Yesterday I wrote a nondescript post on books that knock God.
It got more than 100 comments in a day — about as many as we have ever gotten on any post where we weren’t giving something away.
Now I know who buys these books: the same people who read this blog.
Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist who lives in New York City.
Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
Their book Freakonomics has sold 3 million copies worldwide. This blog, begun in 2005, is meant to keep the conversation going. Recurring guest bloggers include Ian Ayres, Jessica Hagy, Daniel Hamermesh, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Justin Wolfers.
Annika Mengisen is the site editor.
Dubner was first published at age 11 in Highlights magazine -- which, in honor of its 60th anniversary, has just recognized him as a “Highlights Kid” who went on to become a professional writer, as Dubner puts it: "for better or worse."
November 20
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I often get emails from blog readers asking me to shed light on some issue that, in the mind of the email writer, is a pressing social or economic issue. Sometimes it is a big issue like immigration or the financial crisis. More often it is something less mainstream, like election fraud or an unusual [...]
November 20
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It’s not an entire film (and it’s not in French), but two more readers, Talya and Pavle, have sent in a video of their song “Fannie Mae Eat Freddie Mac and Cheese,” which uses “freakonomics” as a sort of mantra. We like.
November 19
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Photo: Jamesfischer
These are the economic times that try men’s souls, and women’s too. In the past few months, a lot of people have seen their net worth fall substantially, and I’m sure more than a few have contemplated what would happen if they lost everything.
So we asked a group of people — Nick Mills, [...]
November 19
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Blog reader Nick Turner sent along this photo of a Body Shop ad in San Francisco:
Photo: Nick Turner
He was surprised that the ad guarantees fair-labor conditions for workers in Italy:
I thought fair-trade protections were for third-world workers. I
wonder how the Italians feel about this designation.
The ad didn’t outright call Italy third-world; but if it had, [...]
November 19
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Eric Oliver is a colleague of mine at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the absolutely fantastic book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic.
He has some new and interesting insights on the “Bigot Belt,” which he has generously written up for the Freakonomics blog.
The Bigot Belt
By Eric Oliver
A [...]
1. Go to Hulu.com. 2. Choose Arrested Development. 3. Start with Season 1 and then watch every episode of all three seasons. 4. You can thank me later. (SJD)
I can scarcely tell a scarlet tanager from Scarlett O’Hara, but The Life of the Skies had me transfixed from the first page. Jonathan Rosen -- who happens to be a friend of mine -- writes with astounding insight, wit, and compassion. The story he tells here is the best kind of odyssey, an outward journey that ends up highlighting the beauty and daring that live inside of us. Here's a Times review of the book, and here's an earlier blog post about the book and the power of suggestion. (SJD)
Even if you don’t have a son fighting in Iraq, even if you don’t read poetry, even if you think you are immune to the power of a mother’s lament – pick up The Warrior and read it right away. Fran Richey has written some of the most powerful stories I’ve ever encountered. It is obvious that her life was changed by living these poems; yours may well be changed by reading them. (SJD)
In his last walk of the series, the author manages to avoid stepping out into thin air.
All New Yorkers develop tricks that allow them to stay ahead of the pack in daily life. Here I offer some of mine in a couple of handy charts.
From 1 to 25 of 32 Comments
“Now I know who buys these books: the same people who read this blog.”
— discordian…or just about anyone who post on an internet message board. Every board I’ve been a memeber of has had a good share of religion bashers preaching their non-belief… either seriously or as trolls.
yep. add one more. i read em, and didn’t take the time to comment yesterday. i guess have an extra 2 minutes today.
— busterAlas, not all 100+ were discrete posts - many were dupes (in a lot of ways). We wouldn’t want people to think you were that popular. Any mention of G-d is sure to raise hackles, plain and simple. My next book will have a now agnostic, accused pedophile former priest robbing all of Las Vegas to get money for a small child’s life saving operation.
— gehrig4Ocean’s 14 - The Final Cut has already been optioned to G. Clooney.
I think you invented the inverse of your friend Pinker’s “Dangerous Questions.” His questions are inflammatory because the subject is taboo and “should not be talked about.”
Your question was inflammatory for a smaller reason: the subject is in the zeitgeist, so framing it as bland was disingenuous.
— kahNot too suprising–the Freakeconmics target market probably tends towards the rational, analytical, somewhat wonkish end of the spectrum.
Given everything that religion’s been responsible for in the U.S. over the last few years, it’s pretty easy to understand why it’s a sore spot with that kind of community.
— tomrlutongYour question was inflammatory for a smaller reason: the subject is in the zeitgeist, so framing it as bland was disingenuous.
I doubt Levitt was being disingenuous. I suspect his puzzlement was entirely sincere.
— El ChristadorPeople who read this blog are probably also very analytical. Religion has a tendency to creep into people’s everyday lives in surprising ways (esp. policy decisions) and nothing fails to stand up to analytical scrutiny like religion.
— DrwgYou have to remember that the average blog comment or message board post is made by the kind of person who would comment on a blog or post on a message board. This is a small subset of the general population.
