Books : Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
EAN: 9780061234002
ISBN: 0061234001
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: October 02, 2006
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: October 17, 2006
Sales Rank: 141
Studio: William Morrow
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Product Description:
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
Average Rating: 
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Everybody knows that economics is about measurement and money and things numerical; that's why most of us find it so damned dull.
But as approached by offbeat economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt, economics is also "the study of incentives": what it takes to get us to do a certain thing--or to not do it, as the case may be. Which makes it human, and therefore fascinating.
This is what I love about this delightful book by Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner: that it comes at things sideways or upside-down or head-on, but never the usual way. I'm still not sold on some of the more radical hypotheses Leavitt coaxes from the data (the link between abortion and falling crime rates being the most widely reviled and quoted), but I'm 100% there on the importance of throwing the numbers against conventional wisdom to see what sticks. The numbers may not always tell the exact truth, but neither do they lie, making them extraordinarily useful in the exploding of myths.
Levitt and Dubner tell fascinating stories about how to combat crappy teaching, bring down the Ku Klux Klan and what happens when you call your kids "Winner" and "Loser" (answer: not necessarily what you'd think on any count). But really, they've written a book celebrating the heart of truth: asking questions, and hacks to stay open to the real answers.
As an interesting side note, the prospect of reading something that seemed like it would rock my world ... Read More
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Freakonomics addresses many diverse topics. The thing that ties the book together is the interesting kind of questions it examines and the unique blend of intuition, logic, and statistical analysis it uses to answer these questions. This book is enjoyable to read and describes many rather nerdy concepts in easy-to-understand language.
Of the twenty or so topics the book addresses, four were especially interesting to me: rigging of Sumo wrestling matches, cheating by public school teachers on their students' proficiency exams, the drop in U.S. crime rates in the 1990s, and family attributes that correspond to children's educational success. The first two analyses identified statistical anomalies in patterns of wrestling match outcomes and test answers that demonstrated probable corruption in the world of Sumo wrestling and cheating in the Chicago public school system. The third and fourth analyses were the most impressive in the book. Each considered about a dozen variables that might be related (causally or otherwise) to crime rates or educational success and used regression analyses to determine which ones were in fact related.
The analysis of the drop in crime rates in the 1990s is probably Steven Levitt's best known and most controversial work. His analysis shows that four factors were likely responsible for the decrease in crime: harsher prison terms, increased hiring of police, the crash of the crack cocaine market, and the U.S. Supreme Court's ... Read More
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I purchased this book as a gift for my fiance. He really enjoyed and appreciated it. Now it's my turn to read it!
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I really enjoyed the contents of the book, but I was very disappointed with its physical condition. The pages were of uneven size and appeared to be cut with a blunt edge. Not a book to be put on your display bookshelf...
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I found this work to be enlightening and curious. I would recommend this book and the CD's to anyone who has an open mind and wants to really understand social strata and sociology anomalies. It is makes you thing how many more trends have occurred and we have been misdiagnosing there real cause. Get the book, listen to the CD and keep an open mind.
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