Number game | Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything...

book: Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything | Stephen J. Dubner

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	• Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Stephen J. Dubner William Morrow, 2006 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 1545 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Entertaining, thought-provoking, and lacking scientific rigor

While I wouldn't go so far as to relegate the book to one-star status, I completely agree some of the objections on here. I'm halfway through the book right now, and I've been repeatedly troubled with the authors' tendency to reach qualitative conclusions that go beyond their data.

That said, it's still an entertaining book. Reading it with a critical mind, questioning the authors' methods and conclusions, helps you sharpen your own understanding of statistics, causation and correlation, etc. I'm happy to have read it (well, half so far).

Number game

Interestingly, the book starts off very nicely with catchy questions and a unique perspective in answering them. However, you quickly realize that the author is beating around the bush and comes back to the same question and answers. The authors are prejudiced to begin with and therefore play with numbers and carefully framed sentences to win the reader's vote. In addition, the authors dismiss other works as providing 'little evidence' while providing little/no evidence to their own work.

In short, the book is interesting and insightful but don't take it seriously.

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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.

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