Freakonomics and open source programmers

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

There has probably been enough praise for this book already, but it's worth it. The authors have managed to find really interesting data and to ask interesting questions concerning it. A real example of the imagination of social scientists as T. Parsons would probably have said.

Freakonomics has been an eye opener in a strange way: by pointing out that people have incentives and respond to them (as economists always say, but I wasn't listening). During my "career" or rather involvement in computer science and computer programming I maybe never really understood it well. I could still think that open source computer programmers actually write programs since they just like writing programs and want them to be good. This view was actually held by P. Himanen in his "Hacker Ethics", and could even be true in some cases. But what's the incentive for most computer programmers? They want their project to be known, used and appreciated (even sold). The quality of the code, the fact that the solution can be based on false assumptions or bad modelling, or the fact that there might already exist a good solution for the problem at hand are secondary matters.

Let's Freakonomics this with another book whose "broken window" thesis was refuted by Lewitt and Dubner -- M. Gladwell: Tipping Point - How small things can make a big difference. Quite good ideas, e.g. there is either lots of violent crime or hardly any at all, and the community can send a message about their commitment to crime prevention by simply erasing graffitti or fixing broken windows. However, the author promised a mathematical model of this (hmm.. arith/geom. series?) but it was missing in my paperback copy.. and some of the examples I did not find very convincing.