{"id":100,"date":"2006-04-11T19:49:17","date_gmt":"2006-04-11T19:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/?p=100"},"modified":"2010-05-08T19:49:50","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T19:49:50","slug":"freakonomics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/freakonomics\/","title":{"rendered":"Freakonomics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve just finished reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What a fascinating book!<\/p>\n

The book’s central idea is that “if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.”<\/p>\n

Here are the fundamental ideas which the authors list as part of their worldview:<\/p>\n

* Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.<\/p>\n

* Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.<\/p>\n

* “Experts”\u2014<\/span>from criminologists to real-estate agents\u2014<\/span>use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.<\/p>\n

* Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.<\/p>\n

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explore questions like what schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common, how the KKK is like a group of real-estate agents, why drug dealers still live with their moms, a surprising factor in the drop in violent crime in America in the 1990s, and aspects of parenting, including a too-long but interesting analysis of baby names.<\/p>\n

I wish they had left out the four-letter words, and their research conclusion (not moral statement) about the societal impact of abortion is distressing.\u00a0 I’m not crazy about their findings about the\u00a0value of parenting\u00a0either, though the scope of that study (how parenting practices affect public-school performance) was a bit limited for their conclusions to be too alarming.\u00a0 They had to choose something they could measure.<\/p>\n

Even so, this is a fascinating book, and the fact that it is primarily research-based rather than mere opinion makes it even more so.<\/p>\n

It also has one of the coolest dust jackets I’ve seen in a while.\u00a0 In case the photo is too small to see clearly, it depicts an orange inside a Granny Smith apple skin.\u00a0 I recently heard a respected graphic designer praise this as an example of excellent cover design.<\/p>\n

If you’d like to stretch your mind with an interesting exploration of how the modern world works and you’re not afraid of being offended, take a look at Freakonomics<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mary Jo Tate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just finished reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. What a fascinating book! The book’s central idea is that “if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.” Here are the fundamental ideas which the authors list as part of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}