Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
A New York Times and national best seller!
Which
is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and
sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with
their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did
Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?
These may not sound like
typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt, an
American Bar Foundation Research Fellow and Professor of Economics at
the University of Chicago, is not a typical economist. He is a
much-heralded young scholar who studies the riddles of everyday
life-from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing—and whose
conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He
usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question.
Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an
admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in
this book: Freakonomics.
Through forceful storytelling and
wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner 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. In
Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of well,
everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about
real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks
of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.
What
unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a
surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not
impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are
asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way
of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed
thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.
Freakonomics
establishes this unconventional premise: if morality represents how we
would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually
does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with
enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But
Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the
way we view the modern world.