First Looks: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)
June 16th, 2011 Filed under: Internet Home Businesses — Small Home Business Author
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Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
How much do parents really matter?
These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday lifefrom cheating and crime to parenting and sportsand reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is, at root, the study of incentiveshow people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.
Review:
Freakonomics explored subjects in ways that I had never really thought of before. Most of the time, Levitt found conclusions of subjects, such as drop in crime rates, and names of children in different social statuses that seemed out of the ordinary. They would end up surprising the reader. He explored these topics in ways that is entertaining to the reader, and makes him or her want to read more.
For example, Levitt explained at the end of the book that one man named Ted Kaczynski, who lived in a family that stressed education and togetherness, ended up failing to succeed later in life, by becoming a postal bomb terrorist. In a similar but opposite situation, Roland G. Fryer, who was abandoned by his mother, beaten by his father, and became a gangster by his teens, ended up becoming a Harvard economist that studied black underachievement. This was quite interesting to me. It is quite possible for someone to achieve greatly without the proper background and past, as Roland displayed.
Although Freakonomics was a good book, it was not perfect. There are times where the reader may feel a sense of redundancy. Levitt might make a point and talk about it at multiple points in the book. For example, in the introduction, Levitt mentions how legalized abortion is correlated to a drop in crime rates. He then leaves the topic alone, and comes back to it in chapter four, giving a little more of a history of abortion, but he still concludes the same thing that he did in chapter 1, with unnecessary background information. Chapter one talks about teachers and sumo wrestlers having something in common they cheat. However, this can basically be said referring to any person on Earth, and is also unnecessary.
There have been some negative comments on this book about it being disorganized and random. However, this book is not necessarily a book with a developing storyline, but rather a collection of findings made by an economist. He simply put them together into a book instead of publishing them separately.
Don’t get me wrong, Levitt set out to show us that some answers in life aren’t right out in front of us, and we have to delve deeper into the subject, think in new ways, and not simply jump ahead to a conclusion. I think he did an adequate job at this However, we have to realize that someone may find a fact or statistic that supports any point. It is the reader’s job to decide whether or not he or she wants to accept it. Overall, Freakonomics was a good book, and I strongly recommend it.
