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Tavis: Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are authors of a unique new book about economics called "Freakonomics." Steven Levitt is a professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. That's V-E-N. Stephen Dubner, P-H-E-N, is a writer--

Stephen Dubner: That's the better way.

Tavis: Stephen Dubner, P-H-E-N, is a writer and contributor for "The New York Times" and the "New Yorker." As I mentioned at the outset, "Freakonomics" has been on "The New York Times" bestseller list since the spring. Steven and Stephen, nice to have you both here.

Dubner: Thanks for having us.

Steven Levitt: Good to be here.

Tavis: I knew you guys had a hit on your hands when at my church, weeks ago, some, you know--people start walking up to me saying, "Have you read this book "Freakonomics?"

Dubner: We sent people to your church.

Tavis: Is that what you did? Ha ha ha! People started posting me up at church asking me, "When are you gonna have these guys on the show?" So I'm glad you're here. Um, this is a fascinating piece of work. Where did the idea--'cause you take Steven's work, a lot of it, and translate it into the pages of the book. Where did the idea come to wanna work with this guy?

Dubner: I had been sent by "The New York Times Magazine" to write an article about him, and I actually said no 2 or 3 times 'cause he was famous for having done this one study that showed a link between R... vs. Wade, the legalization of abortion, and the drop in crime a generation later, which maybe--

Tavis: We can talk about that. It's on my blue card right here.

Dubner: And I said no because I had read about that, 'cause it was controversial at the time. I thought most academics, most economists, only have one big idea, and I thought that one's been done. But I was in Chicago, and I went to talk to him, and I spent 3 days there. He was miserable by the end because I asked a lot of questions, and he doesn't like to answer them, and I came away from that realizing he is just not only a great economist and scholar, but a very creative and counterintuitive in the way that journalists like us are dying to find, people who can tell stories that happen to be true because they're built on data.

Tavis: Tell me about who, as a writer, you take the work of a guy with numbers, an economist--I mean, the stuff that they do most of us never understand, and they're not very good, with all due respect, Steven, they're not very good at translating that kind of stuff. So how did you figure out, in terms of a style, how to make this interesting enough that folk at my church would be running up to me saying, "Get these guys on the show?"

Dubner: Well, in Steve's defense, he is a pretty good writer for an economist. Which is like saying I'm a pretty good basketball player, which I'm not, particularly. But what he is really good at is telling stories, and you tell stories that are built around the data. And so really, that's the answer to this book or to any book is that you might have a lot of interesting things to say, you might have a lot of numbers to back them up, but you need to build stories with narratives and with characters. So when we tell the story about why do crack dealers still live with their moms, we really build this story in the book around the guy, this graduate student named Sudhir Venkatesh, who went into this neighborhood in Chicago and basically lived with this crack gang for 5 or 6 years. Once you, as a reader, get your mind around this character and want to follow him and find out the truths that that leads to, I think it's a whole lot more interesting. And then the data that comes after it makes you say, "Ah. That's why it makes sense." That's why it's interesting instead of starting with the regression analysis at the top of the story.

Tavis: I'm laughing--back to my friends at church walking up to me--one of them walked up to me and quoted almost chapter and verse the whole story. "You must read this chapter about why crack dealers live with their mamas, and you gotta get these guys on the show." So I'm laughing here, all these folk at church saying this to me. That said, Steven, I want to get to you, and I want to run through a list. I had to write these things down 'cause there's so many in the book. I just want to throw some of these things out that you have actually done very studious work on. But tell me where you get the idea--because the stuff that you come up with to even think about trying to figure out, is like from another planet. Where do you get these ideas from?

Levitt: Oh, I just wander around. Nothing better to do. I look at the world and I try to observe it. I think I'm observant, and one thing is I don't worry about what other people are gonna think. 'Cause a lot of times we're so high-bound by morality and concerns about political correctness. I just try to find interesting questions, and often the most interesting questions are the ones that no one else is asking because they're afraid of the answers. I mean, I know you've had Roland Fryer on the show before. He and I are asking a lot of tough questions about race, and we're asking because we want to know the truth, not because we want to impress people at cocktail parties.

Tavis: For those who heard that name and were asking, "Where have I heard that name, Roland Fryer?" He's the young African American brother you saw on this show some weeks back who's at Harvard, and the story was written about him in "New York Times Magazine." Stephen Dubner is the guy who actually wrote that story on Roland Fryer who was on this program some time ago. So, professor, can I start to throw some things at you to figure out where you got these ideas from? So, Stephen, P-H, mentions crack dealers living with their mama. What in God's earth got your attention to make you wanna look at why crack dealers live with their mamas? Where did that come from?

Levitt: Well, it was just fortunate meeting Sudhir Venkatesh. He's an ethnographer, a sociologist who'd been living with a crack gang. So I'm a numbers guy, and what could be more interesting than studying how the financial sides, the economic side of a gang works? Nobody knows anything about that. So when I met Sudhir I said, "You know, you wouldn't have any data on, you know, prices they're paying for cocaine, or how much they're paying to bribe the police, or what they're paying in wages?" He's like, "Yeah. They offered me all that data, but I don't know what to do with data, so I didn't get it." I said, "Well, get the data." Two days later, he's got the data, and it was the most unequal co-authoring partnership in the world. He spent 6 years living and, you know, risking his life in the inner city, and I just sat in my office with an Excel spreadsheet, typed in a few numbers and had a data set to work with.

Tavis: What's the value of what you learned about that? Why do I care about that?

