12
Apr
2009
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
There were a lot of classes I took in college, however, economics was not one of them. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. When this book came out, I didn’t intend to read it, but someone lent it to me and I never gave it back (it’s O.K., it was just my in-laws and they should know by now what a book thief I am). 
Dubner writes Levitt’s research and you get the best of both worlds. Academia not written by an academic, but still with all of the authority of one. It’s refreshing that someone of Levitt’s intellect knows enough to also know that being smart does not equal being able to write for a general audience. But not only does this book read like you’re talking to someone you met in a really great dive bar, the topics the Steves use to illustrate economic points are also untraditional, which makes it all the more interesting.
Levitt insists on making a distinction between causation and correlation. This point runs through the whole book. Many times something that looks like cause and effect are really just two effects of the same cause. Ever take a PoliSci class on unintended consequences? Yeah, it’s something like that.
Not only do the Steves blast through orthodox views, they blast through our cultural comfort zones. I couldn’t stop thinking about this book after I finished it, though it didn’t always gestate well in my brain. The Steves don’t present alternate solutions; they’re not preachers. They lay out the research, make some arguments and leave it to the rest of us to figure out.
The most controversial example of this is the cause of lower crime rates in the ’90’s. Most police forces would love to say that this was due to more cops, intervention, blah blah blah. Untrue. Levitt’s research shows that the root cause happened in the US Supreme Court twenty years before: Roe vs Wade.
Yeah.
Now whether you are a Pro-Choice or Pro-Life proponent, this can’t sit well with anyone. Basically we are saying that by eliminating chunks of a society (the chunks here being unwanted babies), crime is reduced. The Steves don’t go anywhere else with this. They skip what most people are probably wondering… Does this mean that our society is so terrible that it is better to get rid of certain elements than to try to take corrective measures? Yikes.
My favorite example from this book is that busing from bad schools to good schools doesn’t work. Allow me to summarize Levitt’s research to the best of my abilities: Student A, Student B, and Student C go to a crappy public school. Their district is going to start bussing kids to a better school across town. There will be a lottery to determine which lucky kiddos get to go. The parents of both Student A and Student B really want their kids to go to a nicer school, so they enter them in the lottery. Student C’s parents don’t care. Student A gets in to the better school and starts busing across town, while Student B and Student C stay at their old school. At the end of the year, both Student A and Student B have good grades, and Student C has dropped out. The reason is that both of the parents of Student A and Student B cared enough about their kids education to try to get them into a different school. It is not the school itself, but the priority that parents place on education.
Again, the Steves don’t try to suggest what should be done with this information. They present the findings in a cool, easy to understand way. At the end of the book you have learned all about the weirdness that is rogue economics, and armed with such information it is for you to go out into the world, whether you use it for good or evil.
Buy Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything on Amazon
If you like this book/author you might like:
(my reviews in blue)
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins
The World Is Flat by Thomas L Friedman
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works by Jonathan Swift
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
The Stories of English by David Crystal
The First Word by Christine Kenneally
Other works by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner:
Other works by Steven D. Levitt
Economics of Criminal Law (Economic Approaches to Law) (w/ Thomas Miles)
Other works by Stephen J. Dubner:
The Boy with Two Belly Buttons by Christoph Niemann
Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief
Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper
