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Steven D. Levitt

Stephen J. Dubner

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) Paperback – August 25, 2009

by Steven D. Levitt (Author), Stephen J. Dubner (Contributor)

3,360 ratings

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Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

How much do parents really matter?

Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they 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.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Provocative… eye-popping.” (New York Times Book Review: Inside the List)

“If Indiana Jones were an economist, he’d be Steven Levitt… Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae.” (Wall Street Journal)

“The guy is interesting!” (Washington Post Book World)

“The funkiest study of statistical mechanics ever by a world-renowned economist... Eye-opening and sometimes eye-popping” (Entertainment Weekly)

“Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America... Prepare to be dazzled.” (Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point)

“Principles of economics are used to examine daily life in this fun read.” (People: Great Reads)

“Levitt dissects complex real-world phenomena, e.g. baby-naming patterns and Sumo wrestling, with an economist’s laser.” (San Diego Union-Tribune)

“Levitt is a number cruncher extraordinaire.” (Philadelphia Daily News)

“Levitt is one of the most notorious economists of our age.” (Financial Times)

“Hard to resist.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))

From the Back Cover

More Than 4 Million Copies Sold Worldwide
Published in 35 Languages

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
How much do parents really matter?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they 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.

Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
Paperback : 315 pages
ISBN-10 : 0060731338
ISBN-13 : 978-0060731335
Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.79 x 8 inches
Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks; Original edition (August 25, 2009)
Language: : English

Best Sellers Rank: #12,485 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Theory of Economics
- #46 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- #214 in Sociology (Books)

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Top reviews from the United States

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Christian

My Review of Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2018

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My mini-synopsis: Freakonomics is a great book! I loved every minute of it. I have always considered myself to be a bit of an economist because I make all of my personal decisions based on what will ultimately end in a greater amount of “happy points” (how I quantify joy) for all people involved. This book took that obsession to a whole different level. They go into different correlations that they have found and explain why they believe that the correlations may also be causations. Most notably, they explain why they believe the legalization of abortion decreased the crime rate… yeah, they went there. They talk a lot about how they quantify things that are typically seen as unquantifiable (happy points, anyone?) and then use that to answer questions that have always been seen as rhetorical.

What I learned: Whether you agree with all of their findings or not, the way that they tackle the questions they have is admirable. The biggest learning point I got from this book is a completely different outlook on answering questions. Instead of assuming something doesn’t have an answer, get creative and get as close as you can. Additionally, the confidence they had in their findings is something worth respecting. If you have done the work and you believe the outcome, trust the work that you have done. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t accept new evidence or look into new potential options, but don’t discount your work until you have a reason to. Overall, this book pushed me to think more like an economist (dare I say freakonomist?) and I believe the thought process used by these authors will come in handy in business decisions as well.

24 people found this helpful

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Fernando

Nuances and everyday behaviours are broken down and laid out in very relatable language

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2020

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*Edit: I quoted the information on this book as part of an economics conversation with my MBA alumnus. I had their undivided attention and interest for quite a while. I love books!

I decided to read this book in order to put an everyday analytical spin to my Managerial Economics course which focused on optimization and decision making on production environments.

It was remarkable reading how Steven and Stephen used regresion (which in my eyes is a complex process) to identify several variables and fixed values to determine how percieved notions and actions truly affect a child's development and academic performance. Simplified the process and taught me a few things about myself along the way.

Who would dare state that the legalization of abortions caused a reduction in crime? The implications are immense on minorities and low income population. But the data proves it.

It as artful how this book takes you into the statistical process and analysis of the data without expecting you to be a numbers person. The nuances and everyday behaviours are broken down and laid out in very relatable language. I will definitely be reading SuperFreakonomics. My respects for Levitt.

7 people found this helpful

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pwilliams

I would definitely recommend Freakonomics to any reader looking to learn economics through ...

