Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Ambitiously subtitled A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Freakonomics was a big hit when it was published in the mid 2000s. Among its devotees were my younger son, who frequently referenced its unusual analyses of such diverse topics as the link between abortion and crime rates, cheating by public school teachers and sumo wrestlers, and bias among contestants on The Weakest Link. I recently got around to reading the book, which has been on my "to read" shelf for years.

Author Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, loves nothing more than an unusual question and a data set that will help him answer it. And, with the help of journalist Dubner, he has produced an interesting look at such questions as "Why do drug dealers live with their parents?" and "What makes a perfect parent?" While I am deeply suspicious about some of the causal links Levitt posits (I lack the statistical skills to even consider trying to "disprove" them), his analyses are thought-provoking and engagingly presented.

In one of the blog posts appended to this "revised and expanded edition," the authors defend the book against the criticism that the book has no unifying theme (they actually agree that it has no theme and suggest a theme is not necessary). Yet, early on, they lay out several "fundamental ideas": (1) incentives are the cornerstone of modern life, (2) the conventional wisdom is often wrong, (3) dramatic effects often have distant causes, (4) experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda, and (5) knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. All of the cases that Levitt and Dubner present do support one or more of these ideas--in my view, that's a theme (or set of themes).

So, while I wouldn't count myself a devotee of the book, I did enjoy being challenged by the counterintuitive findings that Levitt and Dubner explore in Freakonomics.

Favorite passage:

If I got to make three wishes, perhaps one of them would be that I might turn into a truly interdisciplinary social scientist who uses data to inform human behavior in ways that both shed light on and draw upon not only economics, but sociology, political science, and psychology as well. But let's be realistic. I'm having trouble even mastering the tools of my own discipline. (This passage is reflective of Levitt's self-deprecating approach.)