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 enjoyed Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything; however, I’m not yet sure if it is simply entertaining or is in any way instructive. Levitt and Dubner explore a diverse range of subjects: from linking Roe v. Wade to violent crime, cheating by teachers and sumo wrestlers to an economic model of drug dealing.

I’d like to think that the stories told by the authors and the way they analyze conventional thinking would put me on a path to look past easy answers. Having completed Freakonomics, do I look at the world radically differently than I did before picking up the book? It is Interesting to look at subjects from a different angle. Positing that economics and specifically the field of study now dubbed freakonomics has nothing to do with morality is an intriguing concept as well, but deciding which stories to tell is necessarily selective. Indeed, the focus is interesting. So yes I enjoyed Freakonomics, but feel I should have more to say about it and the authors’ underlying premises than I do. 3.25 stars

مبدئيا هناك خدعة في عنوان الكتاب

فالكتاب ليس في الاقتصاد و لكن في علم الاجتماع و لأن المؤلف رجل إقتصاد و لأن الاقتصاد هو أحد فروع علم االإجتماع فقد استخدم ما تعلمه في تحليل بعض الظواهر الاجتماعية بأدوات إقتصادية.

مجموعة من المواضيع بعضها شيق جدا و بعضها ممل أو مغرق في المحلية لدرجة لا تجعلنا نتفاعل معه.

ما هي الأشياء المشتركة بين معلمى المدارس و مصارعى السومو

يبدو سؤالا ساذجا و لكن الإجابة سهلة.
هي أسئلة من نوعية ما وجه الشبه بين البطيخ و الموز و تأتى الإجابة بأن كل منهما لا يصلح كعصير برتقال.

إجابة السؤال اللوذعى هنا هي أن معلمى المدارس و مصارعى السومو كل منهما يغش في النتائج و ليس هذا هو المقصود بل المقصود هو أنه يمكن كشف هذا الغش بنفس الطريقة و هي طريقة حسابية إحصائية طورها المؤلف و طبقها على أمثلة بالكتاب.



من الحكايات الطريفة حكاية عن موظف كان يحضر معه خبز الإفطار و بعض الجبن ليفطر هو و زملاء العمل كل يوم و تطور الموضوع حتى صار يحضر معه الإفطار لكل الشركة ثم استقال و أصبح المسئول عن توريد الخبز لبعض كبرى الشركات حتى أنه كان يوزع حوالى ثمانية آلاف رغيف يوميا.
سؤال أخر لوذعى:

كيف تتشابه جمعية الكوكلوس كلان مع الوسطاء العقاريين

و لمن يعرف فإن جماعة الكوكلوس كلان هي جماعة إرهابية أمريكية نشأت بعد الإتحاد مباشرة و نشطت ضد الأقليات الإسبانية و السود و الكاثوليك و أي شخص غير أبيض أوروبى الأصل بروتستانتى محافظ و يحكى الكاتب عنها حكايات شيقة جدا جديرة بالقراءة.

المهم أن وجه الشبه بينهم و بين الوسطاء العقاريين هو استثمار الخوف لدى الخصم و استخدام معلومات لا تملكها لإجبارك على اتخاذ رد فعل في مصلحتهم و يدلل الك��تب على ذلك بعشرات الحكايات اللذيذة جدا.


سؤال أخر :

لماذا لا يزال تجار المخدرات يعيشون مع امهاتهم

n
برغم أن تجارة المخدرات تدر أموالا طائلة كما نرى في الروايات و الأفلام الا أن الأموال لا توزع على الجميع بعدالة كما يحدث في شركتك تماما. نعم فهى تجارة رأسمالية أيضا.



يأخذك الكاتب في جولة غريبة و مثيرة في عالم الجريمة و تجارة المخدرات مطبقا نظرياته العجيبة و احصائياته المثيرة ليدلل على أن صغار تجار المخدرات يتمنى أحدهم لو يعمل حارس أمن أو أي عمل أخر لو لم يطمع في الوصول لدور الزعيم و من ثم التنعم بالمزيد من الأموال حتى يقتل أو يقبض عليه.

جزء أخر عن علاقة الإجهاض بالجريمة قد لا يكون مقنعا في عالمنا العربى ثم جزء أخير عن العنصرية التي لا تزال بصماتها واضحة و أثارها تنعكس على الواقع الأمريكي حتى الأن.

