|
| Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything | ![Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Z1scnqz1L._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Authors: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Publisher: William Morrow
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy Used: $10.00
You Save: $17.95 (64%)
New (83) Used (79) Collectible (10) from $10.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  1581 reviews
Sales Rank: 147
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Revised & Expand, Roughcut
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0061234001
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
EAN: 9780061234002
ASIN: 0061234001
Publication Date: October 2, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 The Power of Data in a Master Economist's Hands April 16, 2005
63 out of 72 found this review helpful
Having myself survived the economics program at the University of Chicago as a young graduate student twenty years ago, I know how decidedly eccentric their laurelled scholars can be. One of the most prestigious of the current crop there, Steven D. Levitt, along with journalist Stephen J. Dubner, has written a most intriguing and mind-bending book that uses Chicago-style econometric approaches and applies those to social and political issues that otherwise seem mundane and have no apparent basis in coherent theory which would support the behavior under study. In fact, this book of compelling case studies bears similarities to the approach taken by author Malcolm Gladwell in his recent best-selling book, "The Tipping Point", where he takes primarily historical events and analyzes them almost anecdotally as exercises in human behavior, in his case, making connections and how ideas become trends not by gradual insinuation but by a singular dramatic moment.
But Levitt's canvas is broader, his theories and findings are far more diverse, and his approach is far more quantitative in nature. For example, he challenges the perception that campaign spending determines elections. Levitt's analysis takes a fresh look by contrasting races in which the same two congressional candidates run repeatedly against each other. What he concludes is that a winning candidate can spend half as much as before and lose only one percent of the vote, while a losing candidate who doubles campaign spending picks up only one percent more. Basically they prove that no matter how much candidates spend on their campaigns, the results would not be marginally affected. In another example, the authors describe a seller's real estate agent, who lives on commission and has an incentive to sell a listed home for maximum dollar. Again, this is a misconception since the authors contend the small financial reward to an agent who sells a home for a few thousand more dollars is dwarfed by the greater money to be made by selling properties for less but quicker. Levitt's research into the sale of one hundred thousand Chicago homes found that agents keep their own homes on the market an average of ten days longer and sell them for more than three percent more than the homes they list and sell for clients.
The penetrating analyses provided by Levitt appear to have no bounds as he identifies Chicago teachers, who were proven to be changing their students' test answers and ultimately fired for their actions; sumo wrestlers who were found to be cheating as well; and even the alternative and more lucrative career options that crack dealers may have at McDonald's versus making sales. He even questions the impact of a good first name in a person's later life and if children become more literate if their parents read to them. The conclusions surprised me as they will you. But the most compelling study he presents is related to the impact of Roe vs. Wade. In a study he conducted with Stanford law Professor John Donohue, Levitt makes a seemingly broad-stroked conclusion in attributing much of the drop in the U.S. crime rate to legalized abortion. Their argument was based on the theory that abortion prevented the births of unwanted children who otherwise would have been statistically more likely to mature into criminals. The crime rate drop coincided with the time those aborted pregnancies would otherwise have hit their teen years, and the trend showed up earlier in states such as California that were the first to enact more liberal access to abortions. Through the data they gather, the correlation is startling, and the conclusion is hard to refute despite the naysayers who felt the stuffy to be politically motivated. But to Levitt's academically inclined credit, he never seems like he has an ideological agenda as he lets the numbers do the talking for him. His genius is to take those seemingly meaningless sets of numbers, ferret out the telltale pattern and recognize what it all means. A brilliant mind is at work, as he takes the most mundane open-ended questions and actually answers them. Strongly recommended.
 Light reading. Very, Very Light. May 2, 2005
60 out of 97 found this review helpful
Having read the reviews and blurb, I was excited about the prospect of an essay compilation-style book of economic observations. I've always liked this format for coverage of the social and physical sciences. This book disappoints. Except for the essay on the reasons behind the fall of crime in the 90's, the material is neither interesting nor particularly convincing. He was once criticized by a board member of a fellowship he was seeking for not having a unifying theme. Having no unifying theme is fine as long as each essay stands on its own, but they don't. Many of the questions he asks have an obvious answer and don't need a thorough numbers treatment to prove it. Furthermore, he just doesn't ask many questions. There is about 4 essays in the whole book and it can be read in about an hour and a half. I'll save you the cost of the book and the hour and a half it takes to read it: Crime fell in the 90's because of legalization of abortion.
One of the oddest things about the book is the quotes from a New York Times article about Levitt that preceeds each chapter. They are basically quotes about how brilliant he is. Most narcissistic damn thing I've ever seen.
Highly Overrated December 12, 2005
58 out of 63 found this review helpful
I expected much more from this book, including some actual economic theory and discussion of what separates insightful research from background noise. The only thought-provoking piece in this motley collection of entertaining (to some) factoids is the one about abortion being the cause of declining crime. Beyond that, everything the book touches is either mundane or rehashed from somewhere else, primarily the New York Times article by co-author Dubner.
