Book Bearings
Freakonomics
- 320 pages · about 5 hours
- First published 2005
- 63 editions
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1 About this book
Freakonomics, published in 2005, is a collaboration between Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and the journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Its premise is that economics is at bottom the study of incentives, and that its tools can answer questions economists do not usually ask. Each chapter takes one: what schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common, how the Ku Klux Klan resembles a group of real-estate agents, why drug dealers still live with their mothers, what lay behind the fall in American crime in the 1990s, and how much parents really matter. The book has no single argument, as the authors say themselves.
- Economics
- Sociology
- Business & economics
- Social science
- Psychology
- Socioeconomic Factors
- Psychological aspects of Economics
- Finance
2 What to expect
Popular economics as a set of puzzles: an economist and a journalist use data to ask why teachers cheat, why most drug dealers earn little, and what really cut crime in the 1990s. Each chapter stands alone, there is no overall thesis, and the pleasure is in surprising answers reached through incentives and statistics. It is breezy and quick to read, and several of its claims, the link between abortion and crime above all, have been challenged by other researchers.
Good for readers who want: surprising questions, economics without equations, and quick, self-contained chapters.
3 About Steven D. Levitt
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 Similar books
- Nudge by Richard H. Thaler
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- Misbehaving by Richard H. Thaler
- The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
- Mindhunter by John E. Douglas
- When They Severed Earth from Sky by E. J. W. Barber
- The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene