An Economics documentary might sound like the driest cinema experience one could ever subject themselves to, but having read the source material, I’m quietly excited to see the silver screen adaptation of Freakonomics, the 2005 bestseller penned by Economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner.
If you’re not a Social Science dilettante like I, Steven Levitt is to Economics what Malcolm Gladwell is to Psychology. They’re kinda like the marijuana of academia, an accessible gateway drug to the intellectually rigorous and dizzying data plots of hard science. Gladwell’s pop-psychology oeuvre (The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and New Yorker essay collection What The Dog Saw) in many ways, is a perfect compliment to Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics and unfortunately titled followup Superfreakonomics as both transform scientific case studies into engaging narrative devices while employing simple language, real world anecdotes and graspable concepts to elucidate the key principles of their respective fields.
Like the book, the film examines incentive, rationality and other drivers of human behavior through quirky case studies (What’s in a name? Why is a drug dealer like a fast food grunt?) with five separate segments helmed by some of the finest documentary makers in the world: Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp), Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), and Seth Gordon (The King of Kong).
Watch below…
