Airport Books and the Bad Ideas They Create and Spread

November 5, 2022 9:18 AM

If Books Could Kill is a podcast where Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri discuss and critique books that capture the public imagination. The first episode is about the infamous shitshow Freakonomics, and other staples of airport bookstores will follow in subsequent weeks. It is currently only on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but the plan is that it will be available everywhere.
posted by Kattullus (44 comments total)

It’s on Overcast, too.
posted by shesdeadimalive at 9:20 AM on November 5, 2022 [7 favorites]

Shooting fish in a barrel.
posted by 3.2.3 at 9:23 AM on November 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

really enjoyed this first episode, it’s wonderful to hear someone as baffled by the appeal of freakonomics as i am. Also features a host from the 5-4 podcast and a former host of You’re Wrong About, two of the best podcasts going, so you know it will be great
posted by dis_integration at 9:26 AM on November 5, 2022 [9 favorites]

Just listened to the first episode and it was great! I found it in my podcast app (podcruncher) so I'm assuming it's in most places.
posted by kathrynm at 10:03 AM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have to hope that they started with the excellent podcast title and worked back to what said podcast would entail? Off for a listen!
posted by St. Oops at 10:29 AM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

shesdeadimalive: thanks for mentioning that. I was just about to write it off as something I wouldn’t be able to listen to.
posted by adamsc at 10:54 AM on November 5, 2022

I just subscribed through Pocket Casts.
posted by redyaky at 11:00 AM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Previously.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:07 AM on November 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

The podcasts I listen to are basically You're Wrong About, Maintenance Phase, The Worst Bestsellers, and I Don't Even Own A Television. Essentially, I'm a fan of Michael Hobbes and a fan of podcasts complaining about terrible books, so I don't see how this could possibly be any more in my wheelhouse.
posted by kyrademon at 11:38 AM on November 5, 2022 [15 favorites]

I've been saving this because I adore Michael Hobbes so much. Please tell me he goes full Methodology Queen and breaks down why all the stats in Freakonomics are ridiculous. Michael Hobbes on a methodology rant is the best thing ever.
posted by selfmedicating at 11:47 AM on November 5, 2022 [26 favorites]

Spotify is such a mess, I tried to find this the other day by searching for its exact title; and, nope. Yet there it is. Thanks!
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:29 PM on November 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Looking forward to adding this to my queue. My only other bookcast is Reading Glasses, which is very positive and welcoming, so this will be a fun change.
posted by Night_owl at 12:51 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love this podcast, not least because the production is good: the sound is even and listenable, the editing keeps it tight, and it's consistent.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:00 PM on November 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've been saving this because I adore Michael Hobbes so much. Please tell me he goes full Methodology Queen and breaks down why all the stats in Freakonomics are ridiculous. Michael Hobbes on a methodology rant is the best thing ever.

Yep. It was really entertaining, as someone who read Freakonomics back in high school when it came out but hasn't revisited since then. Economists, man....
posted by sciatrix at 2:46 PM on November 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's available on Google Podcasts too.
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:50 PM on November 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Does it mention the Moustache Of Understanding though?
posted by mhoye at 2:57 PM on November 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

This feels like a craft beer scenario. Yeah sure craft beer but like if I'm at an airport, I buy the stupid popular book knowing I'm not reading Thomas Pynchon's V., I sit at. Chili's, have some wings and wait for my flight.

I enjoyed Freakanomics when it came out, I enjoyed Black Swan. I have serious issues with them now but they lead me to a passion for finance and business and I have them to thank for that.

In school I read some stupid pop philosophy book that lead me to Karl Popper and Wittgenstein. If you had sold me Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus beforehand at an airport bookstore I'd be like turned off by philosophy.
posted by geoff. at 3:28 PM on November 5, 2022 [7 favorites]

The last time I flew somewhere, I ordered some fajitas at a Chili's. The tortillas were so dry they cracked when I tried to fold them, the salsa and sour cream and shredded cheese and whatnot came in a little plastic container with a tv-dinner-style lid to pull off, and the chicken pieces were all of a uniform width and depth that made me think they'd been extruded. There were no menus, just a sticker on the table with a QR code.

The peppers and onions were okay.

And, on the one hand, I'm guessing 'airport Chili's' might be worse than regular Chili's, but, on the other, I'm never eating at Chili's again.

