Millionaire purveyors of counter intuition Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner are back with a sequel to the bestselling 'Freakonomics', RICHARD GILLIShas the story...

AN HOUR before the doors of the Peacock Theatre were due to open, a line of serious young men and women begin queuing for returned tickets, in the hope of seeing their heroes in the flesh. In years to come, when they're running the World Bank or hedging for Goldman Sachs, they'll be able to say "I was there" when the

Freakonomics

guys played the London School of Economics (LSE). As cultural moments go it's not "Dylan goes electric", but it's up there.

The two Steves, Dubner and Levitt, are as close to rock stars as social science gets, millionaire purveyors of counter intuition, masters of man bites dog. They're here to plug their follow up - Superfreakonomics- and to make contact with their people; this is a place where jokes about Milton Friedman get belly laughs, and every knowing aside is met by the sound of 300 Moleskine notebooks snapping open.

Our heroes take the stage with Prof Steve Pischke, Levitt's former tutor at MIT and now an LSE staffer, whose introduction sets the tone: "If you'd asked me 15 years ago who would be the bestselling economist of my generation, I wouldn't have picked Steve Levitt," says Pischke, who seems to have walked here straight from 1975. "But I underestimated him, I didn't realise just how good an economist he was. He understood 'The Division of Labour'." (Cue another big woofer from the crowd.)

The first Freakonomicsbook has sold over four million copies and has been reprinted in 35 languages, creating a new literary sub-market. The partnerships' own division of labour is easy to define. Levitt is the economics brain, the Alvin H Baum Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is also director of the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. In 2004, he was awarded the John Bates Clark medal, which recognises the most influential economist in America under the age of 40. More recently, he was named one of Timemagazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World". Dubner is the storyteller - the award-winning New York Timesmagazine journalist who first met Levitt when he was sent to interview him.

It's a double act that works well on stage, highlighting Dubner's role alongside his more celebrated partner. Without his ability to tell a tale, the chances are Levitt would still be what he was before the books hit the shelves: a clever economics professor spending his days working on a peculiar mix of research projects.

"Neither of us were very excited about doing it," says Levitt about the process of getting together to write the book. "The thing about economics is that it always comes down to price. For the right price we'll do anything, right?" (Cue light chuckling among audience.) "It turns out the same is true of journalists."

In his original article, Dubner labelled his future partner "the economist of odd questions" because of his choice of leftfield subject matter. "Trends are one thing but ideas are something else entirely," says Dubner, "and Levitt really trades in ideas and I found this thrilling as a writer who'd spent all his time around economists whose approach is very different."

Freakonomicswas based on Levitt's odd questions - do sumo wrestlers cheat? Do game-show participants discriminate? Most famously, Levitt claimed the fall in crime rates in New York in the early 1990s was due not to improved policing methods but the introduction of legalised abortion in 1970s: the law led to a drop in the birth rate among the cohort of people who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals.

The latter example is pure Levitt - clever, counter-intuitive and amoral - and the new book's sub title, Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutesand Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance,offers more of the same. "I have a fundamental belief in the power of economics," says Levitt. "The economic approach casts aside moral issues. When you look at a question like abortion, most people's minds go immediately to whether it's right or wrong and the moral implications, but only economists are able to look at abortion and ask what happened to crime 20 years later. If you have a moral or ethical world view it puts blinkers on your ability to see how things really play out. It means we [economists] can tackle problems in a way many other people can't - being ethical is not a bad thing, but it does get in the way of getting the answers to difficult questions."

This world view, and the success of the first book, has made Levitt unusually famous for a student of the dismal science. His books are fun, say critics, but what's a man as clever as him doing spending his time on sumo wrestlers. What about the big stuff?

"Most of what I study, nobody else studies," says Levitt. "I decided very early on that the only way I was going to get on in this profession was by asking a set of questions nobody else would ask. I'm not treading over the same territory as Keynes or Friedman went over, which would have been difficult to improve on. I look for conventional wisdom that doesn't stand up to the test of data."

More significantly, the critics have unearthed mistakes in Levitt's work they say undermines his conclusions and, according to the Washington Post, suggest he and Dubner prefer "an interesting story to an accurate one". The knives are out for the second book, with controversy raging in the blogosphere about Superfreakonomics' chapter on global warming. The environmental pressure group the Union of Concerned Scientists complained the authors "appear to have taken a purposefully contrarian position on climate change science and economics. While such a position may help draw attention to their book, their reliance on faulty arguments and distorted statistics does a disservice to their readers."

"Let's be clear," says Levitt. "There have been allegations that we've got the science wrong and that we've misrepresented the people we quote in the chapter. That is simply not true. Every fact in the climate change chapter is cited in the end notes. People don't like the tone of the chapter, and they don't like the conclusions. But it's not fair to say we got the science wrong."

Dubner says the green lobby find some of the conclusions of the book - particularly in relation to the area of geo-engineering - "repugnant", going against the grain of environmentalism. "But our argument is that if the problem is really worth solving we need to consider solutions like that."

"Very few economists have been engaged with the climate science research," says Levitt. "The more I read the more surprising I found the almost universal policy description that carbon mitigation was the right answer. It wasn't just me: many of the economists I respected were coming to the conclusion that this just didn't seem right. Did we have a political agenda? Absolutely not. Are we deniers? Not at all. But unlike other things we write about, which have no policy implications, getting climate change right matters, right?"

Judging by the queue for book signings after the talk, it's good for sales, too.