Friday, January 13, 2006

Freakonomics authors think they were hoodwinked

In the book Freakonomics, civil rights agitator Stetson Kennedy is used for an illustration of "information asymmetry." After the book was published, the authors started getting clues that Kennedy's story wasn't quite kosher, as they put it. So they started digging...

hat tip: Brothers Judd

2 comments:

Bookworm said...

I hate hearing that the story was too good to be true, because it was such a good story.

Kathryn Judson said...

Bookworm, I can't remember in which link I read it, but the Freakonomics authors seemed to be saying that Kennedy's real life was amazing enough -- if he'd just stuck with the facts, he could have been hailed honestly on those. Instead, it appears he took his own impressive credentials, and grafted someone else's achievements onto them under his own name. Why he couldn't leave well enough alone is anybody's guess, I guess.