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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Paperback)
by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Freaky, fun and thought-provoking, this wonderfully popular non-fiction book is full of weird insights and surprising conclusions. |
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Author: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Publisher: Harper Large Print
Pub. in: January, 2006
ISBN: 0061242705
Pages: 320
Measurements: 9 x 5.7 x 0.8
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00035
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- Awards & Credential -
A runaway New York Times Bestseller. |
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- MSL Picks -
"[The treasure-hunt] approach [used in this book] employs the best analytical tools that economics can offer but it also allows [for the exploration of] whatever freakish curiosities [that] may occur to us [the authors]. Thus our invented field of study: Freakonomics."
This is the definition found in the introduction of this easy-to-read book, authored by Steven Levitt (known by his peers as "the most brilliant young economist in America") and writer Stephen Dubner.
The most important part of this book is the five "fundamental ideas" on which it is based. These ideas are in no way revolutionary. In fact, anyone with some elementary economics, psychology (especially social psychology), philosophy, and life experience is probably familiar with them already. What I found unique though, is that they are the basis of a book on economics!
In this regard then, in my opinion, this is a very honest book. This honesty may breed contempt in some who read it. For those people, it would be beneficial to memorize the following:
"Morality...represents the way that people would like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does work."
What is the aim of this book? "To explore the hidden side of...everything."
The remainder of this book then, is to indeed explore the hidden side of everything. Well, not quite. Obviously, such a book would be tremendously large if everything was explored. So what the authors do is explore what they call "freakish questions" of their own choosing and utilize the fundamental ideas alluded too above.
Thus there are such freakish questions asked such as "What do school teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common?" and "How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents?" Each of these questions forms the title of a chapter where the question is answered.
After reading some of the customer reviews below this one, it seems to me that many people get hung up on the freakish questions and their answers. However, what they should focus on is how the question was analyzed. Realize also, that the answers given to these questions are general. I'm sure there are exceptions to their answers.
The book ends with a brief epilogue. Even though its brief, I feel it is very important and emphasizes what you should have extracted from this book.
Note that "the bulk of this book was drawn from the research of Steven D. Levitt, often done in concert with one or more collaborators."
Finally, some people may be disappointed after reading this book. If your motive for getting it was to help you improve your life materially, then don't buy it because that's not its purpose. However, if you want to understand how the world works (at least economically) by looking at it in a different way, then this is the book to get.
In conclusion, I leave you with Steven Levitt's underlying belief:
"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 - even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking." (From quoting Stephen Pletko, USA)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, government and non-profit leaders, professionals, and MBAs.
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Steven D. Levitt teaches economics at the University of Chicago. He recently receives John Bates Clark Medal, awarded every 2 years to the best American economist under 40.
Stephen J. Dubner lives in New York City. He writes for the New York Times and the New Yorker and is the national best-selling author of Turbulent Souls and Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper.
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From the Publisher:
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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What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?
Imagine for a moment that you are the manager of a day-care center. You have a clearly stated policy that children are supposed to be picked up by 4 p.m. But very often parents are late. The result: at day's end, you have some anxious children and at least one teacher who must wait around for the parents to arrive. What to do?
A pair of economists who heard of this dilemma - it turned out to be a rather common one - offered a solution: fine the tardy parents. Why, after all, should the day-care center take care of these kids for free?
The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380.
After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went... up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.
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. Economists love incentives. They love to dream them up and enact them, study them and tinker with them. The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme. His solution may not always be pretty - it may involve coercion or exorbitant penalties or the violation of civil liberties - but the original problem, rest assured, will be fixed. An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.
We all learn to respond to incentives, negative and positive, from the outset of life. If you toddle over to the hot stove and touch it, you burn a finger. But if you bring home straight A's from school, you get a new bike. If you are spotted picking your nose in class, you get ridiculed. But if you make the basketball team, you move up the social ladder. If you break curfew, you get grounded. But if you ace your SATs, you get to go to a good college. If you flunk out of law school, you have to go to work at your father's insurance company. But if you perform so well that a rival company comes calling, you become a vice president and no longer have to work for your father. If you become so excited about your new vice president job that you drive home at eighty mph, you get pulled over by the police and fined $100. But if you hit your sales projections and collect a year-end bonus, you not only aren't worried about the $100 ticket but can also afford to buy that Viking range you've always wanted - and on which your toddler can now burn her own finger.
An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. But most incentives don't come about organically. Someone - an economist or a politician or a parent - has to invent them. Your three-year-old eats all her vegetables for a week? She wins a trip to the toy store. A big steelmaker belches too much smoke into the air? The company is fined for each cubic foot of pollutants over the legal limit. Too many Americans aren't paying their share of income tax? It was the economist Milton Friedman who helped come up with a solution to this one: automatic tax withholding from employees' paychecks.
There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack "sin tax" is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.
Some of the most compelling incentives yet invented have been put in place to deter crime. Considering this fact, it might be worthwhile to take a familiar question - why is there so much crime in modern society? - and stand it on its head: why isn't there a lot more crime?
After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to maim, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail - thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties - is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime, people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong). For certain types of misbehavior, social incentives are terribly powerful. In an echo of Hester Prynne's scarlet letter, many American cities now fight prostitution with a "shaming" offensive, posting pictures of convicted johns (and prostitutes) on websites or on local-access television. Which is a more horrifying deterrent: a $500 fine for soliciting a prostitute or the thought of your friends and family ogling you on www.HookersAndJohns.com.
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| View all 23 comments |
Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Blink) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America, and reading Freaonomics 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. |
Kurt Anderson (author of Turn of the Century) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
In an age of too much wishful, faith-based conventional wisdom on the right and left, and too much intellectual endeavor squeezed into prefab 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 smart, deep, vigorous open-minded consideration of facts, with a fearless disregard for whom they might be upsetting. This is bracing fun of the highest order. |
Bookmarks (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
"Rogue" economist might be an overstatement. As a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and the recipient of the John Bates Clark medal (presented by the American Economics Association to the nation’s most outstanding economist under 40) Steven Levitt is hardly an outsider. Yet when journalist Stephen Dubner published a profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, the economist's theories struck many as, well, freaky. Levitt’s field of behavior economics tries to combine classical economics with the emotional rules of human behavior. Some critics complain that Freakonomics reads too much like an extended collection of articles without a theme; wasn't this the same complaint we heard most often about Malcolm Gladwell's Blink? Sometimes we don't mind learning about a variety of things, you know. Levitt and Dubner's continued partnership uncovers entertaining tales of the many quirks of human behavior. |
Mike Freeman (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Economics is brought to the masses by the two Steves - Levitt, the economist who applies his science to real-world issues, and Dubner, the journalist whose captivating style makes finishing this book easy and fun. Levitt advances some pretty far-out theories (legalized abortion helps to stem crime, for example) but he supports his assertions convincingly. The book appears on the surface to be a collection of observations tied loosely together by one common thread - economics. In this case, think of economics less as a boring analysis of mind-numbing data, and more as an application of the principle that human beings will act in their own best interests. So, teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat, crack dealers kill rivals to get promoted, middle- and lower-income families name their children after the offspring of wealthy families, and so forth. Most folks think there isn't a 'point' to the book, but if you pay attention, you will realize that Levitt and Dubner are saying that economics can be applied to everything around you. |
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