Freakonomics was an intellectual rollercoaster of a book. Took you up, sent you down, did a few loop-the-loops and ultimately left you feeling slightly nauseous but begging for more.

A collaboration between an iconoclastic economist (Steven D. Levitt) and a slick journalist (Stephen J. Dubner), its most infamous assertion was that the fall in the US crime rate in the 1990s occurred as a direct consequence of the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s. How and why? Because the criminals from the economic underclass were no longer being born.

The book left many wondering what other hidden causal links might be out there, just waiting to be discovered, and others speculating on whether the middle initial in a writer’s byline adds to a book’s popularity. After all, Freakonomics sold more than three million copies worldwide and I, for one, would like a randomised trial examining whether it would have sold quite as many without the D and the J.

Either way, the big news is that D and J have brought out a much-awaited sequel (or, as they would put it, freakquel): Superfreakonomics. Again, it takes a scientific but thoroughly quirky look at a whole range of social phenomena and, in the process, takes us on another rollercoaster ride across the terrain of the improbable.

Pimps, they tell us, are good news for prostitutes, helping them to make more money with less risk of getting beaten up, all for a very reasonable commission. They also reveal that the cost of oral sex has plummeted owing to increase in supply (earlier in the 20th century fellatio was considered so sordid that it commanded an astronomical fee, but is now performed by women of the night without batting an eyelid).

But if the economics of prostitution is not of interest to everyone, there is much else in the book that is spectacularly interesting, attesting, once again, to the authors’ uncanny ability to sift contemporary economic research and cherrypick the really juicy stuff. I loved, for example, the chapter that wielded game theory to examine whether humans are quite as altruistic as we sometimes think (no, the authors say).

The one ever-so-slightly jarring chapter — and the one likely to provoke the most controversy — deals with climate change. D and J make the point that they are not climate change deniers, but the tone of the chapter is unlikely to endear them to Zac Goldsmith. Their main assertion is that we have spent too much time trying to prevent climate change by cutting carbon dioxide emissions and not enough time looking at schemes to cool down the planet, such as pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.

Many have already taken the authors to task for this, most notably Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning darling of the American Left. “Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness,” he writes. “If you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong. It looks as if Superfreakonomics has gone way over that line.”

Krugman goes on to pick holes in the chapter on a line-by-line basis, although it should be noted that others have leapt to the authors’ defence. How to adjudicate in this intellectual fisticuffs? As with the first volume, the trick is to dig deeper into the original sources, which are collated at the back of the book, and to judge the wider arguments on their merits. What is certain is that — regardless of the verdict on its “green” chapter — Superfreakonomics is a humdinger of a book: page-turning, politically incorrect and ever-so-slightly intoxicating, like a large swig of tequila.

It is also likely to prove, once again, that there is a voracious appetite out there for slick, pacy, well-written tomes in the social sciences. The Tipping Point, Outliers, The Black Swan, The Wisdom of Crowds, Blink, Predictably Irrational: all have sold in their hundreds of thousands by cleverly juxtaposing contemporary research with fizzing anecdotes. Last month we had On Rumours by President Obama’s adviser Cass Sunstein, and next month we will get Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-it-on by Adam L. Penenberg (that initial again). It is a literary genre that is burgeoning right now.

After all, what’s not to like? While academics often despise popularisations, the reality is that these books offer a chance for outsiders (ie, the rest of the world) to glimpse what is happening in the rapidly growing field of social psychology and beyond. The only alternative is to get a master’s degree or three, something that few of us have the time to do, even if we would secretly love to go back to university.

Besides, Malcolm Gladwell — the undisputed king of the field — proves that it is possible to simplify without resorting to oversimplification. Although there has been something of a backlash, with one reviewer calling Gladwell’s conclusions in Outliers “so obviously self-evident as to be banal”, this is a staggering dismissal of a book rich in insight and devastating in scope. With examples ranging from ice hockey players (whose success pivots on being born in the right month) to Korean airline pilots (who are less likely to question the authority of the first officer, with potentially catastrophic consequences), Gladwell deftly exposes the wider forces creating success and failure.

That is not to say that all popularisations are on the money. There are a lot of second- rate authors out there seeking to make hay in the wake of Gladwell, Levitt, Dubner and co, but that is precisely what you would expect and does not in any way taint the genre.

Life is irritatingly short and the best of these books give us an opportunity to peep at the cutting edge of science without leaving the comfort of our armchair. It’s all a bit freaky, of course — but in a thoroughly enlightening way.

Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Allen Lane, £20; Buy this book; 270pp

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