A less dismal side of economics
Steven Levitt, an economist at U Chicago, is less interested in numbers and more interested in why people turn out the way they do. He examines the influence of incentive, heredity, the neighborhood you grew up in, etc.
Some of his conclusions are less than earth-shattering. For example, African-American names (DeShawn, Latanya) don't influence African-American test performance. As a second example, Levitt compiled data regarding online dating websites and concluded that bald men and overweight women fared badly. Not rocket science.
However, Levitt livens up the book with some controversial discussions. He believes that the dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s can be traced to Roe v. Wade. He thinks that the children who would have committed crimes (due to being brought up by impoverished, teenage, single mothers) are simply not being born as often.
He also writes about the man who more or less singlehandedly contributed to the KKK's demise by infiltrating their group and leaking their secret passwords and rituals to the people behind the Superman comic book (Superman needed a new enemy).
Interestingly, he also discusses how overbearing parents don't contribute to a child's success. For example, having a lot of books in the house has a positive influence on children's test scores, but reading to a child a lot has no effect. Highly educated parents are also a plus, while limiting children's television time is irrelevant. Similarly, political candidates who have a lot of money to finance their campaigns are still out of luck if no one likes them.
In the chapter entitled "Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers," Levitt explores the economics of drug dealing. An Indian, Harvard-affiliated scholar decided to get up close and personal with crack gangs and got some notebooks documenting their finances. Levitt concludes that drug dealers' empires are a lot like McDonald's or the publishing industry in Manhattan - only the people on the very top of the pyramid do well financially, while the burger flippers, editorial assistants, and low-level drug runners don't (indeed, some of them work for free, or in return for protection!)
Overall, this is a lively read, with some obvious conclusions and some not so obvious.
An Entertaining Lesson on Breaking Out of the Mold
This book succeeds at analyzing sociological developments in a way that is entertaining because Steven Levitt, an economist who strays from convention, has a knack for unpeeling layers and layers of assumptions and myth and showing the real causes behind trends. He shows, to name some examples, how our names affect our career paths; how abortion and the crime rate are related; how a man used his cunning to humiliate the Klu Klux Klan rather than rely on conventional methods; how easy it is to identify the role of public school teachers when they help their students cheat on standardized tests; why drug dealing is only lucrative for the dealers at the top of the pyramid; the myth that real estate agents are looking for our best interests.
The book, co-authored by Stephen J. Dubner, is breezy and anecdotal, which is an effective format for presenting a lot of sociological trends without being dry or losing the scintillating reportage in dense prose.
The lesson of this book is that we should be leery of trusting society's common assumptions or common wisdom. In other words, the book encourages us to keep our mind alert and break out of the mold in the way we see things. By looking at social trends with a fresh eye, the book succeeds at making economic trends a fun, adventurous endeavor.
If I were to criticize the book, it would be that it is too short. It's barely 200 pages and if you take out the blank chapter pages, the charts, the lists, and so on, it's really closer to 150 pages. Because the material is so current and topical, the method of "freakonomics" presented here would make a good format for a monthly magazine. My guess is that there will be many sequels.
Insightful and entertaining
Steven Levitt has a remarkable gift for using the tools of traditional economics to illuminate completely un-traditional problems. While some of the topics covered in FREAKONOMICS are loosely connected to business (the chapter on crack gangs is especially interesting in this regard), the real delight of this book is the light it sheds on issues that many of us have perhaps thought about but never considered rigorously: What effect does a kid's name have on his or her future? Do teachers graded on how well they prepare kids to take tests cheat? What accounts for the precipitous decline in crime in the U.S. in the 1990s? Levitt's answers are not always perfect or completely provable, but they are always intriguing.
The book is not perfect: the prose is sometimes too glib, and the authors occasionally embark on digressions that aren't really all that compelling. Nor should you expect a coherent through-line to the book: the only real connection between the various subjects is that Levitt worked on them. But in the end this doesn't really take away from the pleasure of reading the book. It's enormously enjoyable, as well as being provocative. If you like counterintuitive thinking like Malcolm Gladwell's THE TIPPING POINT or James Surowiecki's THE WISDOM OF CROWDS, you're pretty much guaranteed to love this.
About Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) detail
- Amazon Sales Rank: #188 in Books
- Published on: 2009-09-01
- Released on: 2009-08-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780060731335
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) Description
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
How much do parents really matter?
These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they 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.