الكتاب مفيد و جيد في معظم أجزائه و أرشحه للقراءة.

The book is totally different than ordinary books on this topic. It will bring out those facts that we don't want to eve look or discuss. It has provided many examples with those are unbelievable. It has used to comapre sumo wrestlers and school teachers. IT goona freak you all the time.
May the style of the wrtitng book is different but he delivers the information that is valuable to all. It will change the way you think about the modern world.

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 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 this book, though I think the title is a bit misleading. It's not really about economics. In fact, he's showing you what interesting things you can discover when you apply statistical analysis to problems where you wouldn't normally think of using it. I use statistical methods a fair amount in my own work, so I found it particularly interesting. The most startling and thought-provoking example is definitely the unexpected reduction in US urban crime that occurred towards the end of the 20th century. Crime rates had been rising for decades, and people were really worried about what would happen if the trend continued. Then, suddenly, they peaked and started to decline. Why? There were a bunch of theories, all of them superficially plausible.

Levitt crunched the numbers, to see what proportion of the variance could be ascribed to the different factors. This is a completely standard technique; it just hadn't been used here before. He came to the conclusion that the single most important factor, by far, was the ready availability of abortion that started to come in after Roe v Wade. Other things, like more resources for policing and tougher sentencing policies, probably helped, but not nearly as much. I didn't at all get the impression that he had been expecting this result from the start, and just wanted to prove his point. He processed the data, and went where the numbers led him. That's how you're supposed to do science.

The clincher, at least as far as I was concerned, was the fact that crime statistics peaked at different points in different states, the peaks correlating very well with the dates when each state started making abortion available. States that brought it in early had correspondingly early peaks in their crime rates. It's hard to see how that could happen if Levitt's explanation weren't correct.

I am surprised that there hasn't been more discussion of Levitt's findings in the political world. Maybe it's just regarded as too hot to handle. But if Levitt is right, and at the moment I would say it's up to his critics to explain why he isn't, then pro-life campaigners would seem be heading in a very unfortunate direction.
_________________________
[Update, Jun 26 2022]

In view of the Supreme Court's recent ruling, I wonder which Republican-led states have started planning for the increased levels of crime that are to be expected fifteen to twenty years from now, and which ones have decided it won't be necessary. In the second case, it would be interesting to know why not. A couple of suggestions to get the ball rolling:

a) this is liberal science and can be discounted as political messaging,

b) the Rapture will occur first.

Well,this is the most terrible book I have ever seen,it was too terrible to read.It’s so terrible that I just want to burn it as fast as I can,and it cost me 58RMB.That was 58RMB,it was to expensive for me to afford.At first.I thought it was a good book,and I spend all my money on this book.And I was pretty annoyed about this I don’t have any other money for my breakfast,lunch,and even dinner.I haven’t drink juice for the whole year.Reading this is a waste of time,no one want to see this book again.It was just rubbish,and smelly book.It tells my nothing.I even want to sell this to the writer,and ask to return my money and some extra.It cost me too much time,and too much money on it.I prefer to see a movie instead!!!

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.

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

DNF @ 25%. Freshman year at college, I had the opportunity to take a writing seminar built around Freakonomics. Suffice to say, I dodged a fucking bullet. Freakonomics is a woefully misinformed, poorly written, disgustingly quirky "nonfiction" "economics" book that has very little to do with econ. The book's half-baked theories are presented poorly, but the concepts are so fantastic and dazzling that—to hell with academic research and facts! let's conflate correlation and causality, make a bunch of tables in excel, and bam! Freakonomics, baby! Instant bestseller!

Also, it contains perhaps the WORST description of Akerlof's Market for Lemons study that I have ever encountered (see page 63). The Market for Lemons, just so you know, is a well-known economics paper on market information asymmetry (which is essentially what Freakonomics is about). Akerlof's paper is far less exciting but far more important so if you're actually interested in "Freakonomics" then give that a read.

By the way, have these guys Levitt and Dubner ever taken a writing class? Have their professors never told them how to connect ideas when writing? They lack concision and focus. The writing in this book tends to spout off into tangents or quirky asides that make me want to die. How this book got to be so popular is BEYOND me.

(I am 100% convinced that Levitt and Dubner published this as a book of patchwork theories because no peer-reviewed journal would take them seriously.)