Freakonomics

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In this information age, it seems a shame to remain burdened by conventional wisdom or mislead by rumor. I remember having a smile of satisfaction when I first came across snopes.com, a site where rumors are researched and debunked. Finally I had a place I could point whenever someone tried to hit me over the head with another urban legend. "Be careful on your trip! You don't want to wake up in an ice bath with a kidney missing!"

"Don't worry about me! Head on over to snopes.com and I'll call you later!"

The nice thing about the Snopes was that someone did research for you. You may have known or suspected that the kidney-heist story was a little far fetched, but though we have more information available to us today than ever before, it still takes effort to effectively process that information. And depending on the data involved, it might take some real skill as well.

Freakonomics does to conventional wisdom what Snopes did to urban legends. The economists who wrote the book used techniques such as regression analysis to sort through large piles of data and made some interesting discoveries. There is isn't any theme to the topics, only that a large amount of comprehensive information happened to be available for analysis.

I certainly recommend it. The whole thing is quite interesting, it's a quick and easy read, and you're left feeling a little more insightful about the world -- perhaps less likely to take conventional wisdom at face value.

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