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2017

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I would definitely recommend Freakonomics to any reader looking to learn economics through real current events and hot topics. Levitt uses his teaching and writing styles throughout the book to execute his ideas in an easy to digest way. This book appeals to older kids and young adults because these are the years where we first start to learn about current events and have opinions on political things. Reading this book in a high school econ class was helpful in my opinion and taught me new things I never would have related to the economy.
Levitt’s teaching style appeals to most people in my opinion as he uses real examples that are fascinating to readers.When teaching new complicated ideas, it's important to make them easily understandable. Levitt does a good job of writing to all readers, not just certain classes of people. In the following quote from the book, Levitt uses this strategy to teach his point. “An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.” This quote is beneficial in teaching his lesson because this analogy is helpful in understanding what an incentive is. Most people know what incentives are, but not all, which is why he continues to explain it and does not just assume the reader knows. For many High School students, econ can be hard to understand because the ideas are more abstract, so when Levitt uses examples that are known, it's easier to comprehend the ideas.
As far as writing style goes, Levitt does a good job of using complex sentences and words while keeping the writing fairly comprehensive. His audience of people who are econ beginners are easily able to understand the content because he doesn’t dumb down the topics. The following quote showcases his writing abilities as he uses good vocabulary and explanations. "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how it actually does work."(Pg.13) He relates a word most people already know to an economic topic to teach the lesson. He teaches new econ vocabulary in an easy to understand way through examples. He keeps his examples serious yet difficult while explaining the econ. He maintains new examples every chapter while still relating them to the last. Using real-life current events also helped to teach the information in a new, academic way.
Overall, Levitt did a great job on teaching economy in a fascinating way. Each chapter had a new taste and was captivating to learn about. His examples were new and exciting to read and relate to econ. The combination of complex vocabulary and ideas with his captivating teaching style is what makes Freakonomics a good choice when looking for an educational economy book.

12 people found this helpful

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LokMite

Great price, great writing but be aware of word "deckle"

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2020

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We got this copy at a decent price but it does appear to be one of those hardcover books which appears to have been printed at the end of the cycle of the cutting blade. The pages are not flush with each other as view the book from the front, the top and bottom are even, you can look it up with the term "deckle edge or deckled edge". I am okay with this regardless if it's "feature" or a "defect". If you want to know whether your copy will have this, be sure to ask before ordering. It doesn't bother me at all, but it was just a surprise when I first looked at it.

This book, "Freakanomics" is one of the best non-fiction books written and should be required reading for High School economics classes across the US. From the age of 13 up to people who show up on the Today show for the 100 or older Smucker's club, it is a book that can be enjoyed with laughs and insight-fullness.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

NAFY

Overrated, disappointing, repetitive... and of little, if any, value

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 18, 2019

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Someone said 'have no expectations and you will never get disappointed' and one of things that spoilt this read to me were my high expectations.

The good:
Interesting and sensible way of gathering data
Convincing conclusion
Pleasant style of reading very 'digestible'

The bad:
Incredibly repetitive - the case of decreasing number of criminals is covered at least 3 times! Pretty much every case is covered at least twice.
Authors touch upon 10 or so subjects that I did not find particularly interesting- many are related to race which to me shows how US orientated it is.
The layout is bizarre, seems like an amateurish self-publish booked - someone who decided 'let's make a collage of the materials and add all of them into the book' it start of like a regular book, then it goes through the research published, then articles, then it seems it back to 'a book', then FAQ - very weird and inconsistent.
Trivial matters like the name of babies are killed to death. I am only impressed by the shear determination someone had to go through this data and arrive at conclusion which is 'the trends of names change over time'.

I wanted to like it, the topic is fascinating but it does seem to me that the reputation of the professor is based on his controversial findings that are predominantly race related. Found it more of a sensationalistic than an empirical read.
Rather read Dan Ariely.

14 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Great novel with few issues

