Second And Park — Web Copy That Works by Tiffani Jones

Of all the chapters in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s follow up to Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, my favorite is the one on cheap, simple fixes. In it, Levitt and Dubner talk about how “big, seemingly intractable problems are often solved in surprisingly cheap and simple ways.”

In 1847, one out of every six mothers giving birth in doctors wards died of peurperal fever (the current death rate is 9 out of every 100,000). The problem was, nobody new why. Experts usually blamed the mothers, either for misconduct in early pregnancy or bad eating habits.

Then came doctor Ignatz Semmelweis, who was the first to acknowledge that doctors had no idea what lead to puerperal fever and suggest that mothers weren’t to blame.

After years of research, Semmelweis concluded that it was the doctors themselves who were unwittingly causing the deaths—by bringing in bacteria from cadavers they had been dissecting just before the births.

The solution? Doctors needed to wash their hands.

Germ theory had not been invented yet, so nearly everyone rejected Semmelweis’ ideas—it wasn’t until after his death that the medical community came to respect him. Today, of course, his theories are widely accepted. (Although not, apparently, always followed. The book also talks about how it’s nearly impossible to get doctors to thoroughly wash their hands, even though they know they should.)

The quirky, Occam’s Razor-ish appeal of SuperFreakonomics is typical of Levitt, and useful—you find yourself automatically applying his insights in behavioral economics to day-to-day life stuff.

Check out the book. Aside from an occasional nosedive in tone (I’m still on the fence about “pimpact”—see Chapter 1), it’s real good.