Stephen Dubner reports that Freakonomics is the 7th best-selling book for 2005. According to Nielsen BookScan, it is has sold 584,000 copies so far this year.
Freakonomics discusses the survey that Lott claims to have conducted in 1997, but that he appears to have fabricated. Lott says that eight Chicago university students made the phone calls for him. So why hasn't one of these students read Freakonomics and come forward to prove that Lott conducted a survey? You would think that students (or former students) from Chicago would be particularly likely to have read the book since Levitt is a professor there.
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From http://www.philcooke.com/book_publishing via mt's shared posts:
Here's the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies.…
Steven D. Levitt, the economist and author of Freakonomics, has made a living explaining counterintuitive notions to people on the basis of hidden incentives for human behavior. I haven't read Freakonomics, although it sounds interesting. My behavior is constrained by time. Maybe an incentive will…
Science has printed a letter from Lott (subscription required) responding to Science's editorial suggesting that the AEI should deal with Lott the same way that Emory dealt with Bellesiles:
Donald Kennedy's editorial "Research fraud and public policy" (18 April, p. 393) alleges that I made up a…
Have a look at at this interesting article, from The New Yorker, about the boom in Bible publishing:
The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles…
"reakonomics discusses the survey that Lott claims to have conducted in 1997, but that he appears to have fabricated."
Does the book talk about the controversy?
Your wording is kind of ambiguous. Appears to whom? The author or you? I agree it's a bogus survey, but if the book doesn't mention the controversy no one would call in. Just asking.
Yes, the book discusses the controversy over whether the survey was ever conducted.