There's an interesting, if long-winded, critique of Freakonomics by John Dinardo. A google search will easily find it, I think there may be a shorter published version. It raises interesting issues about doing popular treatments of economic research and highlights some of the pitfalls that await the scholar.Caveat author!
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Jim B. told me this brilliant story of how Terence Gorman, an outstanding Irish economist dealt with a refutation of one of the points in his paper. It is recounted below from one of his obituaries by Christopher Bliss in Oxford (taken from Oxford website)
Christopher Bliss
Nuffield Professor of International Economics, Nuffield College
All those who have spoken before me have talked of Terence as a great economist. And that he was such is unquestionably the case. Yet the description leaves me dissatisfied. It feels somewhat like saying that Napoleon was a man of small stature; a proposition indubitably correct, yet very far from being the most interesting thing that one can say about the individual concerned. A more important truth is that Terence was a philosopher, a deep deep thinker, and a man to whose thought the term "penetrating" really applies. Penetrating is a term that trips easily off the tongue, yet Terence shows what it really means. It is the ability to go deeper and to keep on tunnelling long after others would have given up. I will shortly discuss an example of this from Terence's work.
Clontarf Revisited has been mentioned. I have it here. It is so short that I could read it all, though two extracts will serve my purpose. I start with the background. A paper by Terence on aggregation drew from Professor Karl Vind a sharp comment in which he claimed that a key result of Debreu's had not been cited. Terence responded in the mildest terms, but while confessing to fault, he suggested moderate amendments to Vind's account of the issues. It was the basis for a ceasefire agreement. However Professor Vind did not want a ceasefire; he wanted unconditional surrender, as his further response made clear. Terence did not disguise his exasperation.
"Now I know how the Irish scholar monks felt as they crouched in their round towers while the Danes rampaged below, burning their books. Observe Professor Vind with his double-headed axe, chastising me with one blade for not using an argument in my apologia which, so far as it spells it out, is precisely that in the lemma he criticises, and cutting the tail off my closing sentence with the other."
Later in the same piece, Terence as a superstar Absent-minded Professor:
"To make matters worse, I now learn that a referee, whose comments I promptly lost, made exactly the same point as Professor Vind. If, as I strongly suspect, he was Professor Vind, I can well understand his martial mood, and I am grateful that it is directed against such a small part of my paper."
I am inclined to think that the wonderful self-portrait that Terence gives us in the Clontarf piece is good for more than just the skirmish with Karl Vind. Terence must have felt on numerous occasions like an Irish scholar monk watching savages burning his books. The Danes were economist colleagues above all, and others also, including a one-time Warden of this college. The scholar monk feels besieged but also distinctly superior, as operating on a higher level than the rude mob around. It is impossible to be as good as Terence without knowing how good you are, and when Terence offered cutting insights and comments as if they were trivial and obvious, he cannot always have failed to appreciate that he was in a higher gear than everyone else on the track.
Iowa eggs have been mentioned and they can well illustrate the elevated level from which Terence was forced to view his colleagues. He was visiting the State University of Iowa in the 1950s, when the department received a visit from a local bigwig. This character was shown around and what the department was doing was explained to him. It left him singularly unimpressed. In a closing address he told the department: "What you guys should be working on is why Iowa eggs command such a low price". It seemed obvious to Terence why this should be so, because Iowa eggs are of low quality. Most of us would have arrived quickly at the same conclusion and left it there. High supply, low demand, means a low price. In the Foundations of Economic Analysis Paul Samuelson writes:
"If this were all that economists had to offer they would be parrots taught to say supply and demand."
Sadly most of us are parrots most of the time. But Terence was never a parrot. He thought more deeply and saw that a simple supply and demand account cannot work. There is no such thing as demand for Iowa eggs. We do not go into a New York diner and say, "Give me an Iowa egg sunny side up". If there is no demand for eggs by source as such, how are we to treat the market for eggs? What matters is quality, measured by a relatively small number of variables (freshness, flavour, colour, etc.). Terence had invented (discovered?) the characteristics approach to demand theory.
I am not certain who first used this approach. In the 1950s Dick Stone at the DAE in Cambridge modelled the demand for alcoholic beverages in the UK based on two leading variables: alcohol, with a positive weight, and liquid volume, with a negative weight. So full-strength vodka is great, and near-beer is awful. Terence saw the generality and power of this method. What is certain is that Kelvin Lancaster, whose name is most frequently associated with the model, is not its inventor.
It is a tired cliché to say on an occasion like this: "We shall not see his like again". In truth we are all completely unique, and not one of us will or could be replaced by anyone closely similar. Yet in mourning the loss of Terence I feel the passing of a generation of economists, from which Terence was a golden peak. They belong to a time when economics was far less professionalized than it is today, when graduate teaching was haphazard, and when there were only a few books worth reading. It is always a mistake to recall the past in fond nostalgic terms. There was a big downside to that amateurish and disordered organization of economics. How often one encountered tiresome people who thought that they knew everything, and who in truth had never received a basic training in the discipline. Even so, the changes that have scythed away the bottom have also flattened the top. When economists came to the subject little equipped by training, putting to work whatever they had, and casting the subject as they saw fit; then those who brought genius could do miraculous things. What could then happen is demonstrated by Terence's life. A cause for joy and celebration, and something never to be imitated.
The tone of this (if not the content) is reminiscent of the Shakner critique of Fehr. Another famous example of this is Gigerenzer's critiques of Kahneman which lead to an increasingly heated exchange. Critiqueing is one thing but it is unclear why authors sometimes go one step further and really put the boot in.
I know Terence well.A wonderful man.
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