Over the weekend, bloggers and columnists have been trashing Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, SuperFreakonomics. Brad deLong, Ezra Klein, and Paul Krugman trashed their findings that drunk driving is safer than drunk walking and that scientists use the wrong solutions to deal with global warming. The authors respond here and here. 

Andrew Gelman discusses some reasons why their book contains such shoddy statistical work. He wonders whether blogging could have interfered with their scholarship. They spent too much time online and believing their adoring commenters. 

I think the failure of this book has more to do with the publishing industry, which is only interesting in publishing "rogue" academics. Academics don't sell books, unless they can package themselves as controversial or paradigm smashers. Serious, traditional academic work is too nuanced and detail oriented to appeal to a mass market. And most academics aren't very charismatic. I'm sure there was a lot of pressure on the authors to be as controversial as possible, even if their conclusions were questionable.

Were these chapters actually peer reviewed or did they go straight to the book?