Probably the best thing that can be said about Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is that it makes for excellent cocktail party nibbles.

Who wouldn't like to regale one's friends with some of the weird avenues Levitt and Dubner explore? The book tells why public school teachers might encourage their students to cheat on a standardized test; why a real estate broker would gladly sell a house for less than its market worth; why sumo wrestlers are willing to fix matches; why a swimming pool is more dangerous than a handgun. And so on.

Freakonomics is essentially an expansion of a fawning article that Dubner wrote for The New York Times Magazine a few years back about Levitt, a young economist at the University of Chicago, who specializes in economies that have little to do with money. (The article is quoted -- embarrassingly -- throughout the book.) The research is all Levitt's, and the book is a pop-rewrite of Levitt's academic papers.

Since it has come out, Freakonomics has been collecting nothing but lavish praise from a lot of highbrow reviewers. "If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt," wrote Steven Landsburg, in the Wall Street Journal. The New Yorker's science writer, Malcolm Gladwell, lent the book a blurb for its cover: "Prepare to be dazzled." There were many others.

But I would advise against preparing oneself to be dazzled; on the contrary, I would say that one should prepare to be slightly disappointed. It would be ridiculous to say that there is nothing worthwhile in this book, but I found the book to be scattershot and unconvincing, in which serious topics (such as abortion, crime and drugs) were looked at in a somewhat sophomoric way.

In what should have been the most engaging chapter, "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?" Levitt and Dubner look at the economy of the crack-cocaine world:

A few years back one of Levitt's colleagues befriended a Chicago crack gang and, in the process, managed to obtain one of the gang's ledgers. (Yes, apparently crack gangs keep accounts.)

It turns out that crack gangs are run very similarly to Fortune 500 companies; the gang had an enforcer, a treasurer, a CEO (who was a college educated business major) and dozens of junior-level dealers, who earned pitiful wages working a highly dangerous job (less than minimum wage; many dealers had to supplement their incomes working at places like McDonald's).

The economy of crack dealing is, of course, fascinating, and the chapter smells of what could have been first-rate journalism, but Levitt and Dubner choose to ask the wrong questions; the chapter asks why, if crack dealing is so profitable, most dealers live in the slums? (With their mothers, no less.) It is as if Levitt and Dubner watched movies like "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas", and took them for literal truth.

It's no surprise to anyone who has ever walked through a slum (or even picked up a newspaper) that most crack dealers lead Hobbseian, squalid lives. It almost goes without saying that crime would obey a certain pecking order -- that the Pablo Escobars and John Gottis of crime do very well, and the foot soldiers would not do nearly as well.

Most of us would respond, "Duh."

This chapter only serves to emphasize the overall slightness of the book as a whole.

More troubling is the chapter entitled, "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?" which explains why the legalization of abortion might have led to reduced crime rates.

This chapter begins by asking why crime went down during the 1990s when all experts were predicting it would go up. Some attribute the dip to the booming economy; others say it has to do with stricter gun laws; a few said that it was because more police were put on the force.

But Levitt posits that the dip came almost exactly 16 years after Roe v. Wade took effect -- exactly the same years that most thugs enter their criminal prime. Maybe there was less crime because fewer criminals were being born...

For both liberals and conservatives, the implications of this argument are horrific; for conservatives -- who have always prided themselves on believing in law-and-order -- Levitt's argument would validate abortion. For liberals the argument smacks of a soft form of eugenics; that poor people -- and all the minorities that live in poverty -- are criminals, and that they are being weeded out.

The book has facts to back itself up; in the states where abortion was legal prior to Roe, crime rates went down sooner. And in 1966, after Ceausescu made abortion illegal in Romania, the reverse happened: crime started to go up about 16 years later. (These facts seem a little wispy when making such a startling claim. I would have liked to have seen much more evidence.)

Levitt and Dubner have remained proudly noncommittal, politically speaking, about this chapter -- which, no matter what side of the political aisle you come from, is a major cop-out. At a time when a new Supreme Court Justice might well decide the fate of abortion (as well as the legislation that has been chipping away at a woman's right to an abortion) it seems too important an argument to treat as neutrally as Levitt and Dubner.

But, then, that seems to be the general gestalt of the book. Freakonomics might flirt with serious topics, and maybe that's the only way to write a best seller these days, but it will ultimately be relegated into a quaint anecdote.