Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?
These may not sound like typical questions for an econo-mist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing—and whose conclusions turn conventional wisdom on its head.
Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They usually begin with a mountain of data and a simple question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.
Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they explore the hidden side of . . . well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Klu Klux Klan.
What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.
Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.
Amazon.com Review: Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald's, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don't really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there's a good economic reason for that too, and we're just not getting it yet. --John Moe
Good book, but I'm not sure if I learned anything The books was well written, but I'm not really sure how much I've learned from it.
Neo-Liberalism with a Human Smirk Author Steven Levitt is a recently graduated chef from the Culinary Institute of Elitist Capitalism, AKA The University of Chicago. Freakonomics is a kind of nouvelle cuisine version of economic modeling and game-theory as practiced by the disciples of Milty Friedman, but rather little of the book is spent on economic recipes per se, once the basic assertion has been made that "incentives' are the yeast that cause all human behavior to rise. Rather, Levitt puts everything from soup kitchens to swimming pools through the blender of statistics -- the very sort of statistical analysis used by the authors of The Bell Curve and discredited by Stephen Jay Gould in the book The Mismeasurement of Man, the very sort of statistics that can be used to prove that the older you get in Miami, the more likely you are to be Jewish.
Levitt's basic dough: Start with John Stuart Mill and every other 19th C liberal social theorist. Knead thoroughly into a sticky paste. Add a handful of candied fruit in the form of the more radical 19th C postulators - Fourier, Henry George, Bellamy, and Karl Marx as understood before the Russian Revolution. Soften the dough with as much Thorstein Veblen as you can remember. Spice it with generous amounts of scorn for "them" - anthropologists, psychologists, and others who think that human behavior is shaped by more impulses than acquisition and that specific cultural 'memes' play a role. Half-bake the dough in a journalistic oven with the temperature set on SELL. Frost the loaf with an icing of Ayn Rand super-individualism. But don't expect the finished cake to be much different from cakes you've eaten before. There's nothing new in Freakonomics except the smirky style.
Honestly, many readers might find this book stimulating, or over-stimulating, depending on their prior convictions. Go on! Read it! But read it with the same skepticism you'd apply to the gospel of any other religion than your own - Shinto, Islam, Swedenborgian, Leninist, Maoist. This is a book where the reader will be easily tricked into mistaking polemics for proof.
Freakonomics This is an entertaining look at economics and gave valid views on how our systems works.
SPNG vs CVKG First of all I totally agree that stupid, promiscuous, nasty girls (henceforth referred to as SPNG) are liable to have criminal sons and more SPNG daughters (all things being genetic). So that making abortion available to such women would decrease crime in the long term (by preventing the birth of criminal boys). However, other studies show that Clever, Virtuous and Kind girls (henceforth referred to as CVKG are (and my own observations of my peers reinforces) are more likely to use contraceptives (although they have sex at a later age and with more thought) and upon the failure of contraceptives are most likely to have abortions. Whilst SPNGs are more likely to have the child, go on government welfare, and have a huge number of children to various Criminal men. So pro choice=fewer ambitious/CVKG type children being born. In conjunction with government welfare this means that many SPNG type mothers having criminal sons.
To really reduce crime would not be pro choice-after all every human instinct is towards reproduction and if your life is empty because you are a stupid SPNG you will have more children than a highly ambitious CVKG.
Proposal:
Offer plasma televisions, DVD players etc with greater incentives per repeat abortion amongst SPNG type women. After enough abortions the cervix becomes incontinent and they will no longer be able to carry a baby to term thus decreasing the SPNG's ability to reproduce in the future.
And when a CVKG seeks an abortions give them educational type benefits (or incentives that are of no value to a SPNG) to give the child up for adoption. Obviously we don't want the CVKG to keep the baby as this would harm her education and career, so adoption is the best possible solution. This increases the number CVKG type children being born and thus increases the number of intelligent people. Whilst decreasing crime by discouraging reproduction amongst SPNG.
Sadly in the western world the characteristics that make someone a SPNG are the characteristic that make someone poor-who wants to work with someone or employ someone who is stupid, Promiscuous and Nasty?
Thought provoking Stats, Easy Reading This book has gotten heated reviews from highly focused economic centric minds. Taken for what it is... a very entertaining series of articles with shocking facts and conclusions, the book makes you think about the motivators of human behavior.
Themes: Cheating, Crime, Poverty, Incentives, Testing and finally Causality.
The Chapter Titles grab you. The Chapters can be read in smaller increments.
Very entertaining and enjoyable.
I am pregnant and loved the section on choosing a child names. I liked the Head Start and Public School perspectives...
Very neat... but approach it as a "fluffy" read, not a book to be cited in your PhD or Master thesis.
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