Freakonomics explores the hidden side of everything.

If morality describes the ideal world, then economics describes the actual world. Further, Freakonomics studies incentives and how different people in different professions respond.

Some of the case studies include bagel salesmen, sumo wrestlers, public school teachers, crack cocaine dealers and parents. This is a smart, fun book; but it's not for everyone. Through a high nerd prospective, the authors deliver a slide rule and pocket protector observation of some controversial subjects.

I read this book because it takes everyday things like crime, school, and parenting, gives them a fresh twist, and shares surprising truths with jokes and stories that make learning fun and simple!

Incentives Influence Behaviour:
People do things because they want to get something good or avoid something bad, even if it’s not what they would expect.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear:
Sometimes, what people think is true isn't. Numbers and facts can tell a different story.

Things Happen for Reasons:
Just because two things happen simultaneously doesn't mean one caused the other.

People Have Secrets:
Sometimes, people do things that seem strange or wrong for reasons we don't understand.

Rules Can Backfire:
Trying to fix a problem can sometimes make it worse.

Numbers Tell the Truth:
Looking at facts and data can help us understand the world better, even when it's surprising.

Overall, "Freakonomics" encourages readers to think critically and explore the hidden side of everyday life.

I lost all faith in this book when it tried to teach you how to be a “perfect parent” and came to the conclusion that “it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.” He claims that your socioeconomic status determines whether or not you will be a good parent. One of his biggest points in this chapter is that nothing a parent does (for example, taking their child to museums or reading books to their toddler) matters in the slightest. The only data he uses to draw this conclusion is a collection of test scores. Obviously a high test score does not equal a well-raised, happy child in a healthy family environment. And of course what you do as a parent matters. You can’t totally neglect your child and then claim you’re a perfect parent because of your socioeconomic status. You also cannot determine what makes a good parent based on children’s test scores alone.

Also, can we talk about how self-congratulatory the author is? It makes the book such a chore to read when he includes things like how he is a demigod of economics or how much he dazzled journalists with his inventiveness and how he revolutionized the field.

Freakonomics is disappointing.

I won't deny that this is a very interesting, compelling and thought-provoking book. Even for someone like me whose general response to economics is *snore*. And it's mainly because Freakonomics is not really about economics, but involves applying statistical analysis to many social issues and questions.

Very easy to read. Lots of shocking discoveries that seem weighted in fact - Roe v. Wade is responsible for a huge drop in crime? No wonder some people are pissed off with this book. It's really quite fascinating to look at the power of incentives - economic, social and moral - and examine cause and effect.

One of my favourite personal experiences with silly notions of cause and effect is diet soft drinks. I confess to being a bit of a coke zero addict. It's not great for you (the sodium makes you more thirsty, a lot of potassium can lead to palpitations, and a lot of phosphoric acid has been linked to kidney problems) but I've lost count of how many times people have cited statistics showing that diet soda drinkers are more likely to be overweight and diabetic. Of course they are! If you're overweight and diabetic you're more likely to drink the low-calorie, sugar-free alternatives, aren't you? So strange how people assume it is A that causes B and ignore the possibility of it being the opposite.

Anyway, my issue with this entertaining book is that I think it may be - to be frank - bullshit. Not all of it, sure. But definitely some of it. The writers state their points very confidently (some might say with a touch too much smarm) but it requires you to take a lot of what they say on faith. And some of the jumps they make between statistics and conclusion don't quite add up for me. I know many others have felt the same.

But here was the thing that really got me, the thing that made me smell bullshit: I'm fairly confident something they said is not rooted in any truth. And let's be clear: I am a total noob when it comes to most statistics and economics, so if even I can spot something a bit off, it really makes me question the rest of it. Here it is:

n  Women's rights advocates, for instance, have hyped the incidence of sexual assault, claiming that one in three American women will in her lifetime be a victim of rape or attempted rape. (The actual figure is more like one in eight - but the advocates know it would take a callous person to publicly dispute their claims.)n

This, if true, implies two things. 1) Those advocating women's rights are using false data, therefore undermining their credibility, and 2) They have invented a statistic to intentionally support their cause, knowing no one will dispute it (absolutely bizarre that the author thinks no one is disputing women's rights claims, but okay...)

