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Freakonomics: Revised Edition (Unabridged) | 
 enlarge | Author: Dubner, Steven, Stephen D., J. Levitt
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
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Rating:  1582 reviews
Sales Rank: 7309243
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B000TK5BS2
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Amazon.com Review
Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald's, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don't really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there's a good economic reason for that too, and we're just not getting it yet. --John Moe
Product Description
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 scholar who studies the stuff and 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1577 more reviews...
 The Dismal Science No Longer November 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Economics and economists have the reputation of being dry, dusty old ideas and men with no more life to them than an Egyptian mummy on display in a museum. But Freakonomics brings fresh life to the subject and at the same time encourages its readers to think outside the box or break the mold of conventional thinking.
A series of six hilarious chapters challenge our assumptions on everything from drug dealers to school teachers to parenting. Using statistics and new interpretations, the authors Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner help us view our world with altered eyes, recognizing that truisms and cliches are not necessarily reflections of reality. In today's world of crashing stock markets and neighborhoods full of foreclosed houses, its good to take a fresh look at economics and the long time assumptions we have all relied upon far too long.
Freakonomics November 26, 2008
No theme, no logic thread, but some truly original takes on how the world works, from the standpoint of a "rogue economist." Some topics, like how Roe v. Wade is the strongest explanatory variable for America's decrease in crime, just keep coming up, but still, there are lots of common-sense-defying revelations that keep it interesting. For instance, did you know that time spent reading to children does not correlate to improved test scores, but that the number of books in the house does? Did you know that crack-dealing inner-city gangs are run much like corporate America -- except they offer a slightly higher risk of fatality? Whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, these, and a slew more of such revelations, make for an entertaining and thought-provoking read indeed.
Sociology-flavored econ November 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Everybody knows that economics is about measurement and money and things numerical; that's why most of us find it so damned dull.
But as approached by offbeat economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt, economics is also "the study of incentives": what it takes to get us to do a certain thing--or to not do it, as the case may be. Which makes it human, and therefore fascinating.
This is what I love about this delightful book by Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner: that it comes at things sideways or upside-down or head-on, but never the usual way. I'm still not sold on some of the more radical hypotheses Leavitt coaxes from the data (the link between abortion and falling crime rates being the most widely reviled and quoted), but I'm 100% there on the importance of throwing the numbers against conventional wisdom to see what sticks. The numbers may not always tell the exact truth, but neither do they lie, making them extraordinarily useful in the exploding of myths.
Levitt and Dubner tell fascinating stories about how to combat crappy teaching, bring down the Ku Klux Klan and what happens when you call your kids "Winner" and "Loser" (answer: not necessarily what you'd think on any count). But really, they've written a book celebrating the heart of truth: asking questions, and hacks to stay open to the real answers.
As an interesting side note, the prospect of reading something that seemed like it would rock my world long and hard was too enticing to wait for a library copy to become available, but not enticing enough to get me to part with $26 of my hard-earned money. My break point? A 25/day rental from the Beverly Hills Public Library, and pushing the rest of my reading to the bottom of the pile. Some might call that cheap, but I'm betting Levitt would come at it sideways and say that I was already giving up time I'd committed to other reading to explore this book, and therefore it was of great value to me.
And you know what? He'd be right.
 Interesting But Sometimes Unremarkable November 1, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Freakonomics addresses many diverse topics. The thing that ties the book together is the interesting kind of questions it examines and the unique blend of intuition, logic, and statistical analysis it uses to answer these questions. This book is enjoyable to read and describes many rather nerdy concepts in easy-to-understand language.
Of the twenty or so topics the book addresses, four were especially interesting to me: rigging of Sumo wrestling matches, cheating by public school teachers on their students' proficiency exams, the drop in U.S. crime rates in the 1990s, and family attributes that correspond to children's educational success. The first two analyses identified statistical anomalies in patterns of wrestling match outcomes and test answers that demonstrated probable corruption in the world of Sumo wrestling and cheating in the Chicago public school system. The third and fourth analyses were the most impressive in the book. Each considered about a dozen variables that might be related (causally or otherwise) to crime rates or educational success and used regression analyses to determine which ones were in fact related.
