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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by [Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner]

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Steven D. Levitt

Stephen J. Dubner

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Kindle Edition

by Steven D. Levitt (Author), Stephen J. Dubner (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Assume nothing, question everything.

This is the message at the heart of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner's rule-breaking, iconoclastic book about crack dealers, cheating teachers and bizarre baby names that turned everyone's view of the world upside-down and became an international multi-million-copy-selling phenomenon.

'Prepare to be dazzled' Malcolm Gladwell

'A sensation ... you'll be stimulated, provoked and entertained. Of how many books can that be said?' Sunday Telegraph

'Has you chuckling one minute and gasping in amazement the next' Wall Street Journal

'Dazzling ... a delight' Economist

'Made me laugh out loud' Scotland on Sunday

Length: 254 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Book Description

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

More Than 4 Million Copies Sold Worldwide
Published in 35 Languages

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.

--Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN : B002RPCOH8
Publisher : Penguin; 1st edition (5 October 2006)
Language : English
File size : 2445 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 254 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 51,675 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 4 in Microeconomics (Kindle Store)
- 8 in Statistics (Kindle Store)
- 18 in Microeconomics (Books)

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Ross McDougall

interesting facts, and a masterclass on robust research and analysis

Reviewed in Australia on 18 April 2017

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What a super cool book! This was so different to my expectations of what I'd learn from it. I initially thought it would be a 300+ page list of crazy cool facts and data, and while it could probably squeeze into that definition it was more of a love letter to learning and objective research.

I learned how to strive for a satisfyingly robust response and keep asking questions in the face of seemingly definite outcomes; to scratch away at the surface and look deeper for the real influencers of the variables you're chasing and identifying the difference between those influencing factors and the mere symptoms or responses.

The other ones are on the list!

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LawranceKoo

Really interesting

Reviewed in Australia on 29 October 2018

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As a non economics expert, I found this book very interesting and it really kicked off a deeper interest in the topic

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Honest John

Was it really Mayor Giuliani?

Reviewed in Australia on 21 July 2015

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An amazing book which looks at things quite differently. Nice to see a bit of science behind innuendo

One person found this helpful

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tom

Five Stars

Reviewed in Australia on 19 March 2016

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Fantastic, very interesting

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Scott

A different take

Reviewed in Australia on 11 December 2015

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Both provocative and reassuring at the same time. Nice trick!

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Amazon Customer

Four Stars

Reviewed in Australia on 20 March 2016

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New view on the world for me

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Jana

Fantastic read

Reviewed in Australia on 19 June 2015

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Really interesting

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Sarah

Four Stars

Reviewed in Australia on 26 August 2015

A book that really makes you think.

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Top reviews from other countries

NAFY

Overrated, disappointing, repetitive... and of little, if any, value

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 December 2019

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Someone said 'have no expectations and you will never get disappointed' and one of things that spoilt this read to me were my high expectations.

The good:
Interesting and sensible way of gathering data
Convincing conclusion
Pleasant style of reading very 'digestible'

The bad:
Incredibly repetitive - the case of decreasing number of criminals is covered at least 3 times! Pretty much every case is covered at least twice.
Authors touch upon 10 or so subjects that I did not find particularly interesting- many are related to race which to me shows how US orientated it is.
The layout is bizarre, seems like an amateurish self-publish booked - someone who decided 'let's make a collage of the materials and add all of them into the book' it start of like a regular book, then it goes through the research published, then articles, then it seems it back to 'a book', then FAQ - very weird and inconsistent.
Trivial matters like the name of babies are killed to death. I am only impressed by the shear determination someone had to go through this data and arrive at conclusion which is 'the trends of names change over time'.

I wanted to like it, the topic is fascinating but it does seem to me that the reputation of the professor is based on his controversial findings that are predominantly race related. Found it more of a sensationalistic than an empirical read.
Rather read Dan Ariely.

16 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Great novel with few issues

