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Superficial, lleno de anécdotas y explicaciones enrevesadas sin ninguna base más allá de la correlación. Este es el nivel de la economía.

Hay un punto que resulta especialmente ofensivo: Levitt repite una y otra vez "ya sé correlación no es causa" y añade sistemáticamente "pero...", y da una explicación causal de libro. El análisis de regresión es llamado "una sofisticada herramienta de los economistas", que "permite controlar variables". Esto es la peor interpretación posible de la regresión, que NO es una técnica explicativa, pese a que durante dos capítulos Levitt convence a Dubner para escribir lo contrario.

A ver. La economía va de hacer predicciones ajustadas a corto plazo sobre un sistema muy complejo, usando mil variables y sin pretender explicar o entender nada del sistema, y olvidando al agente del cambio. Eso es la economía, así usan la regresión y el resto de la maquinaria técnica predictiva que han desarrollado. Mientras el sistema está estable y el agente se comporta en él de manera regular, todo va bien.

Cuando la maquina de ver el futuro falla, los economistas abren la máquina y dedican todos sus esfuerzos a ver qué ha fallado. Aquí Levitt busca la pieza más exótica y seduce a Dubner para que admire su ingenio y le haga un panegírico (por no usar una metáfora más sexual). Y no.

Reto a Levitt a usar su penetración intelectual para hacer una sola predicción a un año sobre cualquiera de los temas de los que trata.

Un libro ridículo sobre retrofuturología.

Levitt is an original thinker who has an ability to look beneath the obvious, using the tools of his trade, economics. As such he has come up with a diverse range of insights into various social issues, finding connections that are sometimes quite surprising. He shows how many notions taken as common wisdom are anything but.

The unexpected results of the legalization of abortion – crime reduction
Using statistics and logic to show how teachers and sumo wrestlers can be shown to cheat
What is the impact of greater spending in political campaigns
These and other questions, and their examination by Levitt make for an educational, thought-provoking, and eminently entertaining read.

P 13
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work. Economics is above all a science of measurement. It compromises an extraordinarily powerful and flexible set of tools that can reliably assess a thicket of information to determine the effect of any one factor, or even the whole effect. That’s what “the economy” is, after all: a thicket of information about jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the tools of economics can be just as easily applied to subjects that are more—well, more interesting.

This book, then, has been written from a very specific worldview, based on a few fundamental ideas:
tIncentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, ferreting them out—is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.
tThe conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn’t keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn’t win elections, and—surprise—drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health.
tDramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.
tExperts—from criminologists to real-estate agents—use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda


P 71
Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage, fear. Fear that your children will find you dead on the bathroom floor of a heart attack if you do not have angioplasty surgery. Fear that a cheap casket will expose your grandmother to a terrible underground fate. Fear that a $25,000 car will crumple like a toy in an accident, whereas a $50,000 car will wrap your loved ones in a cocoon of impregnable steel. The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same

P 155
…nature-nurture discrepancies were addressed in a 1998 book by a little-known textbook author named Judith Rich Harris. The Nurture Assumption was in effect an attack on obsessive parenting, a book so provocative that it required two subtitles Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do and Parents Matter Much Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More. Harris argued, albeit gently, that parents are wrong to think that they contribute so mightily to their child’s personality. This belief, she wrote, was a “cultural myth.” Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.

Extremely enlightening! Worthy of 15 stars out of 5! This is a book about the world and not about any science in particular. It's about learning to question the given and see beyond the obvious. An extremely useful gift in the misguiding modern world.

Yeah, populistic much too much but neverthless compulsively readable. A definite revisit and reread.

Q:
As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?
And how does a homeless man in tattered clothing afford $50 headphones?
(c)
Q:
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.
(c)
Q:
“Experts”—from criminologists to real-estate agents-use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. However, they can be beat at their own game. And in the face of the Internet, their informational advantage is shrinking every day-as evidenced by, among other things, the falling price of coffins and life-insurance premiums.
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. If you learn how to look at data in the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Because there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.
So the aim of this book is to explore the hidden side of . . . everything. This may occasionally be a frustrating exercise. It may sometimes feel as if we are peering at the world through a straw or even staring into a funhouse mirror; but the idea is to look at many different scenarios and examine them in a way they have rarely been examined.
...
Steven Levitt may not fully believe in himself, but he does believe in this: teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even CIA analysts. But numbers don’t.
(c)
Q:
Levitt had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the venerable intellectual clubhouse at
Harvard that pays young scholars to do their own work, for three years, with no commitments.
Levitt felt he didn’t stand a chance. For starters, he didn’t consider himself an intellectual. He would
be interviewed over dinner by the senior fellows, a collection of world-renowned philosophers,
scientists, and historians. He worried he wouldn’t have enough conversation to last even the first
course.
Disquietingly, one of the senior fellows said to Levitt, “I’m having a hard time seeing the
unifying theme of your work. Could you explain it?”
Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme was, or if he even had one.
Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in and neatly summarized what he
saw as Levitt’s theme.
Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that’s my theme.
Another fellow then offered another theme.
You’re right, said Levitt, my theme.
And so it went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher Robert Nozick interrupted.
“How old are you, Steve?” he asked.
“Twenty-six.”
Nozick turned to the other fellows: “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a
unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one.
He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine.”
(c)
Q:
There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.
Some of the most compelling incentives yet invented have been put in place to deter crime. Considering this fact, it might be worthwhile to take a familiar question—why is there so much crime in modern society?—and stand it on its head: why isn’t there a lot more crime? After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to maim, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail—thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties—is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime, people also respond to moral incentives (they don’t want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don’t want to be seen by others as doing something wrong). For certain types of misbehavior, social incentives are terribly powerful. In an echo of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, many American cities now fight prostitution with a “shaming” offensive, posting pictures of convicted johns (and prostitutes) on websites or on local-access television. Which is a more horrifying deterrent: a $500 fine for soliciting a prostitute or the thought of your friends and family ogling you on www.HookersAndJohns.com.
(с)
Q:
Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive.
Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children
suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15,
and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent
child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly,
seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous
year’s 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United
States
(c)
Q:
Of all the ideas that Kennedy had thought up—and would think up in the future—to fight bigotry, his Superman campaign was easily the cleverest and probably the most productive. It had the precise effect he hoped: turning the Klan’s secrecy against itself, converting precious knowledge
into ammunition for mockery. Instead of roping in millions of members as it had just a generation
earlier, the Klan lost momentum and began to founder. Although the Klan would never quite die,
especially down South—David Duke, a smooth-talking Klan leader from Louisiana, mounted
legitimate bids for the U.S. Senate and other offices—it was also never quite the same. In The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America, the historian Wyn Craig Wade calls Stetson Kennedy “the single most important factor in preventing a postwar revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the North.”
This did not happen because Kennedy was courageous or resolute or unflappable, even though he was all of these. It happened because Kennedy understood the raw power of information. The Ku Klux Klan was a group whose power—much like that of politicians or real-estate agents or stockbrokers—was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information. Once that information falls into the wrong hands (or, depending on your point of view, the right hands), much of the group’s advantage disappears.
(с)
Q:
Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.
(c)
Q:
It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In
the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a
verity of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a
consumer).
(c)
Q:
If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you’d be
right. Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so
befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the
information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare
challenge them. If your doctor suggests that you have angioplasty—even though some current
research suggests that angioplasty often does little to prevent heart attacks—you aren’t likely to
think that the doctor is using his informational advantage to make a few thousand dollars for
himself or his buddy. But as David Hillis, an interventional cardiologist at the University of Texas
Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, explained to the New York Times, a doctor may have the
same economic incentives as a car salesman or a funeral director or a mutual fund manager: “If
you’re an invasive cardiologist and Joe Smith, the local internist, is sending you patients, and if you
tell them they don’t need the procedure, pretty soon Joe Smith doesn’t send patients anymore.”
(c)
Q:
Consider this true story, related by John Donohue, a law professor who in 2001 was teaching at Stanford University: “I was just about to buy a house on the Stanford campus,” he recalls, “and the seller’s agent kept telling me what a good deal I was getting because the market was about to zoom. As soon as I signed the purchase contract, he asked me if I would need an agent to sell my previous Stanford house. I told him that I would probably try to sell without an agent, and he replied, ‘John, that might work under normal conditions, but with the market tanking now, you really need the help of a broker.’”
Within five minutes, a zooming market had tanked. Such are the marvels that can be conjured by an agent in search of the next deal.
(c)
Q:
They were also a lot richer, taller, skinnier, and better-looking than average. That, at least, is what they wrote about themselves. More than 4 percent of the online daters claimed to earn more than $200,000 a year, whereas fewer than 1 percent of typical Internet users actually earn that much, suggesting that three of the four big earners were exaggerating. Male and female users typically reported that they are about an inch taller than the national average. As for weight, the men were in line with the national average, but the women typically said they weighed about twenty pounds less than the national average.
Most impressively, fully 70 percent of the women claimed “above average” looks, including 24 percent claiming “very good looks.” The online men too were gorgeous: 67 percent called themselves “above average,” including 21 percent with “very good looks.” This leaves only about 30 percent of the users with “average” looks, including a paltry 1 percent with “less than average” looks—which suggests that the typical online dater is either a fabulist, a narcissist, or simply resistant to the meaning of “average.” (Or perhaps they are all just realists: as any real-estate agent knows, the typical house isn’t “charming” or “fantastic,” but unless you say it is, no one will even bother to take a look.) Twenty-eight percent of the women on the site said they were blond, a number far beyond the national average, which indicates a lot of dyeing, or lying, or both.
Some users, meanwhile, were bracingly honest. Eight percent of the men—about 1 in every 12 conceded that they were married, with half of these 8 percent reporting that they were “happily married.” But the fact that they were honest doesn’t mean they were rash. Of the 258 “happily married” men in the sample, only 9 chose to post a picture of themselves. The reward of gaining a mistress was evidently outweighed by the risk of having your wife discover your personal ad.
(c)
Q:
But if there is no unifying theme to Freakonomics, there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world. All it requires is a novel way of looking, of discerning, of measuring. This isn’t necessarily a difficult task, nor does it require supersophisticated thinking. We have essentially tried to figure out what the typical gang member or sumo wrestler figured out on his own (although we had to do so in reverse).
Will the ability to think such thoughts improve your life materially? Probably not. Perhaps you’ll put up a sturdy gate around your swimming pool or push your real-estate agent to work a little harder. But the net effect is likely to be more subtle than that.
You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular. To claim that legalized abortion resulted in a massive drop in crime will inevitably lead to explosive moral reactions.
(c)

This is an interesting book with some startling hypothesis, and frankly I liked it a lot more than I expected. It was written by an economist (Levitt) with a hyper curiosity and a journalist (Dubner) who found the economist refreshing in his world view and his inventiveness. Nothing in this book is about economics as we generally know it. Instead, it’s about “the riddles of everyday life.” It’s about “how the world really works.” It’s about “the hidden side of everything.”
The book’s central idea is “if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.”
Some of the chapter titles seem to be silly on the surface, but as you read the chapters, they make sense:

“What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?” (Cheating!)

“How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents?” (Information!)

“Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?” (No money!)

“Where have all the criminals gone?” (Not born!)

The book is well written and presents its arguments well. I will admit to occasionally skimming when it got a bit bogged down in statistics, but fortunately that wasn’t too often.

A couple of startling arguments stood out, especially in light of the current threat to Roe v. Wade.

“Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years – the years during which young men enter their criminal prime – the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion lead to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, lead to less crime.”

“What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she’s in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she can’t, she often chooses the abortion. But once a woman decides she will have her baby, a pressing question arises: what are the parents supposed to do once a child is born?”

All these so called “pro-life” fanatics (really forced birth fanatics) should think about this when they are screaming about dead babies and rising crime rates. Maybe, just maybe, if they stopped forcing their world view on others and let us make our own decisions about our lives, the world would be a better place.

A different, fascinating book.

There are at least two ways you can read Freakanomics – as a fun and interesting little book that uses data to tell us little things about ourselves and the world. Or, you can see it as econometrics gone apeshit and finally taking over the world. I kind of view it as both.

That said, I really enjoyed reading this. I think Levitt has developed some useful tools that can tell us some interesting stuff about the way little corners of our world are organized. I also think it is a little bit batty to think we can use economic models to prove a causal relationship between abortion laws and crime rates. There might be something there, but in order to come to a conclusion about two subjects so complex, Levitt must have had to control for so many other factors that I doubt his research is all that reliable. In comparison, the section on the economics of the street level drug trade is fascinating and probably close to accurate. The researchers were looking at a relatively small data set, sure, but I think it is still probably tells us at something useful about how that world works.

I guess what I find most interesting about this one is the effect it has had on the culture. Economics is so hot right now. Everyone is into it, it is the undergraduate degree on the rise and plenty of those kids decided they liked economics by reading Levitt’s book. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, but it is definitely a trend we can track, at least in part to this book. In the end this is a fast fun and diverting read, but don’t take it too seriously, cause I am pretty sure some of these finding are bunk.

Capitalism’s Economic illiteracy 2.0…

Preamble:
--"probably the best-known economics book of our time"
…This is how (real-world) economist Ha-Joon Chang described Freakonomics (2005), before critiquing its entire premise (see later).
--I was reminded of this when re-reading Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). I was thinking how Klein’s book might be the best-known anti-capitalist book of our time, so I did some quick searches to see how books on “economics” and “capitalism” ranked on Goodreads in terms of number-of-ratings. You can see a longer list in my review of Klein’s book:
-838,472 ratings: Freakonomics (the most ratings of any “economics” book I could find).
-46,867 ratings: The Shock Doctrine

--Now, if you know me, you’ll know why I’ve avoided Freakonomics for so long.
…It reminds me of the grueling process of trying to learn about the real world when your entire vocabulary is Orwellian… when you cannot even formulate coherent questions. We should pause here and reflect on how significant this barrier is.
--I remember walking in circles amidst the prominently-displayed glossy covers which I started with, including:
-ex. Malcolm Gladwell: a salesperson rather than a serious social theorist: Outliers: The Story of Success; Gladwell’s blurb is on the cover of Freakonomics: “Prepare to be dazzled.”
-ex. Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is referenced in the book.
--Such a popular book was indeed a breeze to read, but harder to review. If I could find satisfaction in unpacking Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, then it’s about time I cross off the most popular “economics” book.

Highlights:

1) Economics illiteracy 2.0:
--The best propaganda must start with a kernel of truth, as a lure (ex. Jordan Peterson acknowledging the “chaos” and lack of meaning/values in modern society).
…Thus, Levitt (the economist in Freakonomics) tries to distance himself from:

a) Mainstream economics (i.e. Neoclassical economics, which is never named):
--We can think of this as “Economics illiteracy 1.0”. Levitt correctly disparages this school of thought as a bunch of math/econometrics/theory that do not ask (I would say avoid) interesting questions (esp. critical framing).
--Levitt still seems to describe this as a “science” (misleading) with excellent tools (also misleading), applied to the monetary world of stock markets/economic growth/inflation/taxes which Levitt claims to avoid. If the tools are excellent, it’s strange how Levitt avoids applying them to the listed topics (imagine studying “economics” and saying, nah, don’t care about these. What a relief, that would make my studies much easier!).

b) Freakonomics (i.e. Neoclassical microeconomics):
--This is “Economics illiteracy 2.0”. If you read carefully, the authors admit their book is actually “applied microeconomics” with a hearty dose of marketing (“rogue”, “unorthodox”, “Freak”).
--Such rebels, a journalist for the New York Times Magazine marketing an economist from the infamous Chicago School of Economics (such a credible tradition, including the “Chicago Boys” “free market” economists in Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship). Director of the Becker Friedman (yes, Milton Friedman) Institute for Research in Economics.
…Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal which the book describes as “a sort of junior Nobel Prize for young economists”: firstly, the “Nobel Prize” in Economics is infamous for being a fake Nobel given to mostly pro-finance shills; secondly, John Bates Clark was the infamous Neoclassical economics pioneer in the US who justified inequalities (during the robber barons “Gilded Age”!) as natural law based on their contributions, departing from Classical rent theory (thus, “Neoclassical” is “anti-Classical” according to Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh etc.).
--Given such mainstream biases, Freakonomics mentions “capitalism” only twice (and never defined), (1) in the context of Adam Smith (and the rise of capitalism, long ago so readers cannot contextualize), and (2) tossed in (with zero context) when mentioning information asymmetries.
--With the big picture of economics left opaque, Levitt focuses on (1) individual behavioral incentives and (2) data analysis to explore “everyday life”/“how the world really works” (including pop culture/sports/crime)/“everything”. This is why Ha-Joon Chang questions the entire premise of this “economics” book, in Ch.1 “Life, the Universe and Everything” of Economics: The User's Guide
--The root of “economics” is described as how people (individuals) get what they want. The problem with starting from the individual/micro is the structural/macro rules (esp. economics) are not assessed (in terms of how they are socially constructed/alternatives). So, even if Levitt focuses on cheating/corruption/crime (which indeed are avoided in Neoclassical economics), it’s from the individual level so the structural incentives seem vaguely inevitable.
--This book is actually dealing with psychology/sociology topics (thus, asking interesting but misplaced questions) using crude tools described in an economized manner. For an actual intro to real-world economics, see: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails.

