Medical researcher Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler sent me an advance copy of their book, “Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.” Christakis and Fowler are best known for their work connecting social networks and epidemiology, in particular the fact that obese people are more likely to have obese friends. As one wag put it, they find that obesity is environmental and voting is genetic. I guess that sort of interpretation is the inevitable outcome of man-bites-dog reporting, with the real story being that obesity is more determined by social behavior than we might have thought, while voting behavior is more tied to genes than we might have thought.

Anyway, I like their new book a lot. They bring in many different research findings. It’s a popular science book but with a much higher meat-to-filler ratio. Considering myself as the ideal reader, I wish they had more discussion of methodology, of the strengths and potential weaknesses of each of the findings they cite. I understand why they didn’t want to clutter a popular book with such discussion, but in retrospect I wish we’d put in more methods talk within our own Red State, Blue State book. My impression from talking with people is that (a) they respect open discussions of strengths and weaknesses of an argument, and (b) many people find methods fun and enjoy chewing on issues such as representativeness of sampling, etc. In our own book, I think we tried to hard to be reader friendly and wish we’d laid more of the struggle out there for the reader to see. On the other hand, their book has many advantages over mine, being from a major publisher and also covering so many different topics that there’s something for everyone. It’s actually much more general in scope than its title indicated. It’s really about all of social science. I’m not sure how a reader who isn’t familiar with all this work would think of the book, but I enjoyed seeing all this stuff in one place.