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2016

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Freakonomics, written by journalist Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven D. Levitt, is a book on modern economics that provides key insight into our society as well as clarifying the difference between causation and connectivity, and discussing situations were people have confused the two. It covers six different topics through fun and amusing questions: cheating, and what a persons’ incentives to cheat are; the use of fear in an informational unbalance; the profitability of drug dealing; the most effective way to reduce crime; the effect of a parent’s actions on a child and how a name can change a persons’ conception of something. Despite being a debut novel, Freakonomics is written in an engaging and fun style that includes all the facts and figures necessary to support the arguments included within the novel. It was a style that I had not read before but thoroughly enjoyed along with the rest of the book.
Two issues that I find when reading a non-fiction book are firstly the purely academic eye with which an author writes and secondly how much prior knowledge is needed to enjoy the novel. Fortunately, Freakonomics does not have either issue in the slightest. A person does not need to be an economist to enjoy Freakonomics and will find the novel intellectual but fun. The chapter titles, I found to be intriguing and amusing, for example, ‘What do school teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common?’ and made the reader genuinely curious about the novel. Furthermore, the majority of the novel then proceeded to live up to chapters’ interesting titles and kept the reader turning the page. The content was, overall, superb. The arguments themselves were cleverly written with thought experiments as well as actually facts and figures to support them and the novel also included the experiences of two separate men, one of whom infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and the other which got a close up, inside eye of how a gang works. These chapters were among my favourites.
However, like every novel, Freakonomics is not perfect. Towards the end, the topics began to interest me less as they were discussed in far too much detail and, although it may have been necessary for proving the authors’ theory, I wasn’t that interested in the topic to start off with. Furthermore, the authors omit necessary information in at least one point during the novel. When discussing guns, they state that ‘On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet is one of the safest’ to support their argument that guns do not cause violence. What they fail to mention are the strict laws about purchasing ammunition for guns in Switzerland, which essentially equates to the guns being unusable without the government’s permission. The exclusion of this information suggests that perhaps they are slightly changing the facts to benefit their arguments elsewhere in the novel. Finally, as a young British girl, parts of this book, whilst incredibly interesting, did not feel highly relevant to me because it was largely based around America. For example, I did not particularly relate to discussions around the Ku Klux Klan and real estate doesn’t interest me much; that said, it probably wasn’t written for my age group anyway. In spite of these shortcomings, Freakonomics is, overall, incredibly good, and the informative and interactive insight that it gives you in to certain aspects of the modern world is well worth the few issues.

44 people found this helpful

DB Cooper

Entertaining, but wrong enough

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2020

Verified Purchase

Equally entertaining and irritating.
I was convinced by their argument and their data that liberalizing abortion reduced crime 20 or so years later. It is an eye-opening observation, that seems responsive to subtle changes in the timing of when abortion was legalized on a state by state case. But changes in death sentence rates would be a better comparator than the actual execution rates on dr8ving down serious crime stats. They also think crimes with an obvious money motive (eg mugging) are distinct from car-theft - which some of us would also consider financially motivated. They blame some of the decline in attractiveness of drug-dealing on an increase in the supply of cheap, high quality cocaine: commoditization in other words - which many think increases, not decreases competition. Such selectiveness is deliberate (they're not stupid, right?), unappealing and undermines their better considered cases.
They also make some silly mistakes - comparing dangers of driving and flying by the number of hours spent in cars and planes: and conclude on a per hour basis flying isn't much safer than driving. Now if they had looked at miles or kilometers driven vs flown, the clear-cut answer is flying is much safer (highly trained pilots, mostly sober and drug free pilots, properly maintained aircraft, strictly enforced separations, weather restrictions, well understood and controlled flight paths etc etc).
Elsewhere they claim most of IQ is genetic, which is a such an old and thoroughly debunked idea I was surprised to see it included uncritically.
If the book does no more than make people question the usual assumptions in newspapers or pub conversations, that is solid success.
But the writers, whilst clever and funny, are not as clever as they are funny. Read this with a big bag of salt beside you...

4 people found this helpful

objected

If this doesn't get you interested in Economics then nothing will.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2020

Verified Purchase

I didn't want to finish this book.

Not sure if I had ever really tried to understand what economics was or meant or what purpose it served. The book makes a point of the fact that this book has no unifying theme. But all of it makes sense in a way that you can relate to and often marvel at.

I didn't want to finish this book - aka, I didn't want it to finish. I honestly savoured some of the insights that were revealed. It makes you look at motivations behind actions - particularly in these COVID times. What piqued my interest is when the author said he didn't know what made markets go up or go down - he has no clue. And if that was economics then I didn't know anything about economics but then neither did the author and he certainly knows economics. If you said 'incentives' then I think many incentives are misplaced and misguided and when your incentives are material, social, moral and that sums up economics then now I am interested. It helps you understand - or at least gives you the tools to understand - social issues that we as a species suffer from (or inflict on ourselves).

This truly expands the mind. I ended up buying two copies and gave on to my son (an avid reader and Economics Graduate) and have bought a few more economics books that appear to be in a similar vein. Time and reading will tell quite how similar.

KymH

Get ready to question everything you think you know

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

Recommended by a work colleague this is a really different book about economics...In fact if they had used Freakanomics in the university economics curriculum, I may have studied more. This book is a fascinating ride through cause and correlation, facts and fiction and rather than teaching me any particular economic method, has encouraged me to question what I believe to be true, to question what others tell me - to pretty much question all of the questions. I mean how else would I ever have learnt why drug dealers live with their mothers? Read this and enjoy an alternative take on the world you think you know.

9 people found this helpful

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