news-record.com

GREENSBORO — When “Freakonomics” co-author Stephen Dubner speaks at the Friends of the UNCG Libraries dinner tonight, he’s hoping to avoid predictions about the economy.

Dubner’s 2005 book was acclaimed — and controversial — for the way it applied economic principles to larger social and cultural issues such as drug use, parenting and abortion. But he and his co-author, economist Steven Levitt, have been avoiding questions about the economic meltdown and what will happen next.

“There are certain types of hard science that lend themselves to prediction,” Dubner said in a phone interview Tuesday. “If the dew point is at a certain level and you have these other factors, it will probably rain. That works. But you cannot do that with economics.”

“If we learned nothing else in writing the book, it’s that you can’t predict things that easily, in a neat and tidy way,” Dubner said.

Dubner, a journalist who went to Appalachian State, once lived in Winston-Salem and worked for The Spectator, a forerunner to GoTriad.

He said he’s been watching the economic chaos with interest while finishing the last book’s follow-up, “Superfreakonomics.”

But having written about how economic truths often defy widely held beliefs, he said he’s been a little surprised by people’s anger at TV financial pundits.

“Anybody in their right mind should know the last thing you’d do if you had truly valuable financial information is go on television and share it with people,” Dubner said.

“These are mostly Limbaughesque entertainers. Just about anything you hear about the market or the economy on television is spin, exaggeration or sins of omission.”

That’s one reason Dubner and Levitt turned down a lot of offers — and a lot of money — to follow up “Freakonomics” with quickly produced sequels to capitalize on the book’s success. Instead, they concentrated on an ongoing Freakonomics blog — now hosted at The New York Times Web site — and fashioning a sequel they thought was good.

“We got offers to do, like, 'Chicken Soup for the Freakonomics Soul,’ ” Dubner joked. “But we thought we should take our time and do something we thought would be even better than the first one.

“When it comes out, it will have been about four years, but we think it will be even more fun to read and tackle even more important, more global subjects.”

The first book created a stir with its pieces on controversial subjects, such as the role legalized abortion may have played in lowering the nation’s crime rate. “Superfreakonomics” may provoke more arguments with chapters on global warming and prostitution — but Dubner said he doesn’t mind.

“We’re not taking moral stands on these things, just looking at the data,” he said. “What we really hear the most complaints about are people — real estate agents, for example, from our first book — who don’t like the way we write about what their lives are like, what they do.”

“That’s the thing about this type of writing,” Dubner said. “Any time anyone sees that you’ve boiled down what they do to an aggregate, a typical example, they think you’re talking about them.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com