A main premise in the book is that asking the right questions in life is important. It then proceeds to ask almost none of them. For instance, what do sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common? I guess the headline itself is good for a snicker, but then we assume that it will move on to discover some heretofore hidden connection of value to us. Don't get your hopes up. Instead, after pages of unnecessary background on educational competence testing, it is revealed that - no! - teachers have cheated to boost their students' scores. What's more, shhh, occasionally sumo wrestlers have cheated to improve a friend's ranking by letting him win. Again, shocking? Not at all. Both of these revelations have been explored before and cheating doesn't expose any commonality between teachers and sumo wrestlers that doesn't stem from both groups being merely human. People cheat. Teachers and sumo wresters are people. Therefore, they both cheat and that's what they have in common. Some groundbreaking research, eh? The authors could just as easily have chosen any arbitrary group of people, found a human trait, and then shown how both groups exhibit it. For instance, what do umbrella sellers and plumbers have in common? Both take advantage of urgent situations to charge higher prices. What do Balinese dancers and corporate lawyers have in common? Both eat smaller lunches during busy seasons.
This book's subtitle is, "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". A more appropriate one would have been, "An Ordinary Economist Ponders Too Long About the Widely Known Side of a Few Unimportant Subjects". Randomly put together, I might add, and that's another annoying point. The book has almost no organization whatsoever. Rather than taking the time to organize the book into a logical manner, the authors joke about it being a disorganized collection of points and claim that as proof of their rogue status. If that's rogue, I'll take conventional any day.
It's clear that these authors are intelligent men who probably have something worthwhile to write. Unfortunately, they didn't write it in this book. The "Freak" in Freakonomics is supposed to refer to offbeat analysis or an original perspective. Instead it refers to the strange fact that, so often in publishing, what's of lasting value goes out of print and what's fleetingly entertaining climbs the charts.
You would do well to skip this one.
Though Provoking and Amusing April 13, 2005
55 out of 76 found this review helpful
This book brings a fresh and interesting methodology to examining the causes of social phenomena. The portions I have read so far are both thought provoking and amusing.
One of the many examples the author discusses a correlation between the legalization of abortion and a decreasing crime rate 20+ years later.
[...]
Conservatives will probably appreciate another of the author's examples, the findings that selling crack on an inner city street corner pays far less than flipping burgers and is far more likely to get you killed than being a soldier in Iraq.
Entertaining and full of interesting observations May 2, 2005
52 out of 67 found this review helpful
This is a fun book with a great title and catchy cover art. The authors admit that the book does not have a central theme, but like a freak show it wanders from a curiosity to something amazing to the unexpected. The difference here is that it is a display of freaky things revealed by economic analysis. The word economics gets used so carelessly that it is not well understood by most people. Possibly the only word more loosely defined is the list of people calling themselves economists. Since it is not a defined profession, almost anyone can call himself (or herself) an economist, and too many do.
By any measure, Steven Levitt, is an economist. He has the academic credentials, academic publications, and actually teaches economics at the prestigious University of Chicago. His co-author, Stephen Dubner, is a journalist from New York who presumably helped smooth Levitt's ideas and observations into generalist reader prose. This is a book that is fairly easy to read even for someone with the barest exposure to economics. For the purposes of this book, economics is how people make choices in their behavior in the face of incentives and disincentives of various sorts.
Levitt makes a big deal out of his not being an econometrician (an economist who expresses his ideas in higher mathematics rather than words and whose research can tend to be studying mathematical behavior rather than flesh and blood human beings). The old econometrician joke goes like this. There were three econometricians out deer hunting and they see a big buck. The first aims and fires, but his shot is five yards left of the deer. The second shoots, but his shot if five yards right of the deer. The third starts walking towards the deer and his companions ask him why he was not shooting at the deer. He replied, that on average they were dead center, so they must have killed the deer. You get the idea.
This book shows us the author's views on why drug dealers live with their mothers despite the popular notion that they make a lot of money, why a swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun, how Roe v. Wade may have impacted the crime rate favorably and is still an inefficient tradeoff in fighting crime, how teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat in response to incentives and how to catch them (very interesting, actually), how and why we know there were never 3,000,000 homeless as Mitch Snyder claimed, and how much do parents really matter (by far the least convincing part of the book).
While this is an entertaining read, and I hope it will spark some young people (and not so young adults) to want to study and read more about economics, I took a full star off because the book too often denigrates mathematical analysis as boring and as if it were unnecessary. Levitt makes a point that he is an economist, but is not all that good at math. Well, since his papers and this book make constant reference to regression (a statistical method), which is a form of applied math, either he or his co-authors had to know something about mathematics and statistics. More than that, his argument with anecdote and sharp observation, while entertaining, is not in itself conclusive. Proof usually is only granted when all debate is overwhelmed by hard mathematical evidence and analysis. Without the math, the author is simply arguing from authority. That is, I am a big deal authority with a bunch of awards so listen to what I am saying because I know more than you. Well, that may cut it in the popular press, but it is not science and, in a way, undermines the purpose of a book like this. The book provides you ways of challenging the kind of authority the author is using to assert his observations.
That caveat aside, this is an entertaining read that can open up some new ways of thinking about everyday events and provide some techniques to enable the reader to go a bit deeper when faced with news stories proclaiming one absurd thing or another.
Recommended!
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
