Despite condemnation of the claims by the Japan Sumo Association following the book's publication in 2005, the 2011 Grand Tournament in Tokyo was canceled for the first time since 1946 because of allegations of match-fixing.

However, in their January 8, 2006 column in The New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt wrote of questions about Stetson Kennedy's research ("Hoodwinked", pp.

In the "Revised and Expanded Edition" this embellishment was noted and corrected: "Several months after Freakonomics was first published, it was brought to our attention that this man's portrayal of his crusade, and various other Klan matters, was considerably overstated ... we felt it was important to set straight the historical record.

[6] Revisiting a question first studied empirically in the 1960s, Donohue and Levitt argue that the legalization of abortion can account for almost half of the reduction in crime witnessed in the 1990s.

This paper has sparked much controversy, to which Levitt has said: The numbers we're talking about, in terms of crime, are absolutely trivial when you compare it to the broader debate on abortion.

In November 2005, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economist Christopher Foote and his research assistant Christopher Goetz published a working paper,[9] in which they argued that the results in Donohue and Levitt's abortion and crime paper were due to statistical errors made by the authors: the omission of state-year interactions and the use of the total number of arrests instead of the arrest rate in explaining changes in the murder rate.

The Economist remarked on the news of the errors that "for someone of Mr Levitt's iconoclasm and ingenuity, technical ineptitude is a much graver charge than moral turpitude.

"[10] In January 2006, Donohue and Levitt published a response,[11] in which they admitted the errors in their original paper but also pointed out Foote and Goetz's correction was flawed due to heavy attenuation bias.

The authors argued that, after making necessary changes to fix the original errors, the corrected link between abortion and crime was now weaker but still statistically significant, contrary to Foote and Goetz's claims.

This is because urban, educated women were more likely to have abortions prior to the policy change, and the relative number of children born to this type of woman increased after the ban.

However, controlling for composition using observable background variables, children born after the ban on abortions had worse educational and labor market achievements as adults.

Additionally, I provide evidence of crowding in the school system and some suggestive evidence that cohorts born after the introduction of the abortion ban had higher infant mortality and increased criminal behavior later in life.The introduction of the Pop-Eleches paper says: This finding is consistent with the view that children who were unwanted during pregnancy had worse socio-economic outcomes once they became adults.Freakonomics claimed that it was possible to "tease out" the effect of extra police on crime by analyzing electoral cycles.

[16] Levitt settled the second defamation claim by admitting in a letter to McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of The Journal of Law and Economics, that Lott had not engaged in bribery (paying for extra costs of printing and postage for a conference issue is customary), and that he knew that "scholars with varying opinions" (including Levitt himself) had been invited to participate.

In the campaign prior to the release of the book in April 2005, the publisher (William Morrow and Company) chose to target bloggers in an unusually strategic way, sending galley copies to over a hundred of them, as well as contracting two specialized buzz marketing agencies.

[27] Among the recurrent guest bloggers on the Freakonomics blog are Ian Ayres,[28] Daniel Hamermesh,[29] Eric A. Morris,[30] Sudhir Venkatesh,[31] Justin Wolfers[32] and others.

In 2008, Stephen Dubner asked for questions from the site's readers and then featured them in an extended Q&A on "Best Places to Live" with demographics expert Bert Sperling.

[33] In April 2007, co-author Stephen Dubner announced that there would be a sequel to Freakonomics, and that it would contain further writings about street gang culture from Sudhir Venkatesh, as well as a study of the use of money by capuchin monkeys.

In 2010, Chad Troutwine, Chris Romano, and Dan O'Meara produced a documentary film adaptation with a budget of nearly $3 million in an anthology format by directors Seth Gordon, Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, Eugene Jarecki, Rachel Grady, and Heidi Ewing.