Some strange premonition kept me from reading Steven D. Levitt's 2005 social sciences best-seller Freakonomics until the accidental convergence of a three hour plane trip, a lack of reading material, and a 33% discount at the airport book store. Seldom have I found a book so irritating in so many ways.

Begin with the title, which was obviously tacked on after some marketing wiz brain-storming session. The text of the book barely mentions "freakonomics;" indeed, "freakonomics" is a word without meaning. The title implies, and was meant to imply, that Levitt has developed some new and useful analytical discipline dubbed "freakonomics." He hasn't. The book's title is intentionally misleading. It might as well have been called "Hot Sex Coast-to-Coast." Remarkably, the book's subtitle is also misleading; in fact, it's an outright lie: "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." The book explores cheating in Sumo wrestling, parents' naming strategies, the behavior of real estate agents, the demise of the Klu Klux Klan, the link between abortion and crime rates, and a few other diverse matters. These, needless to say, are not "everything." These aren't even most things. These aren't even the most important or the most interesting things, except perhaps to Levitt, and the book gives us significant reasons to doubt that. Judging from all the fawning hyperbole in the book by co-author and journalist Stephen Dubner, Levitt's primary interest appears to be having the world recognize him as a genius. Maybe he is, but this book sure doesn't show it.

In fact, he appears to be an Ethics Dunce, and not just because his book puts at least two misrepresentations on its cover. Levitt's mantra, at least as presented by Dubner, is that "Morality represents the world the way we'd like it to work, and economics represents the world the way it does work." Neither side of this statement is accurate. Morality is one tool we use to use to try to make the world work the way we think it should. (Ethics, which doesn't appear to interest Levitt at all, is the how we determine what kind of world would be best for us and everyone else.) Economics measures some aspects of how the world works, but its conclusions are misleading and incomplete without considering the influence of ethical factors like altruism, kindness, courage, compassion, sacrifice, respect, self-esteem and fairness. Levitt ignores these, leading him to "surprising" conclusions that are also shallow, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong.

For example, Levitt cites aggregate data showing that real estate agents, on average, take longer to sell their own houses than those of their clients, and thus get a better price. After explaining that significant increases in sales prices typically result in relatively small increases in agents' commissions, Levitt concludes that agents sacrifice their client's financial interests to get quicker commission checks, while using their expertise to maximize selling prices when their own properties are on the market. But his conclusions aren't supported by his own data.

First, he impugns the professionalism and integrity of the individuals in an entire profession based on the averages from group data that is ambiguous at best. How many realtors take less time to sell their own property? He doesn't say. What percentage take the same amount of time? We don't know. Maybe the average time is distorted by a minority of realtors who take far longer to sell their own property. We're never told. But a minority of real estate agents could easily tilt the average data, and yet the typical real estate agent might still be listing his client's property for the optimum amount of time. Making assumptions about individual group members based on group statistics is less economics than it is bigotry.Furthermore, Levitt doesn't consider the rather obvious fact that real estate agents' clients instructions and needs often dictate the time of sale. Quite conceivably, real estate professionals are less likely to put their homes up for sale under time pressure, or when the market is soft. The data doesn't reflect whether the agents advised their clients to wait longer before agreeing to sell, or informed them that their chances of a better price would increase if they did. Since Levitt's thesis is that financial incentives and self-interest drive human behavior, he never attempts to examine whether the data could be consistent with ethical and professional conduct. For a book that is, according to another jacket blurb, supposed to "dazzle" us, this is inexcusably sloppy.

The rest of the book proceeds in this mode. When Levitt's conclusions are correct, they were obvious to everyone but him: are we really supposed to be stunned that inner-city crime gangs are organized in a pyramid structure like the typical corporation? Didn't Levitt ever see "The Godfather"? When his conclusions aren't obvious, they are generally wrong or over-stated. In one howler, Levitt's explanation of why the Ku Klux Klan lost popularity and membership after Superman began battling it in comic books is that the public exposure of secret Klan code words and rituals (given to DC Comics by a Klan informant) robbed the Klan of its mystique and made it seem ridiculous. But the story is really a classic case study of the power of the psychological phenomenon, so critical in the formation of ethical values systems in an organization, group or culture, called "cognitive dissonance." Superman was culturally accepted as a powerful symbol of good, and once the character began fighting the Klan, the Klan's status on the values scale was bound to fall, and did. Superman was unequivocally good and if he opposed the Klan, then the Klan must be bad. Apparently it is too much to expect a brilliant economist to have a passing familiarity with psychology.

Levitt's one "Eureka!" is the thesis that garnered him media publicity before Freakonomics and led directly to the publication of the book: the fall in violent crime in the 1990's was brought about by the national legalization of abortion in the 1970s. He has identified a legitimate and logical link in the data, and deserves credit for this. However, his discussion of the implications of the data scream out for an ethical analysis, and his efforts to provide it are woefully inadequate:

"There are roughly 1.5 million abortions in the U.S. every year. For a person who believes that one newborn is worth 100 fetuses. Those 1.5 abortions would translate---dividing 1.5 million by 100--- into the equivalent of a loss of 15,000 human lives…about the same number of people who dies in homicides every year…and far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to legalized abortion."

"The trade-off,' Levitt concludes, "between higher abortion and lower crime rates is, by an economist's reckoning, terribly inefficient."

Just what is Levitt saying here? That it is "efficient" to trade off unborn lives for murder victims if the math works out? That if a person is "worth" one hundred fetuses (whatever that means), it is "efficient" to save two hundred fetuses by killing a doctor who performs abortions? Since when did lowering the crime rate, an unexpected and unintended result of abortion policy, become part of the justification for it? Is Levitt suggesting that if society determines that the mother's control over her own destiny is not itself sufficient to justify abortion on demand, then the reduction in the crime rate could be used to tip the scales?

The book leaves the strong impression that Levitt and Dubner don't care about the ethical implications of these and other matters that they glibly discuss before moving on to the next disjointed topic. But perhaps what is most infuriating about Freakonomics is that it does a lousy job at its most important objective, which is to advocate looking behind conventional wisdom and accepted presumptions using an open mind and probing questions. Bill James, the brave and brilliant baseball analyst and Sabermetrician, has done a far, far better demonstrating the right way to do this kind of analysis in his writings over the last 25 years, and he only writes about baseball. Ironically, the analytical methods revealed in his essays and books actually are applicable to "the hidden side of everything," but James, who is no Ethics Dunce and who doesn't need a journalist to put his ideas into compelling prose, has the integrity, modesty and sense to let readers discover this for themselves.