Steven Landsburg

I’m going to be open-minded here. I will be. First, I will address the book on its style, its writing, and the information presented. Then, there will be a rant and I do not apologize for that.

Steven E. Landsburg’s The Big Questions is an intriguing foray into the use of non-typical sciences to look at macroscopic philosophical questions. The questions in questions range from why is there something rather than nothing, is there a God, is logical disagreement a sign of inherent show more meaninglessness, can we really know everything, and so on. These are indeed interesting and challenging questions. Looking into philosophy using physics and economics is kind of fun and gets one thinking laterally and not directly, which on the whole is a good skill to have.

Landsburg’s tackling of these questions is in many ways logical and rich. There are indeed mathematical bases for following both morality and human perception of color (as well as other things in the universe). His main premise is that once you have math, everything else follows. One of the very mind-boggling assertions me makes is that almost no one is deeply religious because crimes are committed on a fairly regular basis and acts of martyrdom are not. That part makes for fun reading. And for the most part, Landsburg’s theories are engaging, flow well, and get you to think a little more critically about the larger picture.

Now for the rant: The whammy comes near the end of the book. Landsburg unequivocally advocates for the near dismissal of English departments in education. He starts with the basis that reading is a leisure activity and is not a serious use of educational time. He argues that one could get just about as much educational content from a night spent watching The Simpsons. To completely dismiss an entire branch of study as useless when you just spent an entire book using disparate fields to look at philosophical questions seems to me both self-defeating and insulting. You never know where the next great piece of information or idea will come from, but apparently according to Dr. Landsburg, literature will never contain it. Boo, Mr. Landsburg, boo to you, sir. show less

I've seen a few reviewers of this book decry 'politically motivated' criticism of this book, and I scratch my head at the notion. First, the attempt to keep a neat tidy box around what can be deemed political or not. (I tend to err on the side of more things being political than not.) Second, the inability to understand that economics is a political science.

Jonathan Gruber, professor of Economics at MIT, opens his Microeconomics course (freely available on YouTube!) with a crucially show more important observation: Economics is a right-wing science. In that, it's basic principles and logical conclusions lead towards right-wing politics. Less government intervention. More dependence on the free market. More individual autonomy. This may seem offensive to both adherents and critics of Landsburg. Adherents may protest the claim that a 'science' can be political and critics may find that it proves their suspicions of Landsburg's policy conclusions.

Landsburg's book succeeds when it focuses on those economic principles, and it falls short when it attempts to present them as unassailable.

I’ll provide an example, not from this book, but instead that you would find in many introduction to economics textbooks. That minimum wage laws lead to unemployment. The basic economic theory here is not hard to follow. A minimum wage is effectively a price floor. Price floors set below the equilibrium price do nothing. Price floors set above the equilibrium price create a surplus because the prices are too high for many people who would otherwise be interested. In this example a surplus in labor would translate to higher unemployment rate.

This example is sound economic theory, and the logic rather straightforward. But the wrinkle is that in reality we have seen very different things happening when minimum wage laws are enacted. The effects we observe neither prove or disprove the theory. Instead, they point to a complicated outcome with various factors and inputs.

This is where Landsburg’s book falls short. It presents a very basic introduction to economic thought as a very basic introduction to economics. I think there’s a vast difference between the two. Learning to think like an economist is different than learning to be an economist.

I suppose it’s unfair to malign the book for its inability to crunch various undergrad courses into a single 200-something page popular economics book but alas! The book is a fine introduction to economic thought, but economic thought is not necessarily the end all be all way to analyze the world. It’s an important tool in the toolbox and this book serves as a passable starter set. show less

As someone who has had a lot of experience teaching finance and economics at the college level, I am very familiar with the challenge of motivating these subjects to a group of sometimes-unwilling students. While undoubtedly of fundamental importance, the topics comprising these fields of study can be arcane and, occasionally, a little dull. So, I very much appreciate what Steven Landsburg attempts to do with Can You Outsmart an Economist? The volume is nominally pitched as a series of show more quizzes and brain teasers that require economic reasoning to solve. However, what it really represents is a cleverly disguised text that tries to introduce readers to many of the seminal concepts in the economic sciences in an engaging and entertaining way. Happily, the author largely succeeds in doing just that.

