Product Description

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

How much do parents really matter?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-01
• Released on: 2009-08-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060731335
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isn't really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it's wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt's controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit. Malcolm Gladwell blurbs that Levitt "has the most interesting mind in America," an invitation Gladwell's own substantial fan base will find hard to resist. 50-city radio campaign. (May 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Freakonomics sounds like a text on the business structure of rap music. The subtitle is similarly puzzling. What's a "rogue" economist -- one who has stopped taking calls from his CIA handler? Who wears disguises when he sneaks into the library to crunch numbers? Turns out Freakonomics is about the field of behavioral economics, which attempts to combine the pure-logic tools of classical economics with understanding the emotional impulses of human behavior. And the book's principal figure, Steven D. Levitt, is anything but an outsider. Levitt is a chaired professor of economics at the University of Chicago, meaning he sits at the very pinnacle of his profession's establishment. Nothing "rogue" about that.

Levitt is regarded as among the most creative thinkers in contemporary economics, gifted at drawing connections among seemingly unrelated forces. He believes, for example, that there is a relationship between legalization of abortion and the decline in crime -- more on that in a moment. Levitt is the latest winner of the American Economics Association's John Bates Clark Medal, granted biennially to the top economist under the age of 40. Clark medalists often become influential figures: Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton and a closely read columnist for the New York Times, was a Clark winner, for instance. In typically dry economics-speak, the Clark judges declared, "Steven Levitt is the most innovative empirical researcher in his cohort." American Economics Association, just come out and say it: The guy is interesting!

Freakonomics presents Levitt's findings in accessible, non-academic terms. It is an engaging and always interesting work, rich in insights, full of surprises. Readers, though, may find themselves in a perpetual state of confusion regarding just what it is they are reading. The book is by Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, a writer whose previous books include Turbulent Souls and Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper. You're never sure who is speaking. Sometimes Levitt or his work is spoken of in the third person, as if Dubner were writing of them in a detached way; sometimes the text sounds like Levitt addressing the reader; sometimes the book spends pages discussing work done by people other than Levitt, yet the impression given is that it's all Levitt's thinking. Often the reader must flip to the source notes to try to figure out what's going on.

The mishmash quality of Freakonomics seems to trace to its origin. In 2003, Dubner wrote a New York Times Magazine article on Levitt's quirky theories. The piece was a great read, and Levitt and Dubner began to collaborate on articles. According to Freakonomics, Levitt then agreed to write a book, but only if Dubner actually did the writing. (Writing is work, as any economist will tell you!) Yet it seems the two never resolved the question of whether Dubner would ghostwrite for Levitt or write about Levitt. The result feels too much like a magazine article padded to book length. Each chapter of Freakonomics even begins with quotations from the Times piece, as if it merited study by future historians.

Confusing structure aside, Freakonomics is packed with fascinating ideas. Consider Levitt's notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, Freakonomics shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade. Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of unwanted children declined; 16 years later crime began to decline, as around age 16 is the point at which many once-innocent boys start their descent into the criminal life. Leavitt's clincher point is that the crime drop commenced approximately five years sooner in Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York and Washington state than it did in the nation as a whole. What do these states have in common? All legalized abortion about five years before Roe.

Other Levitt theories span the landscape. Along with sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University, Levitt has found that drug gangs are structured essentially like street versions of Fortune 500 corporations. Levitt studied high-tech car alarm devices and found they benefited the people who did not buy them almost as much as those who did, by discouraging all auto theft. Levitt has shown that campaign money has almost nothing to do with who wins elections. He has even looked at how parent name children. Parents who expect their children to go far in life give them classy-sounding names such as Katherine; parents who do not expect their children to go far give them names such as Brittney. (That Levitt can cite statistics for all this -- you'll have to read the book -- is impressive.) For amusement value, Levitt makes a case that academic cheating differs little from cheating in sumo wrestling.

