Take some of it with a grain of salt but still overall very thought provoking.

As the old joke goes, the questions in economics exams are the same every year; only the answers change.

(re-reading in prep for the super-freaks)

Yeah, this isn't 'rogue economics'. This is sociology. It's not a new discipline. And this is really spurious sociology that wouldn't pass muster in academia, so Levitt published it for public consumption.

I could go on about the wealth of misinformation, statistics devoid of context, and the casual racism at work in this book. Instead, I'm going to take a novel approach because this week I came across a podcast that sums it up more eloquently and succinctly than I could here. Check out the first episode of "If Books Could Kill." They cover most of the reasons I loathe this book.


https://pod.link/1651876897

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005)

There are intriguing elements in this book but when it comes to the larger picture, I find it sorely lacking. Levitt is a young star in the economics profession who enjoys playing games with interesting questions. For example, he assembles data to demonstrate that Roe v. Wade was critical to the drop in the crime rate in the 90s. On p. 125 he notes "So it wasn't capital punishment that drove crime down, nor was it the booming economy. But higher rates of imprisonment did have a lot to do with it." Also, on p. 139, he says "Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness, unwantedness leads to high crime, legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime." He also addresses the old nature vs. nurture argument or environment vs. genetics when he says, on pp. 175-176, "Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school, but it doesn't seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start....The reality is that technique looks to be highly overrated....adopted children test relatively poorly in school, any influence the adoptive parents might exert is seemingly outweighed by the force of genetics. But...the parents were not powerless forever. By the time the adopted children bacame adults, they had veered sharply from the destiny that IQ alone might have predicted. Compared to similar children who were not put up for adoption, the adoptees were far more likely to attend college, to have a well-paid job, and to wait until they were out of their teens before getting married."
Despite these insights, I would never want to write a book like this because it doesn't go after the betterment of the human condition in a broad sense in the fashion that Adam Smith tried with Wealth of Nations in 1776. Levitt may be rewarded for his fun puzzles by a best-seller, but does any of this really help society toward healthier, happier families in the future?

از هرلحاظ کتاب خوبی بود.
اول از همه بگم که توی این کتاب قرار نیست خواننده با نظریات و تئوری های اقتصاد خرد و کلان رو به رو بشه که با نثری خشک و سنگین و تخصصی، فقط برای علاقمندان و استادان اقتصاد قابل درک و مطالعه باشه. کتاب کاملا برای مخاطب عام نوشته شده، کسی که نه تخصصی در اقتصاد داره و نه علاقه‌ای به پرداختن به مباحث نظری، بلکه فقط دنبال لذت بردن از نثر و ایده کلی کتاب و کِیف کردن و هیجان زده شدن از ورق هایی که نویسنده دونه به دونه رو میکنه و حقایق جالب و تامل برانگیز به خوردش میده تا بعد از تموم شدن کتاب به یه‌نگاه متفاوتی به علت و معلول های جهان اطرافش داشته باشه.
برای نگاه ژرف‌ و کنجکاوانه به‌جهان اطراف، الگو های هیجان‌انگیزی در اختیار خواننده گذاشته بود. صرفنظر از اینکه آمارهای مورد استفاده به بومِ ناآشنا و غریبی تعلق داشت؛ یا حتی اینکه بعضی نتیجه‌گیری ها برای محیط اجتماعی ما جور در نمیومد؛ اما با این وجود پژوهشگر، متفکر، اقتصاددان یا به‌طور کلی هر شخصی که علاقمند به دونستن پشت پرده مسائل اجتماعی باشه با خوندنش تجربه جالب و به یاد موندنی‌ای خواهد داشت.

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

This Review ✍️ Blog

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.

This would have been much more impressive had I read it in a timely manner, like say ten years ago when I first wanted to. It does read a tad bit dated, even though this is the updated version, but it's still pretty fascinating, and I think worth reading. I will be reading the second book and checking out the podcast.

[four and a half months later]

And now I have finally come to write this review, and I have forgotten nearly everything about it but the overall feeling I got from it. This will not be a comprehensive review. So.

My feelings, in summary:

*Mostly this was a fun way to apply statistics and math to real life.
*Since the book is now fourteen years old and a lot of it hinges on current cultural norms and references, it doesn't age as well as other books might. I know there was more than this, but the one that stood out in my head was the way he treated rape statistics. (Of course, I remember nothing about the way he treated them, only that it felt wrong to me.)
*There was something in here about realtors? It made me very suspicious to buy property. Also I don't want to buy property because I like having people come fix things for me.
*There was something else in here about gangs and a researcher embedded with them? I don't remember the significance.
*This might be the worst review I have ever written.

It made for a good audiobook, though! So if you're still going to check it out and like listening to things, that is a good way to go.

[3.5 stars, rounded up]

This was an interesting book. I say it was interesting because I started liking it (a lot) when I first read it, as time passed I liked it less and less. In that way I call it a candy book, tastes good at first but leaves you worse off for reading it.

In my opinion, there are two problems with the book: First, Stephen Dubner comes across as a sycophant. Way to much of the book is spent praising Levitt. Secondly, I was disappointed in the lack of detail provided about Livitt's hypothesis. I wanted more. It was like reading War and Peace and discovering that you read the abridged version and in fact the book wasn't 100 pages long. This disappointment may have come from my engineering background and my strong desire to really understand economics. This book didn't offer any of that, only a titillating glimpse of the economics.

In some regards one may think my single start rating is to harsh. As mind candy this book was quite good. I did enjoy reading it at the time. Whats more, it did encourage me to study real economics. I am currently enrolled in a masters program in economics and this book did play a very small roll in that decision process. However, as I learn more about economics I realize how shallow the book in fact was.

While this is not the forum for a comprehensive review of the topics presented in the book, or an analysis of how good the economics in Freekanomics are, a review in "Journal of Economic Literature (Vol XLV, Dec. 2007 pp 973)" quotes Livitt as saying: "There is no question I have written some ridiculous papers." The article then goes on to quote a paper by Noam Scheibler(2007) describing Livitt's comparing some of his papers to the fashion industry. "Sometimes you write papers and they're less about the actual result, more about your vision of how you think the profession should be. And so I think some of my most ridiculous papers actually fall in the high-fashion category."

I had high expectations for this book based on all of the hype. It's been on my to-read list for a long time, and after finally got around to reading it, I came away disappointed. The book is mostly a disjointed series of unexpected pairings phrased as questions, like "What do sumo wrestlers and real estate agents have in common?" Most of the questions would never be anything an average person would ask or wonder about. The book was a haphazard compilation of these pairings and odd questions but, to be fair, the authors explicitly state that from the get-go. I found the sections on parenting and naming babies to be the most interesting, with the rest of it being on the dull side.

Many of these questions felt artificially contrived to create a "freaky" spin on economics but it felt forced. That was my chief issue with the book - it felt like it was trying to hard to be edgy and hip, like a geeky kid who tries to impress by looking cool and winds up falling flat.

I found Dan Arielly's book, Predictably Irrational to be much more entertaining with a smoother flow. Arielly's book deals with behavioral economics and delves into the reasons why people make the choices they do, some of which seem rational but aren't and others which seem irrational but aren't. Arielly's book left me with a greater insight into my own choices and the mechanisms at work behind them. Freakonomics left me with a general thought of "Hmm, seemingly unrelated stuff is actually related and vice versa."

For anyone interested in behavior economics presented in a very accessible and entertaining manner, I would recommend Arielly's book over Freakonomics, hands down.