Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even awhisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily
paperThis is ahugely popular book on economics and the application of statistical analysis toevery day life...The best is the one about gang life in Chicago.The bestparts of this book were the ones that dealt with more unusual subject matterlike cheating in sumo-wrestling and the economics of dealing crack cocaine. The other parts, the ones dealing with crime and public education, were fairlypedestrian, I thought. Instead, I think this book is too much of a mish-mash ofthe exciting and the dull.I found the book written in a way that was very understandable, the languagethough sometimes a bit ivory tower, was none the less engaging and would beuseful in an entry level statistics class to help illustrate the power ofstatistics for both good and dubious ends. The topics range from interesting tofascinating, and the
authors are consistent in their logical prose. The book iswritten in clear, readily understandable language (including the bestdescription I've ever seen of regression analysis, causality, and correlation).The topics discussed are quite interesting - why crime REALLY went down in the90's, the impact parents can REALLY have on their kids, and several others.Whether one ultimately agrees with the authors' conclusions or not, the bookcertainly encourages you to think about everyday things more critically and notjust accept the
conventional wisdom.Forexample, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violentcriminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted theexistence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Theseenlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the bookbeing written. He's intrigued by anomaliesand unusual patterns of data and the truths that might be hidden behind them. Whenit was suggested to Levitt that he write a book about his approach toeconomics, he thought that Dubner might be the man to do it for him. Together they've created abook about the different questions and answers that Levitt has encountered inhis research, and explain their choice of its title: Most booksput forth a single theme, crisply expressed in a sentence or two, and then tellthe entire story of that theme: the history of salt; the fragility ofdemocracy; and the use and misuse of punctuation. True totheir word, the chapters in Freakonomics have no unifying theme,although it is obvious that Levitt loves to sift through data to uncover liesand cheating. He approaches the subject in his chapter about teachers and sumowrestlers. The point that Levitt makes in this chapter is that incentivesprovide temptation for cheating, and also for understanding the rationalebehind someone's behavior. They are quick to pointout, though, that there is a distinction between causal relationships betweendata and the correlations found within this data. They also take on the ideaof conventional wisdom. The authors have created a book that is bothentertaining and educational.