(Because I'm snooty across multiple axes, I always bring my own reading material to the airport. This time it was secondhand paperbacks of Eric Schlosser's 'Command and Control,' about nuclear weapon safety and one particular incident, and Jeffrey Toobin's 'American Heiress,' about Patty Hearst. Fun books, at least by my definition, but not complete junk food. With used paperbacks, I don't feel bad about leaving them in a coffeeshop or AirBNB when I'm finished with 'em, which is a nice bonus.)
posted by box at 3:59 PM on November 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

Metafilter: Snooty across multiple axes.
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 4:01 PM on November 5, 2022 [38 favorites]

I think the dichotomy between "easily digested" and "accurate to the literature at the time of publication" is a pretty false one, though. Consider, say, Carl Zimmer's At the Water's Edge, which tells a really engaging, easy to follow story while also being clear about what we do and don't actually know. Consider anything Mary Roach or Deborah Blum have ever written. There's so many weird and wonderful things in our world, and people too--why does "light and interesting" also have to be dubiously sourced?

It's possible to be both accurate and engaging, but you wouldn't know it from the men--and it is nearly always men--who write this kind of stuff. It's particularly gross considering the kinds of misrepresentation in the service of conservatism in Freakonomics itself, especially on racial lines. And again: I really liked the book when I was in high school! It wasn't as sticky for me as, say, The Blind Watchmaker or any of a number of population geneticsy books, but it was definitely a thing I thought was cool that made me want to look into big data sets. I just want those data sets to be either reliable or at least hedged with the known caveats, you know?

I kind of want to do something like this as a Metafilter Book Club now, honestly; I've been sitting through a lot of behavioral genomics talks with extremely bad methodology problems and kind of reflexively lazy thinking for the past few months, and I'm itchy to hone my claws on something related. But I'm also the kind of weird who reflexively checks myself in the lit to the point of paranoia, which has lead to some pretty frustrating discoveries when I go hunting for sources in my own field of research and find that the textbook examples are based on, like, personal reports from some guy thirty years ago. I think digging into that sort of thing is a good habit to be in, anyway--it's always useful to be aware of what the actual underpinnings of the work you're looking at is, especially if it seems pretty intuitive at first blush.
posted by sciatrix at 4:11 PM on November 5, 2022 [26 favorites]

This is extremely a Michael Hobbes cohosted podcast; you could tell me that it was a guest-hosted You're Wrong About episode and I'd have believed you. This is not a complaint.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:19 PM on November 5, 2022 [10 favorites]

Looking back I think one of the most harmful bestsellers ever was 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save The Earth. It taught my generation that we can reverse huge environmental harms through individual consumer choices. This kind of thinking stems from a total misunderstanding of the (limited) power of boycotts, which historically have had impact only within the context of larger movements working on multiple fronts. Like, if boycotts had been the only method we fought apartheid, it would still be in place. There was an armed wing of the ANC. The grape boycott was part of a grape-worker strike effort, not just some free floating shopping thing.

I just googled and learned the author of 50 Simple Things (who was just some dude who had previously had success writing the Bathroom Reader series) recognized the whole concept sucked, disavowed it, and re-wrote the whole thing with his kids to focus on systemic change.
posted by latkes at 4:32 PM on November 5, 2022 [24 favorites]

It’s on Overcast, too.
It's available on Google Podcasts too.

...and here's an RSS feed for weirdos like me: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2040953.rss
posted by bigendian at 4:43 PM on November 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

> Please tell me he goes full Methodology Queen and breaks down why all the stats in Freakonomics are ridiculous

You will be satisfied.

At one point they describe the books they're going to do as books you pick up at the airport when you forgot to charge your Kindle, which is perfect.

(The most recent meal I had at an airport was lobster roll, and it was surprisingly good.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:42 PM on November 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

I remember reading a long time back The Guerrilla Guide to Air Travel. The author recommended, as reading material, trashy novels with lots of sex. The reasoning was that the sex scenes would hold your attention while the trashiness would allow for frequent interruptions. Ideal for airplanes. Given my habits I probably would bring Wittgenstein. And then regret it.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:08 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ok I like cheesy genre schlock for airports too but can we also talk about the harm done by Dan Brown books then?
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:06 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Shooting fish in a barrel.

Shooting cyclopean -- in every sense of the word -- fish in a barrel.

Given my habits I probably would bring Wittgenstein. And then regret it.

