Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald's, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don't really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there's a good economic reason for that too, and we're just not getting it yet. --John Moe

Product Description

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: Freakonomics.

Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want or need especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.

Read by Stephen J. Dubner

Customer Reviews: Read 1576 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A fun, interesting, and provocative book. April 14, 2005
853 out of 1083 found this review helpful

While I'mnot generally inclined to read economics books, Freakonomics is very, very accessible. The book is written in clear, readily understandable language (including the best description I've ever seen of regression analysis, causality, and correlation). The topics discussed are quite interesting - why crime REALLY went down in the 90's, the impact parents can REALLY have on their kids, and several others. Whether one ultimately agrees with the authors' conclusions or not, the book certainly encourages you to think about everyday things more critically and not just accept the conventional wisdom.

[...]

My only disappointment is that the book wasn't longer!

5 out of 5 stars

Smarter for having read it April 12, 2005
313 out of 429 found this review helpful

Levitt/Dubner present complex ideas in the most straight forward, enlightening way possible. The topics range from interesting to fascinating, and the authors are consistent in their logical prose. The reader is encouraged to open his/her mind, and after poring through so many examples that undermine the pillars of conventional wisdom, the reader emerges with a new world view (as well as great anecdotes to tell friends).
This is a fantastic book!!!

1 out of 5 stars

Correlation doesn't mean causation August 20, 2006
213 out of 278 found this review helpful

The authors repeat this mantra a few times in this book and stress its importance. Then they repeatedly proceed to violate their own rule!

Much of this book is a presentation of correlations in society. This by itself is not a problem. However, the authors will often go on to explain that there is causation by coming up with unsubstantiated theories.

Fact: The increase in abortion rate is CORRELATED with a decrease in crime rate.
Authors' Theory: The increase in abortion rate CAUSED a decrease in crime rate because it eliminated potential criminals.

Fact: Highly educated parents are CORRELATED with a child's performance in school.
Authors' Theory: Highly educated parents CAUSE a child's improved performance in school because they value schooling and IQ's are hereditary.

It's not that the author's theories are necessarily wrong. It's simply that they provide no proof or research to support them. The book is basically an editorial.

When the authors do follow their own rule, it simply results in an uninteresting read. For example, the last chapter lists names such as "DeShawn" that are correlated with an unsuccessful life. The conclusion of the chapter is that the choice of name doesn't cause a child to be successful or not. Um, thanks for telling me that. I was planning on naming my child Bill Gates so he could become super rich but I guess that won't work.

I was expecting this book to be completely different. It has nothing to do with economics at all. It has more to do with statistics and revealing some correlations in our society. Unfortunately, many of these correlations could lead to dangerous misinterpretation and many are simply not all that interesting.

Update: I just finished reading The Undercover Economist, Naked Economics, and Basic Economics. These are the books you want to read if you are interested in how economics impacts the world and your everyday life.

1 out of 5 stars

Fun read, but certainly not science July 4, 2006
90 out of 113 found this review helpful

I know this review will be barraged with "unhelpful" votes from the fans for writing something negative, but so be it. This book is cute and fun to read, which would make me give it three stars, except that it scares me how many people think that Levitt practices actual science and that his conclusions are valid. Read this book for its fun and humour value, but please take all conclusions with a hefty grain of salt.

It says on the cover that this book has been used as student literature for economics courses. This is interesting, since a friend of mine is an economics professor and she does indeed recommend this book to students - as the perfect example of how people lie with statistics.

Levitt demonstrates beautifully how one can come to false conclusions by seeing correlation and assuming cause. If you don't know what I mean, let me explain: Ice cream and rape are correlated. When ice cream sales go up, so does rape. With the kind of reasoning Levitt uses, this is solid proof that ice cream is a cause of rape. The truth is that hot weather increases both. Levitt cautions against assuming cause out of correlation in the beginning, then spends the entire rest of the book doing just that. It amazes me how little research he has done. An introductory biology textbook will tell you that his conclusions about genetics and intelligence are false, but he states it as fact after finding some economical correlation.