Many of the examples Landsburg has created are simple—deceptively so, in fact—but they do a nice job of conveying the book’s main message: When making decisions or judgments, do not take things at face value and jump to easy or obvious conclusions. Economic principles, while mostly logical, are not always transparent and they often require looking at situations in indirect ways. An example of this is trying to apply cost-benefit analysis—a cornerstone of economic thinking—when neither the costs nor the benefits are well defined. The author illustrates several other interesting discussions in a quiz-and-solution format. He uses the celebrated Prisoner’s Dilemma model from game theory to establish the moral that rational decisions do not always lead to good outcomes for the participants involved. Also effective were the examples of the role that the price system plays in properly allocating economic resources and how the assumption of irrationality affects an individual’s decision-making prowess.

Unfortunately, not all of the topics explored were as compelling; some of the discussions were either misapplied, misleading, or overly didactic. For instance, the chapter ‘Are You Smarter Than Google?’ was a very low-payoff exercise in the intricacies of probability theory that ultimately read like a self-serving promotion of the author’s own work. The same can be said about the decision theory analysis of which street one should take to avoid being consumed by a dinosaur (this frame actually makes sense in its context). Finally, the description of option valuation, while not exactly wrong, was quite misdirected; the simple example Landsburg chose violated a basic assumption of the model being illustrated and resulted in the nonsensical outcome that the option would be worth more today than it could possibly receive as a payoff at expiration! Still, these are not major quibbles and they do not detract from what was a very solid overall project. For readers seeking intriguing explanations of economic concepts—and not just a random collection of brain teasers—Can You Outsmart an Economist? is a great place to look. show less

On the bandwagon with Freakonomics. Thinking about things from an economic standpoint – i.e., from the way the world actually works as opposed to the way numerous interest groups would like it to work – is always a laudable pastime; the catch being that economists usually don’t know the way it actually works either. In this case, most of the hypotheses proposed are pretty reasonable – alas, though, they are just hypotheses and testing them by experiment ain’t gonna show more happen.


Ironically, the lead essay in this collection (and also the title for the whole book), More Sex is Safer Sex, is one of the weakest. It was presumably chosen on the assumption that a book with “sex” in the title will sell better; if only my first scientific paper had been titled “Chronostratigraphic accuracy of Ordovician ecostratigraphic correlation and sex” I might be famous today. Author Steven Landsburg clumsily explains his premise with an anecdote involving a hypothetical office Christmas party; a later explanation works somewhat better – suppose you have a community of 1000 married couples and five prostitutes. The women are all content to remain monogamous; the men, however, “need” an additional sexual partner annually. The prostitutes will get a workout and potentially infect everybody with STDs. However, if the women or a reasonable fraction of them cheat, all the men can be satisfied and everybody will stay healthy. Landsburg comments that of course there are some assumptions; I should think so.


The remainder of the essays are similar; some ideas that make you think; many unstated assumptions or failures to account for confounding factors. An interesting one involved a way of thinking about outsourcing jobs overseas; suppose John Doe invents software to perform some valuable service – the example Landsburg uses is automatically analyze MRI scans. People who were previously employed analyzing MRI scans lose their jobs, but for everybody else MRI scan analysis is now cheaper. On investigation, however, it turns out that there’s no fancy software in John Doe’s setup at all; all it does is send the MRI scans to doctors in Mumbai who analyze them and send back the results. In one case, John Doe is a clever inventor and consumer benefactor; in the other he’s an evil and unscrupulous business owner sending American jobs overseas. However, the two situations are economically identical. Landsburg expands somewhat by commenting that John Kerry’s website contained references to keeping “American” jobs for “Americans”, presumably to the enthusiastic approval of his supporters; if, however, Kerry had stated he wanted to keep “white” jobs for “whites”, there would have been a different reaction. The conclusion is “Think Globally” only applies to polar bears, not jobs.


Landsburg’s comment on Third World child labor will also raise hackles among the politically correct; the issue is not one of 13-year old Egyptian girls working all day weaving carpets versus 13-year old Egyptian girls going to school; it’s between weaving carpets and starving. Landsburg is especially hard on American college students with expensive educations and high-tech gadgets “protecting” children in Third World countries from earning enough to eat.


Pretty good overall except for the unfortunate title essay; these were originally written for magazine or newspaper consumption and are thus short and to the point, with the caveat that this sometimes leaves some of the assumptions unstated. Picked mine up in the remainder bin at Barnes and Noble for $2.70 and well worth it. show less