Levitt: I think it has some public policy relevance. The one thing is could the government go in and give summer jobs that paid $8.00 an hour to inner-city kids and hope that's gonna solve the gang problem? I think the answer's no. That's not gonna solve the gang problem. Because these kids aren't making a lot of money now. The reason they're in the gang is 'cause they're shooting for the top. It's a tournament. If they can really make it, rise to the top of the gang, they'll make 6 figures.

And they know that. That's why they're participating. It doesn't matter if you give them $8.00 or $10 an hour. You know, unless there is some path that leads kids out of the ghetto other than the gang or sports or something, then that's not gonna be the answer.

Tavis: Another one of your famous undertakings. You did a study that proved, found, that swimming pools are a hundred times more likely to kill a child than a gun.

Levitt: Yeah, particularly swimming pools. If you just pick a gun at random in the United States, pick a swimming pool at random in the United States, and you go and see how likely they are to kill a child, the swimming pool is a hundred times more likely to kill the child than the gun. And I think people aren't aware of that. That's a perfect example for public policy. People fret about guns all the time. Not that guns aren't dangerous, and guns are killing a lot of adults, but in terms of children, swimming pools are a real danger. 500 kids a year are dying in swimming pools. 150 are being shot by guns. And yet there are 200 million guns in the U.S. and only 150 are being used each year to kill children.

Dubner: A big part of that, too, is that when a child gets killed by a gun, it's tragic by its nature and by its nature it makes the TV news. When a child drowns in a backyard swimming pool, it's a different kind of tragedy, and it doesn't often make the news. So we as makers of the news and consumers of the news, we tend to adopt or embrace conventional wisdom that's often formed in a very, very haphazard way, so what Steve does with the research, and again, what we try to do with the book is not be crackpots for the sake of being crackpots, not to try to overturn wisdom that's good wisdom, but just try to look at different scenarios. Like we wrote in "The New York Times" recently about child car seats. Well, we measured the efficacy of child safety seats versus just seat belts, and it turns out that these things that we, as parents--we have 6 kids between us--you lug these seats, you read a 400-page manualo-not 400 page, a manual--try to strap 'em in, try to figure out the way that's gonna work optimally. Then you look at the data and you see that they actually don't improve the chances of survival for a child versus wearing a seat belt. And then you start to try to figure out what might be a better solution than that.

Tavis: And the reason for that is...

Dubner: If you were starting over and you wanted to make children safe in the backseat of a car, you wouldn't add on some contraption that makes the seat belt fit better or that tries to hold them down. You would probably try to make the seat belts adjustable in some way--the seat belts that are already in the car--or build some kind of integrated car seat where, you know, a child is boosted up so that the seat belt works. But, you know, the way that any one thing in modern life comes about--in this case, child car seats--it's a confluence of very strange and powerful forces--government regulations, auto manufacturing, car seat manufacturing. So we as parents tend to think, "Well, somebody figured out that this is best," but we actually look at the data and say maybe it's not.

Tavis: I wonder, Steven, whether or not you think that our lives would be made infinitely better if there were, to Stephen's phrase, more crackpots like you doing research like this that the public and the media took a great deal more seriously. I wonder how much better improved our quality of life would be. You think dramatically?

Levitt: Probably not. I'm not sure I'm doing much good for anybody.

Tavis: But I raise that seriously, because that story is fascinating. I mean, if the car seat is a dumb idea as compared to how good the idea could be, that's a life-saving idea. I mean, if kids are dying of swimming pools as opposed to guns, and we keep, you know, talking about guns as opposed to, you know--I wonder if our quality of life would really be better.

Levitt: Yeah. I think the hard thing for the media, though, is judging whether research is good or not. And much of crackpot research is really terrible. It's really awful. It's done by people who have incentives to put forth their own agenda rather than by people who are doing solid research or by people--a lot of times, conventional wisdom is conventional because it's right. So the media's got a tough job trying to sort out, and I don't think it's an easy question.

Tavis: I got a minute and 30 seconds. Let me just get 2 words on some of these--you can get the book, "Freakonomics," but just so you know what's in this thing, right quick--"Typical prostitutes earn more than typical architects"?

Dubner: Yeah, well, has to do with basic supply and demand. That's an easy one.

Tavis: All right, an easy one. All right, Steven--"Fatality rates for street dealers are greater than those of inmates on death row in Texas."

Levitt: It is, and it tells you a lot about whether or not you think the death penalty could possibly be a deterrent for crime.

Tavis: "Money doesn't win elections." I don't get this one.

Dubner: You know what? If you study the effect of money in an actual campaign--forget about who uses the money to get popular in the first placeo-we tend to think that money wins the elections. It's not. The attractive candidate tends to buy--tends to get more money. It'd also be interesting to know whether advertising really works along a similar vein. We're not quite sure that's true.

Tavis: "Giving books to kids does not improve test scores."

Levitt: Yeah, it's good if you have the kind of household where your parents are gonna have a lot of books in the house and they're gonna nurture you and take care of you. But if you just did a helicopter drop of books into a kid's house, there's no reason to think it's gonna help kids do better.

Tavis: And the one you talked to, Stephen, Fryer about to some extent--"Distinctively black names are an indicator, not a cause, of life outcomes."

Dubner: Right, again, very easy to mistake indicator and cause, and I'd like to just use the last couple seconds to say you need to have Roland Fryer back on the show as soon as you can because getting to write about him and Steve's gotten to collaborate with him, and he's just a terrific scholar and, you know, the kind of work that he's doing on different--on one big subject, race, I think is incredibly valuable.

Tavis: Well, we look forward to doing just that. "Freakonomics; A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner at a book store near you. Nice to have you guys on.

Dubner: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Glad to have you here.