…see comments below for rest of the review…

This book is a good example of garbage in, garbage out. The demonstration of critical thinking is good on a superficial level. But that it where the good stuff ends. The background facts used to perform their logical analyses suffer from gaps in relevant facts to downright misinformation. Even worse is the impression given that the background research is astonishingly thorough and accurate. It is not. Don't take their word for it on anything. A quick Google search yields rebuttals from true experts in the various fields that effectively point out flaws in their quotes, facts, and logic.

I love that they promote the ideas of critical thinking. I love that they promote the idea of thorough research and questioning the status quo. I love that they promote use of numbers and statistics to explore ideas in an attempt to find the truth. But I wish that they were providing as good of a demonstration of the principles as they claim to be.

Their conclusions are then presented as irrefutable, as if they are a magic bullet of the truth, rather than a heartfelt (presumably) effort at finding truth, subject to revision based on refined thought or background research. And then there is the assignment of cause to correlation...... In at least some cases, I am not convinced that it is truth that they are after so much as their own agenda (on oh so many levels).

Do as they say but better than they do!

I found this audiobook unbearable. I turned it off halfway through and listened to the public radio pledge drive instead.

I once read somewhere that statistics can be used to prove anything. This book is evidence for the same.

Steven D. Levitt, a "rogue" economist by his own admission, and who confesses that he is terrible at traditional economics, uses the methods of statistical analysis to look at the unexplored relations between things in society - like the resemblance between Japanese sumo wrestlers and American schoolteachers, why real-estate agents are similar to the Ku Klux Klan, whether parenting has any effect on how a child turns out... etc, etc. By the confession of the authors themselves, the book has no central theme - it just explores the "hidden side of everything". Levitt and Dubner say that economics has the tools to provide the right answers, but only a very few people ask the right questions.

Some of his findings do have credibility (like that of schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers cheating to advance their careers, though I did not find anything earthshaking in those); some seem to be refreshing new perspectives (the similarity between the drug mafia and corporate houses, for example); some seem trite to the point of silliness (like the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents being undone through the availability of information); and some seem to have some substance, but require further study of all parameters (how the station in life and the behaviour of parents affect the children). However, One finding, which is lauded by most reviewers of the book as startling, I found I could take with only a very large lump of salt: that the reduction in crime in the USA in the 1990's is due to the legalisation of abortions in 1973. The authors assume that crime is committed by unwanted children whom their mothers could not get rid of, and once they were allowed to, problem was solved! This, while at the same time arguing gun control is not having much effect either way while increase in police force and punishment is a deterrent, seems to me peddling to the right liberal narrative - at the same time totally ignoring the socioeconomic factors behind crime.

As far as I am concerned, any kind of simplistic conclusions drawn from statistical data is suspect. Let me make this clear with an example close to my heart.

In India, the state of Kerala in the south (from where I hail) tops in almost all Human Development Indices (HDI) such as health, education etc. However, the state also has the highest morbidity levels. What does this mean? Whether higher levels of general health leads to higher incidence of life-style diseases, or simply that since the healthcare and education are good, more people see doctors? Similarly, Kerala is fourth in India on the basis of reported crime. Does this mean that a higher level of education increases criminal tendencies, or that with a more aware population, more crimes get reported? Heated arguments take place on these questions regularly with no clear conclusions - because there are too many factors to make clear inferences.

So does that mean Levitt and Dubner are talking through their hat, and are best ignored? No, in my opinion. This book is worth reading, if only for the unusual perspective. Also, it prompts us to think beyond the glib statistics the "experts" spout to intimidate the poor layperson, and see for ourselves.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is a non-fiction book that crunches data to answer relevant questions (that appear funny on the onset) related to the human psyche and behaviour.

It is a book by the nerds for the nerds. If you feel lost seeing a lot of numbers and calculations, this may not be the book for you.

Will be definitely picking up the next book in the series.

Jesus H Tittyfucking Christ on a bike! Could these two tossers be any more smarmy and self indulgent? Levitt and Dubner and probably the kind of smart arse nerds who snigger at you because you don't understand linux but sneer at you because you've actually spoken to a woman.

This book is much like the Emperor's New Clothes, people are so scared about being left out if they don't like or understand it because some sandal wearing hippy in the Guardian said it's 'This year's Das Capital' or some such bollocks that they feel compelled to join some sort of unspoken club where they all jizz themselves silly over a book that effectively is 300+ pages of pure condescension.

Only buy this book if a facist regime ever seizes control of your country and instigates a book burning policy.