Philobiblon

…when it finishes with a “who can unfold their Brompton the fastest” competition.

But, no, that wasn’t the highlight of the evening – an interesting discussion of the book Freakonomics, which I also learnt continues to be developed in blog form.

As the blurb goes, the book shows “that economics is, at root, the study of incentives – how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing”.

As you might expect, the economists among our gathering were more sold on the thesis than the others – there’s no doubt it has some interesting things to say, particularly about the human desire to find cause and effect from inadequate data, but I was among those who thought it didn’t adequately address the issue that what answer you get still depends on what question you ask, and you might entirely miss the salient question.

There’s also the issue that to collect the sort of data sets they are talking about, you can only use it to explain past events – that is what happened in the particular set of circumstances of the past, but human societies are so complex that you can’t “run the same experiment” again and necessarily expect to get the same result just by changing one variable, because so many other things will have changed. So how can you use this approach, rigorously at least, to frame policy and politics?

But one clear choice emerged from the evening – CafeMed in Kentish Town serves a very nice vegetarian meze plate…