After having seen one of its authors, Steven D. Levitt, on Jon Stewart, I decided to pick up a copy of the book Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I enjoyed it, though it read more like a series of interesting magazine articles rather than like a book.

Freakonomics is not a new discipline or way of thinking, and the economist referred to in the title (Levitt; his co-author is Stephen J. Dubner) is not really rogue. The book encourages you to think both are true, and that's it's biggest failing: the book totally believes its own hype. But setting that aside, Freakonomics is engrossing in the way that most freaky things are engrossing. Despite it's problems, I found it difficult to put down.

The "freaky" part involves the application of regression analysis to a variety of real-world questions, like "Who cheats?" or "What makes crime go down?" The answers given are usually not what one would expect, but in a way, that's besides the point. The real focus is watching the authors unravel their unusual data, documenting cause and effect and showing where and how our intuition about these problems leads us astray.

One of the chapters, titled "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" explores a part of Superman's history that I wasn't aware of. The chapter begins with a brief but informative history of the rise and fall of membership levels in the Ku Klux Klan. With high-profile Klan trials in the news lately, this was pretty timely reading.

On the first page, the authors refer to the Klan as a "multi-state terrorist organization." I had never thought of the Klan in exactly that light before--as domestic terrorists. But as it turns out, the authors didn't apply the term first, a past U.S. president did. In an address to Congress, President Ulysses S. Grant charged that the Klan's goals were

"'by force and terror, to prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free ballot, to suppress the schools in which the colored children were taught, and to reduce the colored people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery.'"

The book details how, despite Grant's efforts to defeat the Klan in 1872, the organization continued on into the twentieth century. In the wake of World War II, the Klan's numbers began to grow again. One man, Stetson Kennedy, decided to infiltrate the Klan in an effort to subvert it. He discovers the Klan's most precious secrets, including details of the group's structure, its special rituals and passwords.

Kennedy passed the material on to the producers of the Adventures of Superman radio program. Although the book doesn't mention it specifically, from surfing around the web, I gathered that this was during the program's "Unity House" season of 1946. In this season, Superman took on racial and religious intolerance in his fight for truth, justice and the American way.

The Klan information was woven into radio plots, where, the authors write,

"It had the precise effect he hoped: turning the Klan's secrecy against itself, converting precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery. Instead of roping in millions of members as it had just a generation earlier, the Klan lost momentum and began to founder."

This was definitely my favorite chapter in the book. Although people make fun of superheros all the time, here's a great example of how one superhero had an undeniably positive effect on society.