Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Reviews

• A fun, interesting, and provocative book.

  
  By A3S2AWIZB2Y4C8 on 2005-04-14
  While I'mnot generally inclined to read economics books, Freakonomics is very, very accessible. The book is written in clear, readily understandable language (including the best description I've ever seen of regression analysis, causality, and correlation). The topics discussed are quite interesting - why crime REALLY went down in the 90's, the impact parents can REALLY have on their kids, and several others. Whether one ultimately agrees with the authors' conclusions or not, the book certainly encourages you to think about everyday things more critically and not just accept the conventional wisdom.
  
  [...]
  
  My only disappointment is that the book wasn't longer!
  
  

• Smarter for having read it

  
  By A29XXGF8DULNUM on 2005-04-12
  Levitt/Dubner present complex ideas in the most straight forward, enlightening way possible. The topics range from interesting to fascinating, and the authors are consistent in their logical prose. The reader is encouraged to open his/her mind, and after poring through so many examples that undermine the pillars of conventional wisdom, the reader emerges with a new world view (as well as great anecdotes to tell friends).
  This is a fantastic book!!!
  
  

• Correlation doesn't mean causation

  
  By A2507ZYWGMY9BK on 2006-08-20
  The authors repeat this mantra a few times in this book and stress its importance. Then they repeatedly proceed to violate their own rule!
  
  Much of this book is a presentation of correlations in society. This by itself is not a problem. However, the authors will often go on to explain that there is causation by coming up with unsubstantiated theories.
  
  Fact: The increase in abortion rate is CORRELATED with a decrease in crime rate.
  Authors' Theory: The increase in abortion rate CAUSED a decrease in crime rate because it eliminated potential criminals.
  
  Fact: Highly educated parents are CORRELATED with a child's performance in school.
  Authors' Theory: Highly educated parents CAUSE a child's improved performance in school because they value schooling and IQ's are hereditary.
  
  It's not that the author's theories are necessarily wrong. It's simply that they provide no proof or research to support them. The book is basically an editorial.
  
  When the authors do follow their own rule, it simply results in an uninteresting read. For example, the last chapter lists names such as "DeShawn" that are correlated with an unsuccessful life. The conclusion of the chapter is that the choice of name doesn't cause a child to be successful or not. Um, thanks for telling me that. I was planning on naming my child Bill Gates so he could become super rich but I guess that won't work.
  
  I was expecting this book to be completely different. It has nothing to do with economics at all. It has more to do with statistics and revealing some correlations in our society. Unfortunately, many of these correlations could lead to dangerous misinterpretation and many are simply not all that interesting.
  
  Update: I just finished reading The Undercover Economist, Naked Economics, and Basic Economics. These are the books you want to read if you are interested in how economics impacts the world and your everyday life.
  
  

• Fun read, but certainly not science

  
  By A352A34WUZZWWE on 2006-07-04
  I know this review will be barraged with "unhelpful" votes from the fans for writing something negative, but so be it. This book is cute and fun to read, which would make me give it three stars, except that it scares me how many people think that Levitt practices actual science and that his conclusions are valid. Read this book for its fun and humour value, but please take all conclusions with a hefty grain of salt.
  
  It says on the cover that this book has been used as student literature for economics courses. This is interesting, since a friend of mine is an economics professor and she does indeed recommend this book to students - as the perfect example of how people lie with statistics.
  
  Levitt demonstrates beautifully how one can come to false conclusions by seeing correlation and assuming cause. If you don't know what I mean, let me explain: Ice cream and rape are correlated. When ice cream sales go up, so does rape. With the kind of reasoning Levitt uses, this is solid proof that ice cream is a cause of rape. The truth is that hot weather increases both. Levitt cautions against assuming cause out of correlation in the beginning, then spends the entire rest of the book doing just that. It amazes me how little research he has done. An introductory biology textbook will tell you that his conclusions about genetics and intelligence are false, but he states it as fact after finding some economical correlation.
  
