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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything |
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A NEW YORK TIMES AND NATIONAL BEST SELLER!
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, an American Bar Foundation Research Fellow and Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded young 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. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: Freakonomics.
Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, 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 myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.
What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and - if the right questions are asked - 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.
Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: if morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.
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"Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America... Prepare to be dazzled."
-- Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink
"The funkiest study of statistical mechanics ever by a world-renowned economist... Eye-opening and sometimes eye-popping."
-- Entertainment Weekly
"If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt... Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae."
-- Wall Street Journal
"Hard to resist."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An eye-opening, and most interesting, approach to the world."
-- Kirkus Review
"Freakonomics is politically incorrect in the best, most essential way... This is bracing fun of the higher order."
-- Kurt Andersen, host of public radio's Studio 360 and author of Turn of the Century
"This guy is interesting!"
-- Washington Post Book World
"The trivia alone is worth the cover price."
-- New York Times Book Review
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