2 out of 5 stars

"Steven Levitt is Smarter Than Jesus." - Freakonomics, Chapter Four October 2, 2005
70 out of 90 found this review helpful

The bookstores in regional airports like John Wayne in Orange County, California offer few choices in reading material, either your usual assortment of management books de jour ("I earned a bazillion dollars, so can you") or USA Today's Top Ten. With some time on my hands, I digested in two hours while waiting for a plane the rather thin (especially for $26 list) tome, "Freakonomics", a Top Ten non-fiction book, having some prior awareness of the furor created by the book when it was first released.

"Freakonomics" probably would not have hit anyone's Top Ten but for Levitt's clever and controversial observation in Chapter Four that the Roe v. Wade decision was as responsible for the drop in crime in the 1990s as anything else. Once televangelists took to the airwaves to successfully exhort their brownshirt congregations to denounce Levitt (who is more of an yuppie iconoclast than having any particular political agenda), Levitt was assured a spot on the best talk shows and inside page of upper-crust book reviews everywhere. He certainly is bright, entrepreneurial and articulate, and his twists on individual motivations and risk perception (backyard pools kill way more kids than guns in homes) are breezy and entertaining, but just as easily condensed into a New Yorker or Harpers article. Levitt is a very smart guy, and original, no question about that.

The problem with "Freakonomics" is that it is only a strung together set of witty observations that, like a sugary meringue, there isn't a lot of substance. Statistics are scarce, and a lot of the footnotes refer back to other articles by Levitt himself or someone else's popular-print books. This is especially true of Levitt's explosive but dispassionate Roe v. Wade discussion. Although Levitt disclaims any bias or subtext, he had to have known that in today's Salem witch-trial culture, linking legalized abortion to the falling crime rate would be akin to tossing a match in a shed full of open gasoline cans. Yet this central thesis is unattached to any hard data, a genuine shame since the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade needs all the help it can get.

Certainly many sociologists must recoil in horror at some of the cited sources, such as they are, particularly Levitt's favorable comparison of the workings of an inner city drug gang to a Fortune 500 company. The comparison is largely based upon a graduate student's study in which the student (at considerable peril) befriended a drug capo and reported on his business methodologies. This is certainly entertaining and interesting (La Vida, a breakthough 1960s study of the culture of poverty) comes to mind, but is it science?

Economics shares characteristics with quantum physics (John Nash understood the cross-over well), namely that while larger trends or processes can be predicted with some accuracy, the actions of individual people, like photons, are more or less uncertain - you can only approximate the location of a particle at a given point in time, just as individual motives and actions are disparate. You wind up with a bunch of little spots along a curve. More to the point, like photons, the very act of observing individual people will alter their behavior. My strong suspicion is that in the example of the drug gang leader, his similarities to a good business executive were in some part genuine, but also a response to the study itself. It certainly does not lend itself to broad generalizations, and I suspect the median gang is far less romantic or corporatized. Anecdotes, or single-sample studies, do not a social science make.

Because I do not devour like candy the latest get-rich-like-me business management books one finds in airports, I was also unprepared for the sheer volume of self promotion in "Freakonomics." The ostensible co-author of the book is Stephen Dubner, who wrote an adoring article of Levitt and his theories in a 2003 New York Times Magazine. Like the mediaeval minstrels hired by knights to sing their praises as they entered a new town (brave Sir Robin, Sir Robin the brave..."), Dubner trumpets Levitt's genius at the beginning of each and every chapter by quoting portions of his very same and only 2003 article . "Levitt is a self effacing genius." The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003. "Did I tell you Levitt is the smartest guy on earth?" The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003. "Levitt's observations are brilliant and scintillating." The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003. And so on. If this portends a trend of witnessing book jacket promo blurbs migrate into and infest the very text of non-fiction books, this development needs to be ruthlessly stamped out, tout de suite, before all popular social science books start resembling autobiographies like Anna Nicole's or Donald Trump's.

In sum, despite its hip-hop, dot-com age title, I am hopeful (although not encouraged by the volume of breathless reviews) that this discontinuous exercise will ultimately find its way to the bookshop remainder table, leaving future generations to wonder what the fuss (or, freak) was all about.

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