Well, being a feminist and someone who has spent an awful lot of time reading and writing about women's rights organizations and statistics, my eyes narrowed a little. See, in all my research, I've never seen or heard any claim that "1 in 3 women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape". I have heard the "1 in 3" statistic, but a somewhat different one.

So, obviously, I went to look it up. I spent a couple of hours going through Google and every women's rights organization page I could find, trying to uncover a single case where that statistic was used. I found exactly: none. The only other thing I found that mentioned it was a Time article attempting to debunk so-called "feminist myths": http://time.com/3222543/5-feminist-my...

The statistic the authors appear to have misquoted is that "1 in 3 women will experience sexual violence, or physical violence by an intimate partner", which is used often. Sexual violence here is an ambiguous term, leaving room for wider interpretations and probably explaining why, with the addition of domestic violence into the statistic, the number is at "1 in 3" instead of "1 in 8".

Furthermore, not only have the authors misrepresented the statistical claim itself, but they have also suggested that women's rights advocates have pulled the numbers from thin air to make a point - on the contrary, this is a study conducted by the World Health Organization on the "Global and regional estimates of violence against women".

I like the idea of the book, but this really put me off. Perhaps it was a one-off error that I managed to spot. Perhaps. Either way, I started to be less impressed by the facts and statistics they presented. Still, very enjoyable book for the most part.

I loved the abortion cured crime theory.

Freakonomics: a rogue economist – Is that all there is?

The title of Freakonomics tells us that Steven Levitt is a “rogue economist” exploring the “the hidden side of everything.” I have always been up for a rogue telling me about everything. Even a rogue telling me about anything appeals to me; you know that special insight that only a mischievous, perhaps unprincipled, but somehow likeable person has. From the title I even conjured up some noble rogue elephant tearing apart the civilized world after suffering a loss of habitat. I was up for rogue. Economics, I thought, is a damn good place for a rogue.

Levitt is an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. That medal is awarded every two years to the best economist under 40. It is given by the American Economic Association. If you know anything about this Vanderbilt University supported organization, it wouldn’t be for their search for rogues (although they got Milton Friedman right in 1951.)

Steven Levitt is best-known for his findings on America’s falling crime-rate during the 1990s. Teenage murder rates were predicted to double. Instead they fell by more than 50% in the space of five years. By 2000 they were at their lowest in 35 years. But why? Well, a lot of people were taking the credit. They were citing economic growth, gun control, policing, imprisonment and even the death penalty as the reason. Levitt proved the cause as Roe vs Wade, the Supreme Court decision that lead to the repeal of abortion laws in the US. His research showed that children born into impoverished environments were more likely to grow up to become criminals. His analysis formed the elegant but uncomfortable syllogism: “Unwantedness leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime.”

Levitt is saying, according to Dubner, that incentives and motivations are intimately linked in driving human behaviour. No breakthrough – my mum knew that! He does come through with some interesting proofs. His ingenious methods of analysing data reveal sometimes startling conclusions: Chicago public school teachers were helping their students cheat on state exams; Sumo wrestlers were fixing some of their matches; real-estate agents don’t really care about how much they sell your house for – only their own house, and my favourite; dope-dealers rarely make a good living. These results do amuse, surprise and even educate. In all these conclusions there is a haunting. Strangely, within these intriguing anomalies we never find that superbly-skilled rogue practitioner of economics. Instead we are left with a peppy little repertoire of cocktail chatter (beer-chat for me) and little else.

