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DiscountDelight - Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
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List Price: $25.95
Our Price: $12.74
Your Save: $ 13.21 ( 51% )
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Manufacturer: William Morrow
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Roughcut
EAN: 9780060731328
ISBN: 006073132X
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 242
Publication Date: 2005-05-01
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: 2005-04-12
Studio: William Morrow
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Here goes.....
Comment: This will be pretty dismissive as four star reviews go. I give it four stars because it is entertaining, well written, and highly unique. I am dismissive for reasons that will become clear as you read the review.
The book is written, so it seems, mostly by the co-author and based mostly upon the research of Levitt. It's bad form to assign heroes and villains without really knowing what one is talking about, but I'm not going to let that stop me. I put Levitt as the hero, based on the ability to analyze and compile large amounts of odd data and come up with sometimes useful conclusions. One of the more simple and useful examples demonstrates that a swimming pool is about 1,000 times more deadly to a child than a handgun. The total number of deaths are roughly similar, but the total number of guns are magnitudes more than swimming pools. Thus a far more effective use of resources for child safety would be child-proofing pools as opposed to fire-proofing pajamas, making weaker car bags, etc.
He also demonstrates how statistical aberrations can be used to catch cheaters, why crack dealers live at home, and a hundred and one items of varying degrees of usefulness. Now for the villain. Most of the writing and extrapolating of conclusions to preach themes seems to come from the co-author, and much of it is weak. Here for example, some correlations are shown between various parental situations (intact vs. single parent, book owner, museum visitor, spanker) and styles, and school performance. A conclusion is drawn, I think rightly so, that who the parent is matters more than what the parent does insofar as bald school performance goes. In other words, nature counts for more than nurture. From here he goes on to imply that single parent homes or working mom homes have no merit over intact, loving, two-parent families. Again, insofar as academic performance goes, his observation is clearly unassailable, but he makes a rather large leap by judging outcome and quality of life almost solely on school performance. I'd have to say stable marriages, good friends, purpose and meaning, and a whole host of things are probably more indicative about which kind of family is better than honor roll at PS 127, but maybe that's just me. No, maybe it's not, because a few paragraphs down he makes this same point (and undermining his previous conclusion), by pointing out that although adopted children seem to score in school reflective of their biological parents, down the road they are far more likely to attend college and have stable marriages than their kids from similar backgrounds who were not adopted. He should've stuck with "parenting doesn't much affect your grades." He also had some odd statements about spanking, implying that to admit to spanking was to admit to being unenlightened, and only those brutally honest would admit to a stranger that they ever spanked their kid. I'm not sure what part of Belgium he's talking about, but here in flyover country spanking a kid every once in a while still isn't seen as Hannibal Lecter behavior.
Much more controversial is his study on the drop in crime in the US. I found this intriguing and reasonable, and thought he did a respectable job of papering over the problems with conventional wisdom in this area. His main contentions are that more prisons and Roe v. Wade did in the crime rate. Leaving aside the prisons-hard to argue- let's look at RVW. 1.6 million few kids a year not being born to the kind of parents who would kill their own offspring seems to me to be a pretty reasonable explanation for the crime drop, and the statistics bear it out. On the flip side, Romania which banned abortion, had a bunch of extra kids that eventually overthrew the corrupt government. Now here is where his pc glasses are pulled down tighter than ever. The Romanian uprising is constantly written as though it were a bad thing- the counterpoint of the crime drop in the US. Forced births horrible, elective abortion if not wonderful, at least "allowing the mother to make her own reproductive choices", wonderful. There's many such a loaded phrase in there. A tip of the hat is made to sanity, pointing out that the best solution to too few hats is not necessarily to lop off a few heads, but that's about it. It rather reminds me of the old Al Gore solution to over-population- genocide. Not creative, perhaps, but effective.
So, all in all, a good book. I've probably over-focused on the problems I had with the perceived bent of the co-author, and I think he gives himself credit vicariously for an objectivity that perhaps Levitt had, and the data has, but the analysis of the data is not quite so pure as he would have us believe. Still, I'd recommend it, and even recommend it highly, just at the point where the data and statistical analysis stops and the "art" begins, I'd take it with a bucket or so of salt.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Style over substance
Comment: Freakonomics has enjoyed widespread hype since it was published. While its narrative format creates an unusually readable economics book, much has been sacrificed for the sake of mass appeal. In short, none of the theories presented seem especially revolutionary, belying the so-called search for the "hidden side of everything." Instead of a meaningful collection of economic findings, we are presented with a rather trivial collection of ideas that, in the end, fail to produce much surprise or deep thought.
On the other hand, the book does dispel the common confusion between economics and finance. However, those searching for groundbreaking new knowledge will likely be disappointed.
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Summary: One of those books Everyone in Business should read
Comment: A Must read if you are in business or if you do business.
-jim
Customer Rating:
Summary: Levitt has a Genius for the Wacky!!!
Comment: This is sometimes funny, often thought-provoking and usually enlightening. It should be required reading for journalists and politicians, two groups that too often confuse cause and effect with results that can be comic or tragic.
Levitt stands out not because of any large claims about human motivations, but because of his remarkable ingenuity, creativity, and sheer doggedness in investigating empirical questions about which no one seems to know much at all. Unfortunately, some of his findings are not terribly exciting.
An amusing book... It's best enjoyed, though, as a series of music-hall turns, tall tales and outrageous paradoxes rather than anything resembling an argument.
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun and interesting, but a little "overdone"
Comment: Don't get me wrong, this book is a lot of fun at times, and some of the ideas will catch even the educated and well-read off-guard. However, perhaps because of the high expectations created by the book's huge success, it was not quite what I thought it would be. In places it reads a little like a first-year class in statistical inference, and at others one gets the sense that the authors are trying a little too hard to be controversial. But again, a fun (and quick) read worth your time.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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
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