Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt gave a lecture at Colorado College about how economics can explain everything and credited the inspiration for his book: Jerry Seinfeld. Which explained perhaps why Levitt was stuck in the minutia.
The Colorado Springs audience spilled over two venues to hear the author because economics presents a particularly galling mystery as Americans face the plunging dollar, joblessness and a real estate bubble. A good deal of the audience left before the question and answer period perhaps as they realized that this trust fund tenured professor’s thesis was the equivalent of bizarro theory proving irrelevancies.
Levitt linked legalized abortions to decreased crime, instead of linking abortions to less poverty to less crime. He demonstrated how criminal hiearchy in the hood mirrored the management structure of McDonalds, instead of pondering which was a mirror and which was the model.