Reading List

Table of Contents

ISBN:

006073132X

Format:

Hardcover, 242 pages

Publish Date:

April, 2005

Publisher:

37

Other Format(s):

Audiobook, E-book

What’s more deadly, a gun or a swimming pool? What common characteristic do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers share? Why do dope peddlers still live with their mothers? Do parents matter? How did Roe v. Wade effect violent-crime rates? These may not sound like standard questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not your run-of-the-mill economist. He is a scholar acclaimed for his unique take on the oddities, and odd correlations, of daily 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 outrageously interesting bestseller: Freakonomics. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, the co-authors 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 just about 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.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. This is one of those books that can redefine the way you view the world.