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 book has an apple on its cover, I like apples because of its good taste. However, the inside of the apple on the cover is an orange's flesh, what's the taste of it, maybe a little sour, or sweet? It is magical and unbelievable, I think it is changed in some technological ways. Anomalous

At a cocktail party you don’t count on quant types to provide much entertainment. In rare cases a data-plying vector-head like me might talk about how some big swinging member at the trade desk got eviscerated when he messed up his numbers. A story like that can be marginally interesting if told in a gory way. But as relatable tidbits go, that had pretty much been the full gamut. Now, with Freakonomics, we dare to dream of audiences appreciating a new set of number-based anecdotes. They came up with examples where their quantitative forensics would yield something clever or fun, often exposing ironic, counterintuitive, or sordid behavior in the process. I suspect the less these examples had to do with economics, the more interesting they seemed. Be that as it may, it was gratifying to see that the modeling techniques quants rely on (like multivariate regression) have been brought to bear to tell these tales.

The Freakonomics formula is a smart one. It starts with sound research on non-traditional topics with results that were vetted in academic journals. That was Levitt’s part. Co-author Dubner is the writer. His job was to provide context, explain how results were uncovered, and sell us on why it’s all so cool. And who wouldn’t be at least mildly intrigued by patterns that show how teachers in Chicago cheated to raise their students’ test scores, and how that links them with Sumo wrestlers in Japan. They cited another example discovered in April of ’87. Evidently that year 7 million children in the US simply disappeared off the face of the earth. This was fully one-tenth of the dependent-age population. They speculated that maybe, just maybe, the new requirement from the IRS in ’87 to include a child’s SSN on the form had something to do with the massive decline in dependents.

The authors were careful to explain the methodological difficulties in making data confess. Researchers of this stripe are rarely given the luxury of a lab, where one variable at a time can be changed, holding everything else constant. Ceteris is almost never paribus in social science. I give the authors credit, too, for their interpretation of results. For instance, they explained how the old cliché in real estate that your first offer will be your best may have a lot to do with the incentive structures of the seller’s agent. Say they’re slated to get 3% of the sale price. If it’s a matter of getting 0.03 x $300,000 right now and no longer needing to show the home versus holding out for 0.03 x $310,000 at some unknown point in the future, the usual counsel is to take the first offer. They’re only foregoing a potential $300. The homeowners’ incentive is very different. Say they owe the bank $250,000. For them it’s a matter of netting $50,000 or $60,000. Not surprisingly, the data show that realtors selling their own homes keep them on the market for longer and get a higher percentage of the true value.

Some of their findings generated controversy. Read their account on the legalization of abortion and subsequent drop in crime rates 20 or so years later if you want an example. They were careful not to engage in moral calculus, but they had to know they were playing with fire.

All in all I thought their examples were interesting, but generally not the most important issues we confront today. Still, they may serve a purpose if you’re looking for cocktail party chitchat of a quantitative bent.

I assumed Freakonomics would be a book that used statistics to debunk various societal hysterias and fearmongering in a semi-humorous way. I quickly realized what I was in for when early in the book when the authors gave their background as Harvard Jews and profiled a guy that infiltrated the KKK for the ADL. The story sounds at least partially made up.

It then jumped into predictable white guilt inducing trash and goes into mental contortions using "data" and sociological explanations for black criminality and low IQ scores. The writers of this book are also obsessively pro-Abortion. The only surprise was they used statistics to show you are much more likely to die from an automobile or a swimming pool than a gun. This book would probably appeal to upper middle class liberals who like to consider themselves clever and politically astute from their isolated armchairs. For me Freakonomics was a big load of garbage.

Levitt and Dubner's ground breaking look at the world through the eyes of collated data that tells a story in itself, like their shocking discovery of what caused a huge drop in crime in America in the 1990s. Reading this a decade on I still find this so absorbing and interesting which is just as much as a result of their writing style as their great content.
[image error]
Just remember assume nothing... question everything! 8 out of 12.

__________________________
“An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.”

Well that was a big surprise. When I arrived at page 7, I discovered that, among other things, the authors of Freakonomics were writing about something I had worked on in the early 2000s. I was an editor for a major educational publisher at the time and was specializing in the development of achievement tests. I am not ashamed of it. And you can’t prove a thing, see.

A major metropolitan school system happened to be looking for an achievement test to administer as part of a high stakes, No Child Left Behind testing program in their elementary schools and had decided to purchase one of the tests published by my company. It was an excellent, reliable, valid, and highly praised test of student achievement authored by some of the leading educational testing experts in the U.S. My job for this particular adoption was producing a custom version of the tests for the school system. It was a simple task for me, or should have been. All that needed to be done was to develop some new covers with the school system’s name and logo, add a forward by the school district. Then the school found a paragraph in the original test administrator’s instruction that they did not care for and insisted that I delete it. It was a very short paragraph, a mere baby, barely a dependent clause, but it offended the school system. The test’s original instructions––the instructions used around the entire country––stated that the test should NOT be used to evaluate teachers, principals, or schools and the school system fully intended to use the student’s test scores to evaluate teachers and principals.

