This is an extremely interesting book. Unfortunately it has taken me far longer to read it than it should have. I think part of the reason is that at times it feels a bit like reading a text book. Even though it covers really interesting topics, I feel I have to be in the right mood to pick it up. Of course once I get reading it I don’t want to put it down.
As explained by the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, there is no unifying theme throughout this book but as explained on page 11, this book has been written from a very specific worldview, based on a few fundamental ideas:
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.
Experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
Using this view point the authors analyse statistics and previous studies to explain the causality between two seemingly unrelated events. A few such examples are how legalised abortion reduced the crime rate across America, how the Ku Klux Klan is like a group of real estate agents, what makes a perfect parent, how black names in resumes are less likely to get a call back than the same resume with a white name, what schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common.
You may or may not agree but these are all topics which I had never thought about before but seeing them wrote down certainly aroused my interest. I also like that the authors are not afraid to raise quite controversial ideas no matter where the data leads. The chapter on parenthood and how much parents actually matter, I can imagine would be very hard to accept if you are a parent yourself. But as with all the arguments that are made in this book, they are all based on statistics and research rather than just the opinion of a few individuals.
The book feels like it is split into two parts. The first of which covers all the subjects mentioned above. The second part of the book is the epilogue and is over 100 pages long. It consists of columns from the New York Times magazines and articles from the Freakonomics blog.
There are a load of quotes that I took from this book and indeed I found myself writing notes as I was reading, just like I would a text book, which I mentioned before this book is a lot like. A lot of these quotes are key to the points that are made in this book so I would suggest if you are interested in reading this book you postpone reading the quotes below until after you have done so.
“Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, especially when other people want or need the sane thing, Three basic flavours of incentives: Economic, social, and moral.” – Page 16
“A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.” – Page 20
“Cheating is a primordial economic act:getting more for less.” – Page 21
“A broad swath of psychological and economic research has shown people will pay different amounts for the same item depending who is providing it.” – Page 43
“If morality is the way we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.” –
Page 46
“Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear.” – Page 64
“We associate truth with convenience” – John Kenneth Galbraith, Page 79
“A crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage.” – Page 93
“The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession: a lot of people are competing for very few prizes.” – Page 95
“Since people mellow as they get older, more older People lead to less crime.” – Page 124
“Childhood poverty and a single parent household are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single parent home doubles a child’s propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.” – Page 126
“Legalised abortion led to less Unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalised abortion, therefore led to less crime.” – Page 127
“One need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.” – Page 129
“Emotion is the enemy of radical argument. And as emotions go, one of them – fear – is more potent than the rest.” – Page 134
“The risks that scare People and the risks that kill People are very different things.” – Peter Sandman, Page 136
“Risks you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control.” – Page 136
“The difference between causality and correlation. A regression analysis can demonstrate correlation, but it doesn’t prove cause… It should be said regression analysis is more art than science. (In this regard, it has a great deal in common with parenting itself).” – Page 149
“Most of the things that matter (as a parent) were decided long ago… it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.” – Page 161
“When food is scarcer, you become less hungry; and you get hungrier when there is a lot of food around.” – Page 216
“We may be driven to vote less by a financial incentive than a social one. It may be the most valuable payoff of voting is simply being seen at the polling place by your friends or Co-workers.” – Page 226
“Just because a statement is true, it doesn’t mean that it is desirable or morale.” – Page 255
Overall: 85%