Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 242pp, £20 ISBN 0713998067

As pro-choice advocates in the US gear up to fight the confirmation of John Roberts, the new presidential nominee to the Supreme Court, they might be advised to pick up a copy of Freakonomics, by the "rogue economist" Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, a journalist. In the most provocative chapter, the authors argue that the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v Wade decision, which established a constitutional right to abortion, accounts for much of the drop in crime across the US in the 1990s, because it prevented the births of millions of unwanted children likely to become criminals.

When Levitt first advanced this argument in 2001, he was fiercely criticised not just by the anti-abortion right but by the left as well, for suggesting that the poor are more likely to raise criminals. Yet Levitt seems impervious to the political ramifications of his work, and paradoxically the formidable curiosity and intellectual breadth that he displays in Freakonomics may win him many new enemies.

The book is organised arbitrarily, like a "treasure hunt", permitting the authors "to follow whatever freakish curiosities may occur to us". Levitt's interests are immediately attractive to non-specialists, and he and Dubner tackle them in a lively, conversational style. "What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?" they ask. Answer: the law of unintended consequences creates incentives for both groups to cheat. The introduction of "high-stakes" standardised testing, designed to hold schools accountable for the performance of pupils, has led certain teachers to correct pupils' answer sheets before submitting them. And the structure of sumo tournaments, in which competitors must win at least eight out of 15 matches to advance, encourages participants who have already secured eight victories to throw a bout to an opponent with just seven, in return for the other wrestler reciprocating the favour later on.

Levitt and Dubner cover much other fruitful ground, including economic transactions where one party is better-informed than the other (here applied to the Ku Klux Klan), the economics of crack dealing, and an investigation of how children's names correspond to race and social class. But it is unclear what they want readers to take away from their investigations. They hope that their audience will "become more sceptical of conventional wisdom", but the conventional wisdom they use as a background to their arguments is often a straw man. Is anyone surprised that some athletes cheat, that some funeral salesmen are unscrupulous, or that parents give their children names they associate with success?

If there is an idea unifying Freakono-mics, it is the centrality of incentives in determining human actions: the authors describe these as the "cornerstones of life". Surely a mind as powerful as Levitt's is capable of drawing conclusions about the nature of incentives from his wide-ranging study - why they evolve as they have and how they might be modified to encourage behaviour in accordance with social goals. If high-stakes testing encourages teachers to improve their students' performance artificially, should it be abolished? Do we really want to encourage abortions as a way to prevent crime?

For readers unfamiliar with the way economists think, Freakonomics is likely to be enlightening as well as entertaining. But those seeking an intellectual mother-lode at the end of the "treasure hunt" will surely be disappointed.

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