Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
By Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Obligatory Amazon Link
You may have hear of this book, it’s the one that talks about the link between abortion and crime. (More abortion less crime.) Recently these numbers and facts have been disputed by different communities. There’s lots of talk and controversy around it because of that. And there are lots of blow by blow descriptions of the book and then there’s the book itself. So this review is none of the above.
Right from the start I have to clarify and say that it was very well written.It wasn’t written by an economist, don’t worry you aren’t going to use this book to make you fall instantly to sleep every night. Freakonomics isn’t quite as weird as the title might make you think, or at least I didn’t think it was, your mileage may vary.
The point of this book is to link up seemingly unrelated things and look at them in a scientific way, and to look at very unscientific things in a scientific way. What kinds of things? My favorite was the cheating. Not looking at how students cheat, but how teachers cheat. You know all this pay for performance stuff that schools are talking about combined with crazy amounts of standardized tests? Well this leads not so ethical teachers to cheat, they do lots of different things, some write the answers on the board, some just teach to the test, and some change the answers after the students are done with the tests. This last group is who is addressed in the book. They use pattern recognition programs to look for cheating teachers. They also manage to find the good ones in the same manner.
He lays out the information he gathers and doesn’t give you and solutions to the problems he comes up with or points out. This book isn’t about giving you things to it, it is about asking questions you might have never asked. He then gives the answers to the questions. What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Well they both cheat. Then he shows how they can both be statistically proven. He asks lots of questions like this and draws some difficult to understand comparisons between disparate groups. But stick with it because he’s clear, though brief on each of the topics.
While everyone talked a lot about the abortion/crime talk I thought the two top pieces were the cheating and KKK pieces. (There’s also a great chapter on black vs white names that is interesting, is your name on the list?) I already told you what I thought about the cheating, so now I’ll talk a little about the KKK piece. The man who decided to infiltrate the KKK and give their secrets to the Superman radio show was interviewed and his story is very interesting. You can get just a tiny little taste for what he did in this book. [You can also get a little taste by listening to the first segment of this story on This American Life episode #285.] The chapter also included talk about discrimination on the TV show The Weakest Link. Is it there? In what form? And why would people discriminate on a nationally broadcast TV show?
Overall the book asks a lot of questions you never thought to ask, but might intreague you, make you think a little. And any book that makes you think -and- not throw it against the wall is a good book. But is it a great book? It does what it sets out to do very well. Raises questions, answers them, but in doing so raises more for you to ponder in your own life. He also shows that Economics isn’t all Alan Greenspan speaking a semblance of english that requires a PHD and decades of expert training to translate. He tries to show that economics can be applied to every day actual situations. In this last bit I’m not sure exactly how well he succeeds. I don’t know about you but I have very rare interactions with sumo wrestlers, and my contact with drug dealers and KKK members is well…I’ll tell you when it happens. I do have common interaction with a relative who gave her child a highly questionable name. Poor little baby is growing up with quite the lously set of expectations. (My sister just named her baby boy a name on the top of the list though so I’m pleased with her.) But really? I’m sure they can be applied, but I hope he doesn’t decide to go into private pratice trying to solve your and my actual day to day problems with economics.
I very much enjoyed the book. You might have trouble getting at the library (one local library in the Twin Cities had a list of 600 people waiting for it) but it is worth picking up a copy. And lend it to your friends who won’t buy it but will enjoy it after you finish it off.
So should you read this book? Yes, absolutely. It is great, an information but light read. You’ll get lots of things to talk about, and not feel like you’ve just waded through a textbook (there is nothing textbooky about this). You’ll find out about things you never knew you wanted to find out about, but will be intrigued nevertheless. You’ll get to find out why drug dealers still live with their moms. This is a great book, and I recommend it even to people who seriously contemplated crushing their econ teacher under unread copies of the Wall Street Journal.