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2016

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Freakonomics, written by journalist Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven D. Levitt, is a book on modern economics that provides key insight into our society as well as clarifying the difference between causation and connectivity, and discussing situations were people have confused the two. It covers six different topics through fun and amusing questions: cheating, and what a persons’ incentives to cheat are; the use of fear in an informational unbalance; the profitability of drug dealing; the most effective way to reduce crime; the effect of a parent’s actions on a child and how a name can change a persons’ conception of something. Despite being a debut novel, Freakonomics is written in an engaging and fun style that includes all the facts and figures necessary to support the arguments included within the novel. It was a style that I had not read before but thoroughly enjoyed along with the rest of the book.
Two issues that I find when reading a non-fiction book are firstly the purely academic eye with which an author writes and secondly how much prior knowledge is needed to enjoy the novel. Fortunately, Freakonomics does not have either issue in the slightest. A person does not need to be an economist to enjoy Freakonomics and will find the novel intellectual but fun. The chapter titles, I found to be intriguing and amusing, for example, ‘What do school teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common?’ and made the reader genuinely curious about the novel. Furthermore, the majority of the novel then proceeded to live up to chapters’ interesting titles and kept the reader turning the page. The content was, overall, superb. The arguments themselves were cleverly written with thought experiments as well as actually facts and figures to support them and the novel also included the experiences of two separate men, one of whom infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and the other which got a close up, inside eye of how a gang works. These chapters were among my favourites.
However, like every novel, Freakonomics is not perfect. Towards the end, the topics began to interest me less as they were discussed in far too much detail and, although it may have been necessary for proving the authors’ theory, I wasn’t that interested in the topic to start off with. Furthermore, the authors omit necessary information in at least one point during the novel. When discussing guns, they state that ‘On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet is one of the safest’ to support their argument that guns do not cause violence. What they fail to mention are the strict laws about purchasing ammunition for guns in Switzerland, which essentially equates to the guns being unusable without the government’s permission. The exclusion of this information suggests that perhaps they are slightly changing the facts to benefit their arguments elsewhere in the novel. Finally, as a young British girl, parts of this book, whilst incredibly interesting, did not feel highly relevant to me because it was largely based around America. For example, I did not particularly relate to discussions around the Ku Klux Klan and real estate doesn’t interest me much; that said, it probably wasn’t written for my age group anyway. In spite of these shortcomings, Freakonomics is, overall, incredibly good, and the informative and interactive insight that it gives you in to certain aspects of the modern world is well worth the few issues.

46 people found this helpful

DB Cooper

Entertaining, but wrong enough

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 June 2020

Verified Purchase

Equally entertaining and irritating.
I was convinced by their argument and their data that liberalizing abortion reduced crime 20 or so years later. It is an eye-opening observation, that seems responsive to subtle changes in the timing of when abortion was legalized on a state by state case. But changes in death sentence rates would be a better comparator than the actual execution rates on dr8ving down serious crime stats. They also think crimes with an obvious money motive (eg mugging) are distinct from car-theft - which some of us would also consider financially motivated. They blame some of the decline in attractiveness of drug-dealing on an increase in the supply of cheap, high quality cocaine: commoditization in other words - which many think increases, not decreases competition. Such selectiveness is deliberate (they're not stupid, right?), unappealing and undermines their better considered cases.
They also make some silly mistakes - comparing dangers of driving and flying by the number of hours spent in cars and planes: and conclude on a per hour basis flying isn't much safer than driving. Now if they had looked at miles or kilometers driven vs flown, the clear-cut answer is flying is much safer (highly trained pilots, mostly sober and drug free pilots, properly maintained aircraft, strictly enforced separations, weather restrictions, well understood and controlled flight paths etc etc).
Elsewhere they claim most of IQ is genetic, which is a such an old and thoroughly debunked idea I was surprised to see it included uncritically.
If the book does no more than make people question the usual assumptions in newspapers or pub conversations, that is solid success.
But the writers, whilst clever and funny, are not as clever as they are funny. Read this with a big bag of salt beside you...

4 people found this helpful

objected

If this doesn't get you interested in Economics then nothing will.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 September 2020

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I didn't want to finish this book.

Not sure if I had ever really tried to understand what economics was or meant or what purpose it served. The book makes a point of the fact that this book has no unifying theme. But all of it makes sense in a way that you can relate to and often marvel at.

I didn't want to finish this book - aka, I didn't want it to finish. I honestly savoured some of the insights that were revealed. It makes you look at motivations behind actions - particularly in these COVID times. What piqued my interest is when the author said he didn't know what made markets go up or go down - he has no clue. And if that was economics then I didn't know anything about economics but then neither did the author and he certainly knows economics. If you said 'incentives' then I think many incentives are misplaced and misguided and when your incentives are material, social, moral and that sums up economics then now I am interested. It helps you understand - or at least gives you the tools to understand - social issues that we as a species suffer from (or inflict on ourselves).

This truly expands the mind. I ended up buying two copies and gave on to my son (an avid reader and Economics Graduate) and have bought a few more economics books that appear to be in a similar vein. Time and reading will tell quite how similar.

KymH

Get ready to question everything you think you know

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 February 2016

Verified Purchase

Recommended by a work colleague this is a really different book about economics...In fact if they had used Freakanomics in the university economics curriculum, I may have studied more. This book is a fascinating ride through cause and correlation, facts and fiction and rather than teaching me any particular economic method, has encouraged me to question what I believe to be true, to question what others tell me - to pretty much question all of the questions. I mean how else would I ever have learnt why drug dealers live with their mothers? Read this and enjoy an alternative take on the world you think you know.

9 people found this helpful

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