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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
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Sales rank 9,465
Customers rating (based on 1795 reviews)
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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? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life-;from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing-;and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked 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 co-author Stephen J. 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 set out to 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 Ku Klux Klan. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, 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. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter. 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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| Publisher | William Morrow | | Release date | 05/2005 | | Availability | | | Edition | Hardcover |
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An Econ Tome For Both Freaks And Geeks
: Authors use complicated concepts - such as regression - to explain many different things about the world (@ Fortune)
Year of the Economist: Freakonomics, economic hit men, undercover economists. This ain't Adam Smith. (@ Fast Company)
Data Is the World: And what a Freakonomics world it’s become. Extracting business lessons from Steven Levitt’s bestseller (@ Inc Magazine)
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i like it
i like this book. it inspired me to take up Economics in college. a recommended read for my fellow students in schools and universities. if you haven't had a close idea what economics is or if you have something in mind about it, this is a great book for you.
The hidden side of everything (besides the free market)
Although the main topic of Freakonomics is the economy I feel the most valuable lessons can be found in the presentation of the book. I will admit I was skeptical about the book when I began. I consider myself a fair person and prefer to look at both sides of every argument. Although I did find most of the examples in this work conspiracy based, the way in which they were presented was very believable. Levitt did a great job in presenting information to drive home his hypothesis. Although the hypotheses was often far fetched, he did stand his ground and gave relatable examples. The fact of the matter is that nobody really knows how the economy works. Conservative or liberal, if we really know how the economy worked we would be able to control it. And looking at the last few years and events throughout history we clearly can not. This is a great read if your looking for another point of view, or a fresh look at the "hidden side of everything"
 Just the facts!
An amazing analysis of circumstances that could never be matched in a laboratory. The author uses real-world happenings to explain the cause and effect of different variables. The author keeps a cool, clear head and examines issues that are not always politically correct. There are no biases, only the facts. A facinating read, especially for those that appreciate critical thinking!
 trendy and shallow
Freakonomics is a book on popular social statistics research. Michael Levitt is an economist by training, but the subjects of his research and this book are much more sociology or even market research (that said, a lot of ongoing sociology and market research is much more substantial than this book.)
The book seems to have been bought by an incredible amount of people that did so to seem smart (the cover and title are much more the sell than the content). Now they can think they are sharp, I guess.
The book seems like a collection of articles or really an overgrown article itself (Dubner had already written a long one praising Levitt). There are good books of essays (Feymnan, C.S. Lewis), but this is not one. In all likelihood, if the writers had pushed themselves for a theme, they would have ended up constructing more interesting insights.
Basically, the book is intellectually lazy. It lacks footnotes. Methodology is not even described in summary.
The one "blockbuster" topic (the assertion that crime dropped because of abortion) lacks convincing proof. In general, social and historical effects can have many confounding factors and causes and this is why history is so amathematical and story-like (and arguable). But the authors seems naively confident that they can ascribe social effects to something happening in a general society with a 20 year lag.
The other short topics are often about cheating and statistics to show it and are much stronger in terms of very high statistical significance, immediate cauase and effect, lack of confounding factors, etc. However, they are pretty trivial. And even here, there is no good synthesis of the insights, no connection to literature, to other studies, etc. To put it all in a context. I'm not sure if it is braggadicio or ignorance that leads the authors to act as if these "aha"s are so new.
Actually there is a lot in the book that reminds of the typical business book...in the triumphalism of "newness", in the breathy assertion vice support of arguments, the glorification of a (pretty shallow) appearance of neoliberal "smartness" as opposed to actual hard thinking and learning and growing. The sad thing is there is so much interesting to learn in the world. And so much that can be done by good non-fiction books to popularize learning.
But Freakonomics is not a good non-fiction book. I forced myself to finish it, just to write this review. And as I persevered, nothing changed to make me appreciate it more. Maybe the dolts buying it for the cover and to mention at parties were brighter than I.
Taught me to look at things differently
This book teaches you a lot about looking at economics and to not always take what the numbers tell you at face value. There is always another side of the story that might not have been investigated to its fullest. They take a fun look at things the authors have always been interested in discovering using collected data and using economics in a manner never thought of before. They were right to think that I would be interested as well. I thought it especially interesting how the abortion rate influenced crime. I also learned a lot about how enticements are used to change behavior.
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