Product Description

Modern life can be baffling and chaotic. Is there any way of making sense of it? The answer, explains groundbreaking thinker Steven Levitt, lies in economics. Not ordinary economics, but freakonomics. It is at the heart of everything we see and do and the subjects that bedevil us daily: from parenting to crime, sport to politics, fat to cheating, fear to traffic jams. In Freakonomics Levitt turns conventional economics on its head, stripping away the jargon and calculations of the experts' to explore the riddles of everyday life and examine topics such as: how chips are more likely to kill you than murder or a terrorist attack; why sportsmen cheat and how fraud can be spotted; why violent crime can be linked not to gun laws, policing or poverty, but to abortion; why a road is more efficient when everyone travels at 20mph; how the name you give your child can give them an advantage in later life; and what really causes obesity epidemics. Ultimately, he shows us that economics is all about how people get what they want, and what makes them do it. Asking provocative and profound questions about human motivation and contemporary living and reaching some astonishing conclusions, Freakonomics will make you see the familiar world through a completely original lens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105745 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Wall Street Journal
‘Freakonomics reads like a detective novel … has you chuckling one minute and gasping in amazement the next’

Sunday Telegraph
‘A sensation … you’ll be stimulated, provoked and entertained. Of how many books can that be said?’

Observer
‘A phenomenon … their approach has won the book a cult following’

Customer Reviews

A look at things through the eyes of an economist.
This book is a general interest book- and it certainly is interesting. The book, for anyone looking for an entertaining read, will like it. In a nutshell, the book takes a look at all sorts of things in society, from crack gangs to parenting, and then attempts to make sense of them by applying econonmic principles. According to the book, economics is really the study of incentives, and so using this kind of angle, the book comes up with answers to why things work the way they do.

A book that's hard to put down, I'm sure many readers will enjoy it. Also recommend The Sixty-Second Motivator for a more simplistic explanation of what motivates people and gives them incentives to do what they do.

The hidden side of the "Unexpected Publishing Phenomenon"
Hmmm. A very *interesting* (in the sense of the Middle Eastern curse) kettle of fish.

I'm not sure what co-author Dubner's role is here - either to act as an alter ego for Levitt, allowing reproduction of fawning extracts from various newspaper articles written about Levitt throughout the book (as sole author Levitt wouldn't be able to get away with this without heaping hubris on his head), or perhaps to take the material he had from his original article and pad it out into a volume just fat enough (and no more) to justify publication as a hard-back, in which case Levitt had pretty much nothing to do with this book at all. I suspect a bit of both.

Most of the few points made in this book are, at best, only moderately interesting, and there are very few of them: Freakonomics doesn't even remotely live up to its billing, managing only to explore the hidden side of about five completely discrete, and only moderately uninteresting, topics (statistical evidence that there's cheating in Sumo Wrestling, anyone?) Indeed, the sumo cheating data wasn't especially compelling: it seems to me there is an entirely innocent explanation for wrestlers who have already "qualified" losing an abnormally large number of bouts to statistically weaker fighters who have not: a "qualified" wrestler simply has no incentive to try particularly hard, where as a non-qualifying wrestler does. That analysis doesn't involve any collusion at all.

Elsewhere, Levitt's theorems only really work where there are huge quantities of data covering all conceivable aspects of the topic at hand. Most of the time, this just isn't the case, which is why the hidden side of everything remains, even to Levitt and Dubner, hidden.

In the cases where the data are available - like Baseball - others have done a much more compelling job of writing the economist's expose. For example, try Michael Lewis' outstanding Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

Mean time, this one joins Lynne Truss's Eats Shoots & Leaves as the latest in a long line of quick-buck publishing pan-flashes.

Perhaps the money I've wasted on this book can be put, through this review, to some good use: saving yours.

Olly Buxton

Correlation and Common Sense
Popular science is a literary area that is undergoing a renaissance. Akin to the explosion in interest in history of the 90s, popular science has provided the 'must reads' of the 21st century. Freakonomics is a books that is destined to join the august ranks of the best sellers of this genre, along with Guns, Germs and Steel, Collapse, Blink and the Wisdom of Crowds.

For most people economics is a dimly understood science. It conjures pictures of finance, interest rates, banks and corporations. Whilst these fiscal aspects play a large role, and admittedly many job opportunities for economists, the science itself is much broader. It is essentially the study of how man chooses to live in a world of infinitate want and finate resources. Twinned with advanced statistical study, an enquiring mind and an accomplished writing partner Steven Levitt manages to forge a book that is both a fascininating insight in to academic economics, and an arresting blast to many of our pre-conceptions.

Levitt is seems to be somewhat unaware or unconcerned with the chaos his theories unleash. He is an academic economist, and is unconcerned with politics, political correctness, or the niceties of society. Thus he asserts that sharp reduction in crime correlates and is predetermined by the judgement in Roe v Wade which brought federal sanction for abortions. He demonstrates how the control of information puts experts such as realtors and lawyers in the same 'industry' as members of the Ku Klux Klan. The unifying theme seems to be the shattering of deeply held, but erroneous beliefs, and the 'proving' of alternative factual situations, e.g. the much greater risk posed by swimming pools to children than guns.

Combining Levitt's pioneering economic genius with Dubner's erudite and accessible writing produces a team which exposes many of the commonly held myths, and acts as something of a clarion call for the media, experts, politicians and even the general public to be a lot more responsible and diligent in their pronouncements. They are too often wrong.