But at least, one hopes, you would not be in the long line to the restroom.

Of that of which we cannot Oh! Oh! Oh! we must Ah... Ah... Ah...
posted by y2karl at 7:13 PM on November 5, 2022

I used to schlep an entire bag of books and cds on vacation. I still prefer physical media (especially print) but you can’t beat a kindle for travel.

I once read, or at least skimmed, the entire collected Dragonlance Chronicles on a six hour flight as a kid. I was enraptured.

Reading very sexually charged material on a plane sitting next to a stranger feels impolite to me even on a kindle. But I’m out of step judging by what people feel comfortable putting up on their tablets and laptops for the perusal of transient seatmates. (I’m the opposite of prude but it feels unconsented and who wants to be creepy?)
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:31 PM on November 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

....see, I've always believed that if you snoop on someone else's reading material and you find it to be uncomfortably racy, that's a you problem. It's like complaining that you can see your neighbors are naked when you're peeking through their curtains.

I actually will have a flight to catch to San Diego on Friday, during which I'm pretty sure I'll be continuing to indulge the Christopher Moore kick I've been on unless I decide to nap.
posted by sciatrix at 9:51 PM on November 5, 2022 [7 favorites]

I love Hobbes but I do find so often that his methodological critiques are misplaced. All research is conducted under severe constraints and our job are researchers are to acknowledge those constraints. Hobbes often treats those constraints as invalidating the entirety of the research design. Look at the Maintenance Phase episode on Worm Wars. He’s right that the one weird trick of deworming as a way to induce development is wrong, but if you weren’t deeply familiar with the debate and trained in social science methods, you would listen that episode and conclude that all that research on deworming was mere pseudoscience. The reality is far more complicated than that and the mere presence of a debate and critique within a discipline does not invalidate all research that is critiqued. Everything has flaws.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:00 PM on November 5, 2022 [13 favorites]

Okay, I'm now fixated on the guns vs. pools bit, because I feel like I encounter that a lot, and maybe it was Freakonomics that popularized that?

I will agree with the podcast, it seems relevant to consider "households with guns" vs. "number of guns" like, there are famously more guns than people in the USA. I think the same isn't true for pools.

The relevant Freakonomics quote:

In 1997 alone (the last year for which data are available), 742 children under the age of 10 drowned in the United States last year alone. Approximately 550 of those drownings -- about 75 percent of the total -- occurred in residential swimming pools. According to the most recent statistics, there are about six million residential pools, meaning that one young child drowns annually for every 11,000 pools.

About 175 children under the age of 10 died in 1998 as a result of guns. About two-thirds of those deaths were homicides. There are an estimated 200 million guns in the United States. Doing the math, there is roughly one child killed by guns for every one million guns.

Thus, on average, if you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

The math is relying on comparing one gun to one swimming pool. I'll grant the average number of guns in a household with guns is probably lower than 100, but it's also probably higher than the number of pools in a household with pools. If you have a pool, I think you're way more likely to have just one pool, compared to having a single gun.

https://www.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh241/files/archives/pressreleases/1997/GUNSRIB.HTM

Thirty-five percent of U.S. households own guns,

That's from 1997, it's apparently closer to 44% now, but if we're using Freakonomics stats, I'll try to match the year.

https://tasks.illustrativemathematics.org/content-standards/tasks/234

If I accept that as correct, that there were 97 million U.S. households, then 200 million guns would result in 2 guns per household. But if I accept 35% of households had a gun, then 33 million households had one or more guns. Compared to 6 million households with pools. (Just using Freakonomics' numbers, here. I'm assuming the number of households with multiple pools is small enough to not throw the numbers too far off.)

So if I also take the number of deaths as accurate, I can still take "100 times more likely" down to 16.5 times, instead.

https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/facts/index.html

• More children ages 1–4 die from drowning than any other cause of death.
• For children ages 5–14, drowning is the second leading cause of unintentional injury death after motor vehicle crashes.

Unless there's a reason to think 5-15 year-olds are in increased danger of dying in motor vehicle crashes, it sounds like 1-4 year-olds are at increased risk of drowning.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db413.htm#section_2

Throughout the period, rates were highest for those aged 1–4, although they decreased from 3.2 per 100,000 in 1999 to 2.4 in 2019.

From a graph there, the drowning deaths for 1-4 year-olds is about four times higher than for 5-13 year-olds.