Now here is another big surprise. A few teachers and principals cheated on the test; that is, they “corrected” answers on the No. 2 pencil scannable answer sheets before sending them out for scoring. Because, they didn’t want to be fired, that’s why. The authors of Freakonomics use this case as an example of incentives gone bad.

I’ve been hearing about this book since forever. I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand- it asks some very interesting questions and draws some very interesting inferences. It makes fascinating and, I think, important connections. The writers are also unpretentious and readable.

However.

I have some questions.

Question #1: The authors claim that “women’s rights advocates have hyped the incidence of sexual assault, claiming that one in three American women will in their lifetime be a victim of rape or attempted rape. The figure is more like one in eight- but the advocates know it would take a callous person to publicly dispute their claims.”

Oh, really? What are you basing this off of? Police reports? Surveys? How do you know?

See, I’m a woman. I’ve been sexually assaulted. Out of my, oh, 15 female friends, almost half have been sexually assaulted in some manner so far, and most of those female friends are upper-middle class (lower rates of sexual assault than working class women). If 1 in 3 were true, it would hardly surprise me; I wouldn’t even be surprised by a 1 in 2 estimate.

Now. How many of those friends have reported it to the police? None. How many would answer it honestly in an anonymous survey? I don’t know the answer, but I’m quite sure some would not.

So you see, I’m a little suspicious at the certainty with which they say “That's definitely wrong, it's 1 in 8."

I can see some wiggle room to say “This 1 in 3 claim has not yet been substantiated, as it is difficult to establish actual records on this sort of information; perhaps we should not be repeating this statistic so zealously.”

I don’t see any room to say “that’s wrong, it is 1 in 8, despite what these bleeding heart Bambi-saving women’s advocates would lead you to believe.”

Question #2 centers around the authors’ attempt to explain away those studies that show resumes with traditionally “black-sounding” names get significantly fewer interview requests than identical resumes with traditionally “white-sounding” names. They show some data demonstrating that names we think of as “black-sounding” are actually just names given by parents with low education; because black Americans tend to have poorer access to education, there are going to be more black DeShawns than white Deshawns, so we begin to call Deshawn a “black-sounding” name. A man named DeShawn is more likely to come from a lower-income background, therefore, and have less education. The authors say that’s really what makes employers less likely to request an interview from Deshawn than Jonathan.

I can for sure get on board with the possibility that someone named Deshawn is more likely to come from low-income/low-education background and is therefore less likely to do well in life for those reasons (of which his name is also a symptom, not a cause).

That said. Do I think employers associate DeShawn with a low-income/education background because they believe that’s what it denotes? Or do they think DeShawn sounds black?

Ask a random person on a street if they think a DeShawn is more likely to be a high-education black man or a low-education white man.

Think they'll say the former?

Yeah. I’ll take that bet.

That’s why I suspect the disparity in hiring practices with traditionally black or white names is due to race, not income/education. It doesn’t matter why people are more likely to name their child DeShawn, it matters at how the world views people as more likely to name their child DeShawn. I feel like this is a major, major point the authors miss in this section.

On the other hand, things I liked:
That chapter on names was quite interesting for other reasons. It notes explicitly a trend I had sort of noticed in the back of my mind, just from interacting with the world and lots of people with names: names popular with high-education parents will, 10-20 years or so down the line, be almost exactly the names most popular with low-education parents. The high-education parents start the trendy names, and then low-education parents mimic them eventually (for example, Amber, Heather, Brittany, and Kayla were, in the 80s, very “high-end” names, used by high-education parents; now, they’re used predominantly by low-education parents; in the interim, they were “mainstream” names running somewhere in the middle).

It’s also especially interesting to read this book in 2017, a decade + after this book was written. The authors offer predictive lists of 2015’s most popular/mainstream names, based off high-end names of 2005, when the book was published. And damn they were accurate. They gave 24 names each of girls’ and boys’ names that they thought would be on 2015’s most popular list. For girls, for instance: Ava went from #9 to #4. Avery, 67 to 16. Eleanor, 264 to 60. Ella, 23 to 18. Emma, 2 to 1. Fiona 374 to 219. Maeve 694 to 450. Phoebe 425 to 287. Quinn, 683 to 97. You get the point.

