Questioning the establishment is one thing. Assuming it's always wrong is quite another.

Reading or listening to any of the Freakonomics phenomenon of 20 years ago felt like standing at the top of a three-legged fire tower: The perspective was interesting, but you felt as if it could collapse at any minute.

And collapse it did. Today, Freakonomics — which burst onto national consciousness in 2005 as a best-selling book by economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner — has been widely discredited as a numerical parlor trick, with frequent failings in methodology, basic assumptions and sometimes just plain math.

“Its legacy has been stronger as a work of entertainment than as a new way of doing economics,” wrote Gavin Jackson in The Economist. “The age-old questions of production, consumption and distribution remain as fascinating as ever but the quirky experiments that ‘Freakonomics’ popularized have not stood the test of time.”

Coincidentally (probably), Freakonomics became wildly popular at the same time as Facebook, and while neither has been proven to have expressly caused today’s disinformation revolution, they certainly haven’t helped.

The foundation of Freakonomics was admirable — we should question conventional wisdom and be on the lookout for unintended consequences. A contrarian streak is essential to critical thinking. But conventional wisdom is right more often than not.

Conventional wisdom holds that if you go outside without an umbrella when it rains, you will get wet. To generate content, Freakonomics backed itself into a corner to the point it almost felt compelled to argue that if you went out in the rain you would get drier.

Of course that is an exaggeration to make a point — and that’s what Freakonomics became. Except it purported to be built not on hyperbole, but on solid numbers, formulae and logic.

Some of Freakonomics’ shortcomings were just sloppy errors that would never have been made by a second-year economics student — such as confusing the number of criminal arrests with arrest rates, two totally different things.  “...technical ineptitude is a much graver charge than moral turpitude,” The Economist wrote when the error came to light. “To be politically incorrect is one thing; to be simply incorrect is quite another.”

Perhaps Freakonomics’ most ignoble failing was its conjecture about abortion, which it examined with the fundamental idea that most women who had abortions were the urban poor.

When abortion was legalized nationally in 1973 by Roe v. Wade, Freakonomics tried to prove that these urban poor (read Black) women aborted their children, meaning that there were fewer young men on the streets in the 1990s — which explained that decade’s precipitous drop in crime.

When abortion was banned in Romania, by contrast, Freakonomics surmised that education levels would decrease as more poor (read stupid) women were forced to bring their babies to term.

Except it wasn’t poor women who were having abortions for the very reason that they couldn’t afford them. Abortion was more prevalent in the middle and upper classes. Subsequent studies found children in Romania born after the abortion ban actually did better in school, because more children born to some degree of privilege were entering the system.

And the American crime rate in the 1990s had less to do with abortion than the socio-political fad of locking up great swaths of the population for the most minor of offenses. The ban of leaded gasoline in 1975 is also believed to have reduced crime by promoting the development of healthier, less criminal brains.

Facebook came along on the shoulders of Freakonomics, which taught that facts as we understood them might be wrong and the establishment isn’t as infallible as we’ve been led to believe.

With Facebook, the fatty bacon of Freakonomics turned into a grease fire. Using bad data, Freakonomics “proved” that households with swimming pools were a greater risk to children than households with guns (the authors failed to account for the fact that a gun-owning household was likely to have multiple guns, while people tended to own only one pool).

But in the dumbed-down world of Facebook, the idea that pools were more deadly than guns made a great meme.

Institutions, the establishment, the “elite,” all became suspect. It wasn’t too much of a leap to go from dangerous swimming pools to Sarah Palin’s claim that Obamacare would include “death panels” to decide who should live and who shouldn’t. And from there to Mexican rapists and stolen elections and Jewish space lasers.

It is an American quality to question authority, and an intellectual quality to question the status quo. But social media have given us the impression that anything that is counterintuitive has to be true. So we debunk conventional wisdom and stop there, without questioning the motives of those who are doing the debunking.

Unfortunately, Freakonomics taught us to question everything — except Freakonomics itself.

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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Freakonomics, social media added mightily to disinformation culture