The Google Blog announced that the authors of Freakonomics, the latest New York Times bestseller, visited both Google and Yahoo to discuss their book. After reviewing the Freakonomics blog,
I was very intrigued, so I’ve already ordered the book from Amazon. I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve read it. In the meantime, I’ll just post a few excerpts from the Freakonomics websites.
If there is any objection to the material being posted here, please contact me, but I have referenced the blog and linked to it.
Buy Freakonomics
About “Freakonomics”
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 young scholar who studies the 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.
Reviews
“Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America, and reading Freakonomics is like going for a leisurely walk with him on a sunny summer day, as he waves his fingers in the air and turns everything you once thought to be true inside out. Prepare to be dazzled.”
- Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink
“If Indiana Jones were an economist, he’d be Steven Levitt. The most recent winner of the John Bates Clark award for the best economist under the age of 40, Mr. Levitt is famous not as a master of dry technical arcana but as a maverick treasure hunter who relies for success on his wit, pluck and disregard for conventional wisdom. Mr. Levitt’s typical quarry is hidden not in some exotic locale but in a pile of data. His genius is to take a seemingly meaningless set of numbers, ferret out the telltale pattern and recognize what it means.
It was Mr. Levitt who nailed a bunch of Chicago public-school teachers for artificially inflating their students’ standardized test scores. I’m dying to tell you exactly how he did it, but I don’t want to spoil any surprises. His account of the affair in “Freakonomics” reads like a detective novel.” (more)
- Steven E. Landsburg, Wall Street Journal
“In an age of too much wishful, faith-based conventional wisdom on the right and left, and too much intellectual endeavor squeezed into pre-fab ideological containers, Freakonomics is politically incorrect in the best, most essential way. Levitt and Dubner suss out all kinds of surprising truths — sometimes important ones, sometimes merely fascinating ones — by means of a smart, deep, rigorous, open-minded consideration of facts, with a fearless disegard for whom they might be upsetting. This is bracing fun of the highest order.”
- Kurt Andersen, host of public radio’s Studio 360 and author of Turn of the Century
“Do Sumo wrestlers cheat? Which is a whiter name for a girl, Molly or Holly? And what do crack gangs and McDonald’s restaurants have in common? The answers to these and other seldom-asked questions are all here, in the funkiest study of statistical mechanics ever by a world-renowned economist. Crunching numbers too offbeat for Milton Friedman–KKK membership rolls, bagel sales figures, data from online dating services–Levitt (along with coauthor Dubner) searches for logic in the messy mathematics of human behavior. His conclusions are often eye-opening (say it ain’t so, Sato!) and sometimes eye-popping (his theory that high abortion rates help reduce crime probably won’t get him invited to the White House anytime soon), but in the end he never really adds it all up to a cohesive or compelling sum. Still, give the prof his props: “Freakonomics” is a lot more fun to read than anything Friedman ever wrote.”
- Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly
“Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt’s search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isn’t really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it’s wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt’s controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit. Malcolm Gladwell blurbs that Levitt “has the most interesting mind in America,” an invitation Gladwell’s own substantial fan base will find hard to resist.” (starred review)
- Publishers Weekly
” Why do drug dealers live at home? Levitt (Economics/Univ. of Chicago) and Dubner (Confessions of a Hero Worshiper, 2003, etc.), who profiled Levitt for the New York Times, team up to demolish conventional wisdom.
To call Levitt a “rogue economist” may be a tad hyperbolic. Certainly this epitome of antistyle (“his appearance is High Nerd: a plaid button-down shirt, nondescript khakis and a braided belt, brown sensible shoes”) views the workaday world with different eyes; the young economist teases out meaning from juxtapositions that simply would not occur to other researchers. Consider this, for instance: in the mid-1990s, just when the Clinton administration projected it was about to skyrocket, crime in the U.S. fell markedly. And why? Because, Levitt hazarded a few years ago, of the emergent effects of the Roe v. Wade decision: legalized abortion prevented the births of millions of poor people who, beset by social adversity, were “much more likely than average to become criminals.” The suggestion, Dubner writes, “managed to offend just about everyone,” conservative and liberal alike, but it had high explanatory value.
Levitt hasn’t shied away from controversy in other realms, either, preferring to let the numbers speak for themselves: a young man named Jake will earn more job interviews than one with the same credentials named DeShawn; the TV game show The Weakest Link, like society as a whole, discriminates against the elderly and Hispanics; it is human nature to cheat, and the higher up in the organization a person rises, the more likely it is that he or she will cheat. Oh, yes, and street-level drug dealers live at home with their moms because they have to; most earn well below minimum wage but accept the bad pay and dangerous conditions to get a shot at the big time, playing in what in effect is a tournament. “A crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise,” Levitt and Dubner write, “you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage.”
An eye-opening, and most interesting, approach to the world.”
- Kirkus Reviews