Also, I found the causal link the author draws between abortion legalization as of Roe v. Wade and the unexpected drop in crime in the 1990s credible and compelling. While it definitely, if viewed normatively, has a bit of a eugenics vibe about it that uneases one, I think that, rather, it’s actually rather affirming, in light of how he puts it at the end of the chapter: What this link really demonstrates is that “when the government gives a woman to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well.”

اخلاق اون چیزیه که ما دوست داریم دنیا اون طوری بچرخه اما اقتصاد اون طوریه که دنیا واقعا میگرده.

من با این کتاب از طریف پادکست بی پلاس آشنا شدم.
کتاب فضای جالبی داشت. من خیلی با علم اقتصاد آشنا نیستم ولی احساس میکنم بیشتر از این که این کتاب به اقتصاد مربوط باشه به آمار مربوطه.
چرا که از آمار برای توضیح پدیده‌های قابل لمس استفاده کرده بود و نتایج جالبی رو به دست آورده بود.

درس مهمی که من از این کتاب گرفتم اعتماد نکردن به حرف کارشناس هاس. اینکه چقدر میتونن دلایل اشتباهی برای اتفاقات ارائه بدن و یا گاهی اطلاعی رو از قصد ارائه میدن تا ما رو بترسونن مثل یه مشاور مسکن که به ما میگه اگه خونمون رو به اولین مشتری ای که اومه نفروشیم احتمالا زیان زیادی خواهیم کرد و ما به خاطر اطلاعاتی که داره احتمالا بهش اعتماد میکنیم.

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

Sheer Rubbish. This is an awful book, yes I read the whole thing, like bitter medicine to a toddler, and had to see what the fuss was about.

This Amazon review nails it.  Here's my review/rant.

I'm reading this is 2012, maybe the hype in 2005 was different and people ate this kind of stuff up, even then I don't think we were that gullible at this time. There were good social science/stats books out there. This book pales in comparison to the works of Malcolm Gladwell and others.

Levitt is making something out of nothing from strange stories he heard, now he's stitching them together suggesting there's a *GASP* hidden side to everything. Because the KKK spoke in code, real estate listings are supposedly in code, and we're all being duped into spending more for our house because of the secret speak between realtors! How about consumers don't just read a real estate listings but check a place out before making the biggest purchase of their lives, one could argue there's secret speak in every industry. For his final chapter (which is in the middle of the book) Levitt's grand finale, Black people name their children differently to White people! The second half of the book is blog posts from their blog more atrocious reading from these ranting lunatics.

There's no appeal to science, Levitt is throwing a lot of his own opinion, and making wild estimations and bringing up even wilder conclusions. It's pretty obvious Levitt is a shrewd businessman, he's not just writing books, but has a well to do following with his blog, radio station and yes even movie! This is "easy to consume" garbage for the masses.

This book is little more than Stephen Dubner jerking off Steven Levitt, but that's not why it's a 1-star read. here's why:

"Women's rights advocates... 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 dispute their claim.)"

In the Notes for this chapter:

"The 2002 statistics from the National Crime Survey, which is designed to elicit honest responses, suggests that the lifetime risk of a woman's being the victim of unwanted sexual activity or attempted unwanted sexual activity is one in eight[.]"

Here, in a nutshell, is how the National Crime VICTIMIZATION Survey collects information on rape:

Every six months, they ask everyone over 12 in a bunch of houses questions like:

"41a.
(Other than any incidents already mentioned,) has anyone attacked or threatened you in any of these ways -
(e) Any rape, attempted rape or other type of sexual attack -"

Followed up later with:

"29c.
You mentioned rape. Do you mean forced or coerced sexual intercourse?"

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the flaws in the NCVS's methodology here. And to use it to glibly accuse "women's rights advocates" of somehow manipulating a kowtowed public is incredibly obnoxious. While I'd guess that Levitt might be right more often than wrong, it's not worth his smug, self-satisfied style. I recommend 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre. Similar schtick with substance instead of 'hype'.

This was a reread in preparation for a professional development workshop being conducted in my office. I don't remember when I first read it, but it had to have been shortly after the book was originally published in 2005/2006. I'm sticking with my original rating of four stars.

The book is well-written and has all the data you can imagine to back up the authors' claims. One area it fails at, however, is that the areas they are trying to tie together really have no relationship. I mean, Chicago teachers and sumo wrestlers don't have much in common, and there isn't a strong correlation between the two. Sure, they may cheat, but the "whys" are vastly different.

The one thing I was interested in finding for my workshop is the analysis of the data. Data can show almost anything if you look at it long enough. My job requires a lot of data analysis and asking questions, lots of questions. In this respect, the chapter about the young researcher living with the drug dealers appealed to me simply because he started asking questions instead of relying on the status quo or even wrong concepts. His research changed the views of a lot of politicians, and how they approached the gang/drug problem around the country.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in data analysis and asking, "Why?".