— kipIt’s not that I hate religious believers. It’s that God has been used to justify all sorts of policies from politics to war, and atheists are getting sick of this irrational justification. People don’t believe in system-cell research, because they believe embryos has a “soul,” whatever that is. People like the late Jerry Falwell say that September 11 and Katrina happened because America tolerates homosexuality. What’s worse is that millions of people listen to that fanatical, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, “toad of a man.” As you have probably guessed, I own God is Not Great and the God Delusion. We’re simply tired of religious bulling and irrational legal power of it.
— 58saavedraSo people cannot possible think that an embryo is a person without feeling the need to make it a religious issue? Got it.
— Jacob_yI guess you can form some broad categories to hold ‘the kind’ of people who buy and read these books, but as with many topics, as soon as you start generalizing you start losing accuracy.
The very notion that these are all ‘religion is bad’ books is an unwarranted prejudgment. Some are, others are more nuanced.
“Those who would defend religious belief using logic, understand neither religion nor logic.”
— MackThe insanity has spread farther than that. It’s even illegal in some places to perform experiments on human beings without their consent, because of airy-fairy religious arguments and dubious imagined metaphysical quantities like “rights” and such like.
— El ChristadorIt shouldn’t surprise you that the guy who claims abortion leads to a decrease in crime, no matter how correct he might be, would have a disproportionate number of atheists in his audience.
— themaroonSome of us simpleton theists also are regular readers here.
— caveatBettorThat’s too bad. I can only imagine the audience for those books as being smarter-than-thou in-your-face-about-your-personal-beliefs types.
— junkbondsNo, we are people who are sick and tired of taking a back seat to religious people.
For years we have been content to keep our “lack of faith” to ourselves. It is the believers who won’t leave us alone.
What are the hot topics in America right now?
1. Stem Cell Research
2. Gay rights and marriage
3. Evolution
4. Education
5. War
Every one of these issues are being hijacked by people of faith not by people of science and reason.
Richard
— BrotherRichardhttp://lifewithoutfaith.com
A bridge recently collapsed killing several and injuring many. The president quickly goes on television saying that his “thoughts and prayers” are with the victims. We all know that me means that literally.
Imagine that the president is a Scientologist and instead said that his “thoughts and telepathic communications with Xenu our alien overlord” are with the victims. Wouldn’t that scare you Dr. Levitt?
Seriously, Xenu killed millions because of an overpopulation problem, God drowned all humans (and animals) because they “sinned”.
Dr. Levitt fails to see the importance because when he sees the word “God” he imagines a philosophical abstraction, but those of us outside the ivory tower know that when the average GI Joe says “God” he means the one that brought the 7 plagues to Egypt.
— xanaduxanadu,
Worse than that is the survivors who say God helped them get out of the cars. Of course, God could have helped them not fall off a bridge to begin with.
Also, if God did save some, what process does he go through to decide who is worthy of saving.
Forgive me for deciding not to wait till I get to heaven to ask God.
Richard
— BrotherRichardhttp://lifewithoutfaith.com
Having looked at those books, tempted to buy them but knowing the lack of logic would infuriate me, I passed by.
I thought about buying them because I wanted to know about the arrogance that matches that of the worst religious fundamentalist.
Most people with Christian or Muslim or Jewish moral guidance do not want to control the same-gender couples or other nonsense, and many of us were devastated by the 2004 election results.
— jane2Does Niel Barsky believe in God?
Oh, wrong thread. Sorry.
— Eli CashFirst of all I think its a good thing for people to be educated on the subject either way.
Interestingly enough it seems like many people are advocating the “mean God” argument, which is the idea that God is fake and the people who made up God decided that he would he would not be just or fair but do what they dreamed up, probably for their own goals. The problems with this series of thought is that it neglects how many believers have considered the text in the Bible and reflected on whether God is just. Obviously many believers feel that God is just and right and holy. So the mean God argument boils down to people being so convinced that the Judeo- Christian God is real that no matter what is actions are they are moral and just. Or that believers simply don’t know about the God of the Old Testament. So basically the people who know the most about the bible believe God is good and Holy and the people who don’t know much about the Bible and criticize it think God’s actions are immoral and unjust.
I think people are rational and millions of people over 2000 years would not choose to believe in a supposed just God if the Bible portrayed him as a tyrant. So its kinda fruitless for non believers to hark on about Old Testament stories, when the believers already know and understand the stories contexts and meanings
— hooksinthewaterThese books are simply reinforcement mechanisms. They preach to the choir. As for the spike in comments, the blog crossed over from the non political to the political. I see the same phenomenon at other blogs. Nonpolitical entries generate few comments, but the comments invariably spike when politics is the subject. Some subjects are difficult for the layman to comment on, but everyone has an opinion on politics.
— feeblemindyou should offer one of those books as a prize- then you would get the world record blog response!
— frankendufAssuming for the moment that the publishers are right, and that the fad on issuing these books reflects a corresponding fad for buying them, you could run an interesting experiment by waiting until the publishing fad has faded, then issue an almost identical blog entry. It should allow you to separate the baseline desire of readers to respond to similar blog entries from the spike of interest generated during the life of the fad.
The results might be interesting.
— robertplamondonPeople like to buy books that reinforce their opinions on controversial subjects. It also gives them more ammunition to use the next time the get into an argument about the subject.
— ctcarton