Product Description

Cult bestseller, new buzz word... Freakonomics 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. 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: #130 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 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

Freakonomics
I was hoping for a fun and stimulating read to while away quiet hours spent staying with relatives in the country, but I found Freakonomics a big disappointment. The chapter on the link between abortion and crime is worth reading, but the rest of it is there just to enlarge a magazine article into a book full of unrelated chapters.

For a 'rogue economist' there's not much in the way of unusual viewpoints or radical ideas here, in fact most of it's pretty obvious and extremely padded out. It's also very American (apart from the sumos) and I often found myself wondering why I was reading this stuff - why was I supposed to be interested?

I'm afraid I came away with the feeling I'd fallen for a publishing scam rather than having learned anything worthwhile.