Something went wrong in the writing of Freakonomics. In the reading there was the echo of Mark Twain’s comment that golf was “a good walk spoiled.” Yes it is provocative and interesting but it has a problem. If Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame says “Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America . . .” then the problem is uncompromisingly simple – we can’t find Levitt or his mind in this book!

Without question we can find – actually, we can’t get away from – the other Stephen, Stephen Dubner. He is Levitt’s coauthor and a contributor to the New York Times. Dubner occasionally genuflects to Levitt’s genius, to his unique insight, and treats us to the odd passing anecdote. For most of the book though he relies on the coattails of Levitt to spin his own story.

Dubner just doesn’t get Levitt. A flaw, especially given the hype in the title. He tells us that this very special economist is challenging the established lens through which we see conventional economics. The problem is what is conventional is never argued and the nature of the difference is never revealed. This new lens, we are told, uncovers – no exposes – the patterns of conventional thinking. These come by way of conclusive moments, end points really, that are sometimes remarkably fascinating and clearly capture interest. The question is, are these moments, this shopping-list of results, the only point of the book?

Although Steven Levitt is apparently (or even paradoxically) the coauthor, he never actually appears. Not only is he not there but his methodology is never fully presented nor explained. Malcolm Gladwell goes on to say “. . . and reading Freakonomics is like going for a leisurely walk with him on a sunny summer day, as he waves his fingers in the air and turns everything you once thought to be true inside out.” Well the problem is we never get to go on that walk with Steven Levitt. He just might be nearby, but you never know for sure.

The book is a first-person telling by Dubner. So it leaves Dubner responsible for that walk. It also leaves him responsible for the non-telling of either process or personality. It is an issue of depth. His preamble, along with the very bad An Explanatory Note are ill-chosen attempts at building an arcane, deified and mystical Steven Levitt. When we get into the book, we think we are going to meet Levitt, this “rogue economist” – but we never do.

Dubner continually misses the mark. He let a good book and a great opportunity slip away. This is because he thinks the mark is simply some captivating Levitt conclusion. Even though I found myself relishing some of these points and was more than willing to tell these little tidbits to my friends; they leave forever undone some important thinking.

The success of the book is that each story is portable. In their portability there is a weakness. If the point is, each story is an indicator of how we can mis-see the world, then how do we understand mis-seeing or recognise mis-telling? The only way to know would be to understand Levitt, economics, and the processes by which we make conventional and sometimes remarkably wrong conclusions.

We never do. Instead, in each story there is an echo of missed opportunity. In each he takes us on some short walk on how we might see the world. The trouble is it is only a short walk with no critical path to understand how we got there or just where we might be going.

Dubner tells us early on that when the publisher approached Steven Levitt, Levitt didn’t want to write a book. He finally did agree to write it, but along with Dubner who had done a story about him for the Times. So Dubner and the brilliant Levitt agree to coauthor. Freakonomics is the result of that division of labour. Presumably Levitt’s job was to continue mining of the reality of the “hidden side of everything.” Then what was Stephen Dubner’s job? The answer: The weaver of these disparate stories; the interpreter; the pattern-finder – the writer! Unfortunately a substantive telling never happens. It takes about half the book to slowly realize Dubner doesn’t really get Levitt – and neither do we.

In the end this book bizarrely peters off into some kind of parenting manual. This is presumably because Dubner and Levitt are young fathers. Who knows? Dubner then thinks he can put Humpty back together by saying in the Epilogue that there is “no unifying theme” in Freakonomics. Well he got that right! Here he is alluding to a quote by the philosopher Robert Nozick where Nozick said that at 26 Levitt didn’t need a “unifying theme” as an economist. This may be right for a young economist – but it is not necessarily true of a book.

Dubner’s patchwork attempt at an ending only exacerbates the reality of missed opportunity. Unfortunately it causes Freakonomics to read a bit like: What my really important really smart friend did on his summer vacation.

