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68 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A look at things through the eyes of an economist., 8 Oct 2008
This book is a general interest book- and it certainly is interesting. The book, for anyone looking for an entertaining read, will like it. In a nutshell, the book takes a look at all sorts of things in society, from crack gangs to parenting, and then attempts to make sense of them by applying econonmic principles. According to the book, economics is really the study of incentives, and so using this kind of angle, the book comes up with answers to why things work the way they do.
A book that's hard to put down, I'm sure many readers will enjoy it. Also recommend The Sixty-Second Motivator for a more simplistic explanation of what motivates people and gives them incentives to do what they do.
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40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rogue: A deceitful and unreliable scoundrel, 24 Jun 2006
Well, that's the dictionary definition.
"Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America" says Macolm Gladwell. If that's true, it's a good thing they have nice scenery. Just in case you're not convinced by the chapters themselves, between these you get a helpful article or extract explaining just how great Mr Levitt is. Mr Dubner (Levitt's co-author) doth protest too much, methinks.
The authors make a virtue of having no overall theme, so this is a magpie collection of sometimes interesting observations. This lack of discipline allows Steves L. and D. to appropriate material that's more than straightforward economics.
Chapter 1 shows how statistical analysis can reveal cheating. This, and the material on Estate Agents and the Klu Klux Klan in chapter 2, is fairly well known and understood mainstream knowledge - part of Agency theory, a standard subject certainly in accounting and business management courses. It's about as radical as a Ford Mondeo, or wearing your baseball cap backwards.
Chapter 5 deals with parenting. Studies of genetically identical twins result in the same the conclusions about parenting that are presented here. Stephen Pinker in particular sets the subject out better in "The Blank Slate".
Chapter 6 suggests that parents give children aspirational names, and that (with a few wrinkles) children of affluent parents do better than those less well off. Gosh.
This is "gee whiz" writing, lightweight summer holiday stuff. The book is not the revolutionary, "dazzling" material it's sold as, unless you've only ever read beach novels so far (and no harm in that). Most of these chapters present material fairly well known and understood elsewhere - maybe this stuff is news to economists, but not to evolutionary psychologists, games theorists and accountants.
So: not a bad read if you've never thought about economics before, and don't fancy the heavy stuff. If, like me, you value authors who put time and effort into editing and structuring their thoughts - because they have something important they want to get across - this is one to miss, or borrow from the library. Not one to buy for the shelf.
If you want to read something truly bizarre, and aren't too familiar with quantum physics, try David Deutch's "The Fabric of Reality". If you are familiar with quantum physics - try to get out more!
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172 of 210 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The hidden side of the "Unexpected Publishing Phenomenon", 10 Aug 2005
Hmmm. A very *interesting* (in the sense of the Middle Eastern curse) kettle of fish.
I'm not sure what co-author Dubner's role is here - either to act as an alter ego for Levitt, allowing reproduction of fawning extracts from various newspaper articles written about Levitt throughout the book (as sole author Levitt wouldn't be able to get away with this without heaping hubris on his head), or perhaps to take the material he had from his original article and pad it out into a volume just fat enough (and no more) to justify publication as a hard-back, in which case Levitt had pretty much nothing to do with this book at all. I suspect a bit of both.
Most of the few points made in this book are, at best, only moderately interesting, and there are very few of them: Freakonomics doesn't even remotely live up to its billing, managing only to explore the hidden side of about five completely discrete, and only moderately interesting, topics (statistical evidence that there's cheating in Sumo Wrestling, anyone?) Indeed, the sumo cheating data wasn't especially compelling: it seems to me there is an entirely innocent explanation for wrestlers who have already "qualified" losing an abnormally large number of bouts to statistically weaker fighters who have not: a "qualified" wrestler simply has no incentive to try particularly hard, where as a non-qualifying wrestler does. That analysis doesn't involve any collusion at all.
Elsewhere, Levitt's theorems only really work where there are huge quantities of data covering all conceivable aspects of the topic at hand. Most of the time, this just isn't the case, which is why the hidden side of everything remains, even to Levitt and Dubner, hidden.
In the cases where the data are available - like Baseball - others have done a much more compelling job of writing the economist's expose. For example, try Michael Lewis' outstanding Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
Mean time, this one joins Lynne Truss's Eats shoots and leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation as the latest in a long line of quick-buck publishing pan-flashes.
Perhaps the money I've wasted on this book can be put, through this review, to some good use: saving yours.
Olly Buxton
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