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| Freakonomics | | Date Created: May 17, 2005, 07:37 AM |
 OK, it seems I'm getting better at knowing which books are worth the effort to read before I open them. They all seem to be classics that everyone should read. Must be self serving and/or conventional wisdom... according to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Levitt is the "rogue" economist and he certainly does think different questions, but his strength is in ignoring the conventional wisdom and seeing through the self serving, politically correct promotion of statistics to use real data to get unexpected real world answers. He convinced me that we can attribute most of the huge drop in major crimes in the 90's to the delayed effect of the change in the abortion laws in 1973.
Dubner is the reporter. He had done some pieces on Levitt for the NYT Magazine and includes them in the book. They got along so well they decided to collaborate on a this book. He's also reads the book for the audio version, which I heard rather than read. Does this make a difference? Well it does when you're trying to write a review. There's nothing to refer back to.
At first I thought there's no way these two are going to top Thomas Sowell's two efforts, Basic Economics and Applied Economics. These two books are the current economic classics and Sowell is the ultimate libertarian economist, but Levitt is young and brash and understands the issues of politicized science, conventional wisdom, and self-serving promotors that plague discourse on economic issues. He has found a new way to look at economics and economic data. Like Sowell, it comes down to individual choices based on incentives rather than groups, wishful thinking, or top down control.
The book is intentionally scattered, unfocused, and iconoclastic. It's certainly not a primer or classic text. There are some nice background stories on abortion law, gun control, crack cocaine, sumo wrestlers, federally mandated testing and teacher cheating, heredity, and parenting to name a few.
You chould read this one for fun, for information, and to learn more about how to see the world as it is rather than how certain people would like it to be or think it is. |
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