William Moore

варто зізнатися, що ніщо так не заспокоює мене перед сном як такий нон-фікшн

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.

I think I forgot to mention that I finished Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I haven’t started the sequel “Superfreakonomics” yet but the first one, well, it started out really interesting but I kind of lost their logic at the end. The book is a collaboration between a “rogue” economist, Levitt, and a writer, Dubner, about trying to discount “common wisdom” and idées reçus with economic analysis and they reach some interesting and also bizarre conclusions. It starts out interesting about cheating which links teachers – perhaps the most interesting study in the book – and sumo wrestlers. The irony here is that in Japan just this year (several years after the publication of the book), the sumo match-fixing has come public and they have even been reduced to giving tickets away for free because the Japanese were so disillusioned with the revelations of corruption and links with the yakuza. Anyway, there are also interesting articles about drug dealers and real estate agents. They also talked about the Klu Klux Klan and mentioned an interesting person, Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated that organization way back when. What they forgot to mention about him is that he actually ran for president once on an independent ticket for justice – I know that because Billy Bragg and Wilco covered the Woody Guthrie song about Stetson Kennedy on their Mermaid Avenue album (an absolute must if you don’t have it!). Then you hit the controversial section where they blame the sudden drop of crime in the 90s to abortion. I suppose that they could be right and the hypothesis is certainly interesting but I think they were going more for shock value than literary or economic value in the “1 baby equals 8 abortions” – at least I couldn’t really see where they wanted to go with that. Towards the end also, I felt that it starts to wander a bit. I didn’t know what the point they wanted to make actually was in belittling the names that african-americans give to their kids and couldn’t really see the link they were trying to make with grades and stuff. While it is a fascinating read – particularly the first three chapters – the end was a bit, well, confusing to be honest. I hope that Superfreakonomics will keep a more even rhythm.



OK so enough blather. I think Burn Notice might be the funnier alternative here with perhaps a dose of Episodes or Shameless thrown in. Enjoy your weekend, dear reader

This is very different and fantastic. If you appreciate counter-intuitive thinking and value approaches to discovering what's ACTUALLY true rather than what "common sense" tells us is true, then you will greatly appreciate Steven Levitt's methods. If you're after directly practical knowledge only, you will not value this much. If you are big into strictly traditional thinking, you will HATE this. Be ready to separate what you believe to be moral from what actually happens (they don't always agree, even when I don't like it). So assess yourself and decide accordingly.

If you want to know interesting truths and value things that are counter-intuitive even when it flies in the face of a deeply held belief, this is for you. Dr. Levitt's approach is so refreshing; ignoring what seems to be true and always wondering what actually is true, then leveraging data he finds to discover what it can reveal (not what he wants, not what you or I want, but what actually IS). He's a refreshing oddball that I wish I could know personally so I would gain more of that fresh look.

Really closer to a 3 1/2. I found the essays interesting enough, but upon reflection they seemed to lose much of their initial punch. It's possible to nit-pick at most of the studies, but more importantly the author tends to equate correlation with cause a little too glibly I think. It was a very popular book, but aside from quite a few comments by the major review media about some of the articles, I don't suspect it really had much effect on thinking in the "social sciences". I could be wrong.


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On the whole most of the contents of the book strike me as sociology rather than economics. Interesting in parts, obvious in others (as in the comparison of the structure of a drug dealing network to that of McDonalds) , apparently methodologically unsound in places, a curate's egg.

The major problem is the difficulty the authors have in escaping the gravity of their own biases which then pull them in certain directions. For example the case of fraud and cheating in Sumo wrestling. Statistically we might be happy with the authors' report that after a certain point in competitions fairly fought bouts were not occurring, but that does not prove their claim that money was changing hands.

It seems more than a little cheeky to describe one of the authors as a rogue economist when his rogueishness consists not of wayward or distinctive thinking but mostly in commentating upon the work of other researchers. Derivative, moderately entertaining. Take well salted.