Not all of Levitt's ideas meet the test of originality. He proffers that real estate agents serve themselves rather than their clients when they push sellers to take the first bona-fide offer, even if holding out might bring a better price. The agent wants the seller to take the first solid deal because then the agent gets the commission right away; holding out might mean weeks or months of extra work for the agent, while increasing his or her commission only slightly. Freakonomics presents the notion that homeowners and real-estate agents may have conflicting monetary incentives as big news. Memo to the University of Chicago Economics Department: Everyone who has ever sold a house already knows this.

Freakonomics proposes four basic notions: that incentives govern life, that conventional wisdom is often wrong, that "dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes" and that experts sometimes use their "informational advantage" to pursue private agendas. Valid points -- but is there anyone who disagrees with any of them? There is no requirement that an economist's work have any larger theme: To be a good professor and produce interesting papers is more than most accomplish. But Freakonomics leaves the reader with the sense of encountering an assortment of clever ideas that have been crowbarred together into something that doesn't really work as a book. Academic careers may not need unifying themes; books do.

Reviewed by Gregg Easterbrook
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A less dismal side of economics
Steven Levitt, an economist at U Chicago, is less interested in numbers and more interested in why people turn out the way they do. He examines the influence of incentive, heredity, the neighborhood you grew up in, etc.

Some of his conclusions are less than earth-shattering. For example, African-American names (DeShawn, Latanya) don't influence African-American test performance. As a second example, Levitt compiled data regarding online dating websites and concluded that bald men and overweight women fared badly. Not rocket science.

However, Levitt livens up the book with some controversial discussions. He believes that the dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s can be traced to Roe v. Wade. He thinks that the children who would have committed crimes (due to being brought up by impoverished, teenage, single mothers) are simply not being born as often.

He also writes about the man who more or less singlehandedly contributed to the KKK's demise by infiltrating their group and leaking their secret passwords and rituals to the people behind the Superman comic book (Superman needed a new enemy).

Interestingly, he also discusses how overbearing parents don't contribute to a child's success. For example, having a lot of books in the house has a positive influence on children's test scores, but reading to a child a lot has no effect. Highly educated parents are also a plus, while limiting children's television time is irrelevant. Similarly, political candidates who have a lot of money to finance their campaigns are still out of luck if no one likes them.

In the chapter entitled "Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers," Levitt explores the economics of drug dealing. An Indian, Harvard-affiliated scholar decided to get up close and personal with crack gangs and got some notebooks documenting their finances. Levitt concludes that drug dealers' empires are a lot like McDonald's or the publishing industry in Manhattan - only the people on the very top of the pyramid do well financially, while the burger flippers, editorial assistants, and low-level drug runners don't (indeed, some of them work for free, or in return for protection!)

Overall, this is a lively read, with some obvious conclusions and some not so obvious.

An Entertaining Lesson on Breaking Out of the Mold
This book succeeds at analyzing sociological developments in a way that is entertaining because Steven Levitt, an economist who strays from convention, has a knack for unpeeling layers and layers of assumptions and myth and showing the real causes behind trends. He shows, to name some examples, how our names affect our career paths; how abortion and the crime rate are related; how a man used his cunning to humiliate the Klu Klux Klan rather than rely on conventional methods; how easy it is to identify the role of public school teachers when they help their students cheat on standardized tests; why drug dealing is only lucrative for the dealers at the top of the pyramid; the myth that real estate agents are looking for our best interests.

The book, co-authored by Stephen J. Dubner, is breezy and anecdotal, which is an effective format for presenting a lot of sociological trends without being dry or losing the scintillating reportage in dense prose.

The lesson of this book is that we should be leery of trusting society's common assumptions or common wisdom. In other words, the book encourages us to keep our mind alert and break out of the mold in the way we see things. By looking at social trends with a fresh eye, the book succeeds at making economic trends a fun, adventurous endeavor.

If I were to criticize the book, it would be that it is too short. It's barely 200 pages and if you take out the blank chapter pages, the charts, the lists, and so on, it's really closer to 150 pages. Because the material is so current and topical, the method of "freakonomics" presented here would make a good format for a monthly magazine. My guess is that there will be many sequels.

The Power of Data in a Master Economist's Hands
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.