if I can discern such a theme myself.
Then again, maybe I’ll just leave that for the sequel.
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