Global crisis just a 'blip': Freakonomics author

No matter how bad the global financial turmoil seems, don't worry --
there's no doomsday looming on the horizon, says Freakonomics author
Steven Levitt.
Levitt, known for his startling and provocative observations about
human behaviour, has comforting words for those alarmed about Europe's debt crisis and the sluggish US economy.

"It doesn't feel like 'The End'," said Levitt, 44, a leading professor of economics at the University of Chicago, who was on a lightning 48-hour trip to India for a speaking engagement.
"The US economy is even growing a little," Levitt noted, referring to a two percent expansion in the last quarter.
In
fact, "economies around the world have grown so much since World War
Two, -- unless there's something horrific on the horizon which I don't
see -- people will look back on these days as nothing more than a blip,"
he told AFP.
"We're certainly not looking at something like the Great Depression," added Levitt, who co-authored the best-selling Freakonomics and its much-acclaimed sequel SuperFreakonomics.
Levitt,
who revels in the tag of a "rogue economist" challenging conventional
wisdom, said people were also far too worried about terrorism.
While
governments across the world pump huge resources into tackling
terrorism, it is only a "minor problem in the larger scheme of things",
he argued.
"We can't ignore the fact that many more people die in
car crashes each year -- in fact it really puts to shame (the casualty
toll from) terrorist attacks.
"It is only our reaction to
terrorism that is so extreme that it makes the problem look bigger than
it actually is," said Levitt, who in 2003 won the John Bates Clark Medal as the most influential economist in America under the age of 40.
Despite
his successful career, he says he has "never been proficient in math"
and had to struggle with the subject all through school.
When he was admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do his doctorate, he realised "a terrible mistake had been made" because he had such trouble doing the maths.
"But they had had a problem with student suicides at MIT and didn't like to flunk anyone.
"Also, failing someone involved a lot of paperwork which professors didn't like so they kept tossing me on to the next year."
Levitt
says he has an enormous appetite for probing the riddles of life and
decides his subjects through personal experiences and the incongruities
that he sees around him.
"I just follow my nose to look at events and circumstances and draw conclusions," he said.
He
is known for applying economic reasoning to unusual real-world topics
and coming up with counter-intuitive conclusions, such as the fact that
many drug dealers live with their mothers because they just don't earn
that much.
He also created a stir by suggesting that the
elimination of unwanted pregnancies helps reduce the population of
would-be criminals.
He compares his interest in "freakonomics"
with the work of his father -- a world-renowned medical expert in
intestinal gas who is known in some quarters as the "King of Farts".
His
father was told he did not have much talent for medical research but
there was one area desperate for scientists -- intestinal gas -- and so
he applied himself in that field and became a leading voice.
"When
you're not good enough to compete on an equal footing with other
people, you've got to find that niche nobody else wants to take up. What
I do (in economics) parallels my father's career in gas," Levitt said.
On
this visit to India -- his first -- he says he had been particularly
taken with the chaos. "It's amazing the country functions at all."
"But
it must be doing something right -- the economy is growing like crazy,"
he said, referring to the 7.5 percent forecast growth rate for the
year.




Source:

AFP Global Edition