  

• Provocative, eye opening

  
  By A3PEOF0GX4EN38 on 2005-08-06
  There are some very thought provoking ideas presented here and you don't have to agree with them to find "Freakonomics" valuable. Steven Levitt presents some interesting facts that will make you want to research further. Reading his take on the public school system was validating as it has been my opinion all along. Seeing first hand how standardized testing preparation has been substituted for a real education and then reading how all it really does is encourage cheating was powerfully illuminating. The abortion statistics and the ridiculous baby naming trends offered valuable insight.
  I see this as a primer on sociology more than economics but it does show how it is all related. I will pass this one around because I think it is an important read. Maybe not for all the information included but for how it opens your mind and makes you want to look further. I enjoyed "Freakonomics" and recommend it.
  
  
• "Steven Levitt is Smarter Than Jesus." - Freakonomics, Chapter Four
  By A2EWC48FRNO3YP on 2005-10-02
  The bookstores in regional airports like John Wayne in Orange County, California offer few choices in reading material, either your usual assortment of management books de jour ("I earned a bazillion dollars, so can you") or USA Today's Top Ten. With some time on my hands, I digested in two hours while waiting for a plane the rather thin (especially for $26 list) tome, "Freakonomics", a Top Ten non-fiction book, having some prior awareness of the furor created by the book when it was first released.
  
  "Freakonomics" probably would not have hit anyone's Top Ten but for Levitt's clever and controversial observation in Chapter Four that the Roe v. Wade decision was as responsible for the drop in crime in the 1990s as anything else. Once televangelists took to the airwaves to successfully exhort their brownshirt congregations to denounce Levitt (who is more of an yuppie iconoclast than having any particular political agenda), Levitt was assured a spot on the best talk shows and inside page of upper-crust book reviews everywhere. He certainly is bright, entrepreneurial and articulate, and his twists on individual motivations and risk perception (backyard pools kill way more kids than guns in homes) are breezy and entertaining, but just as easily condensed into a New Yorker or Harpers article. Levitt is a very smart guy, and original, no question about that.
  
  The problem with "Freakonomics" is that it is only a strung together set of witty observations that, like a sugary meringue, there isn't a lot of substance. Statistics are scarce, and a lot of the footnotes refer back to other articles by Levitt himself or someone else's popular-print books. This is especially true of Levitt's explosive but dispassionate Roe v. Wade discussion. Although Levitt disclaims any bias or subtext, he had to have known that in today's Salem witch-trial culture, linking legalized abortion to the falling crime rate would be akin to tossing a match in a shed full of open gasoline cans. Yet this central thesis is unattached to any hard data, a genuine shame since the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade needs all the help it can get.
  
  Certainly many sociologists must recoil in horror at some of the cited sources, such as they are, particularly Levitt's favorable comparison of the workings of an inner city drug gang to a Fortune 500 company. The comparison is largely based upon a graduate student's study in which the student (at considerable peril) befriended a drug capo and reported on his business methodologies. This is certainly entertaining and interesting (La Vida, a breakthough 1960s study of the culture of poverty) comes to mind, but is it science?
  
  Economics shares characteristics with quantum physics (John Nash understood the cross-over well), namely that while larger trends or processes can be predicted with some accuracy, the actions of individual people, like photons, are more or less uncertain - you can only approximate the location of a particle at a given point in time, just as individual motives and actions are disparate. You wind up with a bunch of little spots along a curve. More to the point, like photons, the very act of observing individual people will alter their behavior. My strong suspicion is that in the example of the drug gang leader, his similarities to a good business executive were in some part genuine, but also a response to the study itself. It certainly does not lend itself to broad generalizations, and I suspect the median gang is far less romantic or corporatized. Anecdotes, or single-sample studies, do not a social science make.
  
  Because I do not devour like candy the latest get-rich-like-me business management books one finds in airports, I was also unprepared for the sheer volume of self promotion in "Freakonomics." The ostensible co-author of the book is Stephen Dubner, who wrote an adoring article of Levitt and his theories in a 2003 New York Times Magazine. Like the mediaeval minstrels hired by knights to sing their praises as they entered a new town (brave Sir Robin, Sir Robin the brave..."), Dubner trumpets Levitt's genius at the beginning of each and every chapter by quoting portions of his very same and only 2003 article . "Levitt is a self effacing genius." The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003. "Did I tell you Levitt is the smartest guy on earth?" The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003. "Levitt's observations are brilliant and scintillating." The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003. And so on. If this portends a trend of witnessing book jacket promo blurbs migrate into and infest the very text of non-fiction books, this development needs to be ruthlessly stamped out, tout de suite, before all popular social science books start resembling autobiographies like Anna Nicole's or Donald Trump's.
  