So this is the other point, that Freakonomics uses stats for children under the age of 10 without making any smaller distinctions, even though 1-4 year-olds account for a big part of the drowning stats.

If I look at "unintentional firearm fatalities":

https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-019-0220-0

We estimate 430 unintentional firearm fatalities in the United States per year. The rate is highest for older children to young adults, ages 10 to 29

https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s40621-019-0220-0.pdf

From there, unintentional deaths for ages 0-9 are 138 and for ages 10-19 are 306.

So it sounds like older children are at highest risk of dying from firearms and younger children are at highest risk of dying from drowning? So was Freakonomics' choice to focus on children under 10 a completely arbitrary cut-off or something they chose because it gave the results they wanted?
posted by RobotHero at 12:17 AM on November 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

RobotHero: So was Freakonomics' choice to focus on children under 10 a completely arbitrary cut-off or something they chose because it gave the results they wanted?

Considering that they lied about what the Romanian study said about the link between abortion legality and crime, I’m not going to give them any benefit of the doubt.
posted by Kattullus at 2:25 AM on November 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

So was Freakonomics' choice to focus on children under 10 a completely arbitrary cut-off or something they chose because it gave the results they wanted?

freakanomics’ whole shtick is “you might think x is true, but if we look at the data then y is really true” where it isn’t that y is counterintuitive exactly it’s that y is somehow unappealing to liberal sensibilities (not that they will ever admit it’s a political project). so i think they saw overall stats for gun deaths vs drownings and just went with it, and probably didn’t even look into further factors. for me it’s all the more infuriating since it’s so obvious that pools are dangerous for children who can’t swim, whereas guns are more dangerous at the age they become stronger swimmers since they’re more likely to be curious about them
posted by dis_integration at 5:16 AM on November 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

< Shooting fish in a barrel.>

Certainly true, but these are fish that need to be shot. I’m listening to the part where they talked about names and am getting my eyes opened about something that was so incredibly influential (not to me but others) - the author of that book apparently started with some assumptions and artfully wrote a book calculated to reinforce and justify the assumptions. That stuff never resonated with me at all because they were so snarky and blasé about it but lots of people believed it and found it justified their own historical assumptions about “those people”. From things like this book came popular assent for things like the “war on poverty”, “super predators”, the growth in prison populations, stop and frisk, not to mention the rise of some attorney named Giuliani (and so many others) to elected office espousing ideas like that.

Freakonomics lol.
posted by cybrcamper at 8:17 AM on November 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

(whispers) Freakonomics (/whispers)
posted by box at 9:28 AM on November 6, 2022 [8 favorites]

Freakonomics, for whatever reason, was just never on my radar -- nothing about it grabs me -- but I definitely crossed paths with The Secret and that PUA bullshit, both of which are pure cancer.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:55 PM on November 6, 2022

One thing that became apparent listening to the episode is that much of the bits of Freakonomics that I hadn't forgotten entirely I misremembered.
posted by ckape at 2:49 PM on November 6, 2022

And at Google podcasts ✓✓✓
posted by Schroder at 8:55 PM on November 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I had my quibbles but enjoyed the ep and would like twelve more right now thanks.

Here's the 5-4 podcast archive for more from the co-host.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:05 PM on November 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

freakanomics’ whole shtick is “you might think x is true, but if we look at the data then y is really true” where it isn’t that y is counterintuitive exactly it’s that y is somehow unappealing to liberal sensibilities (not that they will ever admit it’s a political project).

Worth noting, then, that it's the Republicans who continually forbid the (if memory serves me correctly) CDC from collecting data on gun casualties. If the Republicans don't want to collect data on a phenomenon, it's a pretty good bet -- Freakonomics notwithstanding -- that they themselves believe the data won't support their position.
posted by Gelatin at 4:49 AM on November 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Do they plan on covering Guns Germs and Steel in future? I have some issues with that book.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:40 PM on November 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

A bunch of historians had a Twitter thread about what else they should cover, and that was high on the list. During the Freakonomics episode, Hobbes mentions a couple of the books they’ve already recorded episodes about, but I can’t remember what they are.
posted by box at 5:23 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

That bit on the Korean air crew chapter in Outliers is something else. So incredibly dumb.
posted by Kattullus at 3:03 PM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Outliers

^ new ep up
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:09 PM on November 10, 2022