The analysis of the drop in crime rates in the 1990s is probably Steven Levitt's best known and most controversial work. His analysis shows that four factors were likely responsible for the decrease in crime: harsher prison terms, increased hiring of police, the crash of the crack cocaine market, and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Levitt concludes that the first three factors were responsible for approximately 33%, 10%, and 15%, respectively, of the decrease in crime. He does not attach a specific weight to the Roe v. Wade decision, but presumably it accounts for all or most of the remaining 42%. The factors that did not contribute to the decrease in crime included tougher gun laws, increased use of capital punishment, and innovative policing strategies (such as the oft-touted New York City strategy of going after petty crimes to signal that no crimes would be tolerated).
The theory behind the Roe v. Wade contribution is that widespread abortion removed from the population many of the very people (unwanted children) most likely to commit crime when they became teenagers and young adults. This theory has disturbed many people of all political persuasions, apparently because it provides ammunition to both sides of the abortion debate. In addition, some economists have argued that Levitt's analysis has technical errors significant enough to invalidate his conclusions. I don't know whether Levitt has effectively responded to these economists. As for the political controversy, Levitt has basically stayed above the fray, stating that, "The numbers we're talking about, in terms of crime, are absolutely trivial when you compare it to the broader debate on abortion. ... So, my own view...is that our study shouldn't change anybody's opinion about whether abortion should be legal and easily available or not. It's really a study about crime, not abortion." (Source: Wikipedia.)
The analysis of family attributes that correspond to children's educational success concludes that six factors are positively correlated with success: the parents are highly educated, the parents have high socioeconomic status, the mother was at least 30 years old at the time of her first child's birth, the parents speak English at home, the parents are involved in the PTA, and the child has many books at home. Surprisingly, several factors that conventional wisdom suggests are important to success seem to have little or no relationship to actual outcomes, including whether the child's family is intact, whether the child's mother works before the child enters kindergarten, whether the child's parents frequently read to him/her, and whether the child watches a lot of TV.
For me, the biggest surprise in the list of non-correlated variables was the apparent unimportance of intact families. A great deal of social science research contradicts this finding. For example, boys who grow up in homes without fathers are more likely to drop out of school. They also have higher rates of substance abuse, arrest, and incarceration. It would be interesting to hear Levitt's critique of this research. I also wonder if there is a problem with Levitt's data. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study from which he draws his data tracks educational outcomes only through fifth grade. Perhaps the impacts that broken families have on children are more acute after fifth grade.
Despite these fascinating analyses, I had a few disappointments with the book. For starters, some of the topics that it addressed seemed so unremarkable that I wondered how they made it into the book. Two of the conclusions presented were ones I had reached on my own, before reading the book. One was the conclusion that a real estate agent's incentives are not aligned with a house seller's incentives. (An agent maximizes his/her income by selling as many houses as possible, not by squeezing the last dollar out of a particular sale.) The other was the conclusion that the internet caused term life insurance premiums to fall (not to mention the prices of countless other goods and services).
I also noticed a couple of instances of sloppy thinking. For example, the analysis of family attributes that correspond to children's educational success concluded with some wild generalizations, including: "it isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are;" and "[child-rearing] technique looks to be highly overrated." The authors admit that they are over generalizing "a bit," but it's more like a giant leap. First, as the authors acknowledge, bad parenting matters a great deal, hence the theory that Roe v. Wade decreased crime rates. Second, parenting is about much more than successful educational outcomes; it is also about physical, emotional, behavioral, social, moral, spiritual, and character development. Third, the set of things that constitutes "what you do" and the set of things that constitutes "who you are" are not discrete sets; they intersect in a big way.
Finally, I grew tired of the subtext that seems to run through this book, namely, that economics is some sort of master science that can explain and predict just about anything. The basic tools of the book -- curiosity, intuition, logic, thinking outside the box, and statistics -- are not peculiar to economics. Also, the book frequently ignores the uncertainties of statistical analysis. For example, there is no discussion of the level of significance of the many correlations that are described. Ironically, the book repeatedly issues warnings about trusting experts, for example, "The typical parenting expert, like experts in other fields, is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself."
But overall I enjoyed this book and found the topics it examined interesting.
(Note: This review is based on the 2005 edition of Freakonomics.)
A much-appreciated gift October 30, 2008
I purchased this book as a gift for my fiance. He really enjoyed and appreciated it. Now it's my turn to read it!
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