  In sum, despite its hip-hop, dot-com age title, I am hopeful (although not encouraged by the volume of breathless reviews) that this discontinuous exercise will ultimately find its way to the bookshop remainder table, leaving future generations to wonder what the fuss (or, freak) was all about.
  
  
• The Power of Data in a Master Economist's Hands
  By A13E0ARAXI6KJW on 2005-04-16
  Having myself survived the economics program at the University of Chicago as a young graduate student twenty years ago, I know how decidedly eccentric their laurelled scholars can be. One of the most prestigious of the current crop there, Steven D. Levitt, along with journalist Stephen J. Dubner, has written a most intriguing and mind-bending book that uses Chicago-style econometric approaches and applies those to social and political issues that otherwise seem mundane and have no apparent basis in coherent theory which would support the behavior under study. In fact, this book of compelling case studies bears similarities to the approach taken by author Malcolm Gladwell in his recent best-selling book, "The Tipping Point", where he takes primarily historical events and analyzes them almost anecdotally as exercises in human behavior, in his case, making connections and how ideas become trends not by gradual insinuation but by a singular dramatic moment.
  
  But Levitt's canvas is broader, his theories and findings are far more diverse, and his approach is far more quantitative in nature. For example, he challenges the perception that campaign spending determines elections. Levitt's analysis takes a fresh look by contrasting races in which the same two congressional candidates run repeatedly against each other. What he concludes is that a winning candidate can spend half as much as before and lose only one percent of the vote, while a losing candidate who doubles campaign spending picks up only one percent more. Basically they prove that no matter how much candidates spend on their campaigns, the results would not be marginally affected. In another example, the authors describe a seller's real estate agent, who lives on commission and has an incentive to sell a listed home for maximum dollar. Again, this is a misconception since the authors contend the small financial reward to an agent who sells a home for a few thousand more dollars is dwarfed by the greater money to be made by selling properties for less but quicker. Levitt's research into the sale of one hundred thousand Chicago homes found that agents keep their own homes on the market an average of ten days longer and sell them for more than three percent more than the homes they list and sell for clients.
  
  The penetrating analyses provided by Levitt appear to have no bounds as he identifies Chicago teachers, who were proven to be changing their students' test answers and ultimately fired for their actions; sumo wrestlers who were found to be cheating as well; and even the alternative and more lucrative career options that crack dealers may have at McDonald's versus making sales. He even questions the impact of a good first name in a person's later life and if children become more literate if their parents read to them. The conclusions surprised me as they will you. But the most compelling study he presents is related to the impact of Roe vs. Wade. In a study he conducted with Stanford law Professor John Donohue, Levitt makes a seemingly broad-stroked conclusion in attributing much of the drop in the U.S. crime rate to legalized abortion. Their argument was based on the theory that abortion prevented the births of unwanted children who otherwise would have been statistically more likely to mature into criminals. The crime rate drop coincided with the time those aborted pregnancies would otherwise have hit their teen years, and the trend showed up earlier in states such as California that were the first to enact more liberal access to abortions. Through the data they gather, the correlation is startling, and the conclusion is hard to refute despite the naysayers who felt the stuffy to be politically motivated. But to Levitt's academically inclined credit, he never seems like he has an ideological agenda as he lets the numbers do the talking for him. His genius is to take those seemingly meaningless sets of numbers, ferret out the telltale pattern and recognize what it all means. A brilliant mind is at work, as he takes the most mundane open-ended questions and actually answers them. Strongly recommended.
  
  
• Entertaining and full of interesting observations
  By AUHG8KSHI529U on 2005-05-03
  This is a fun book with a great title and catchy cover art. The authors admit that the book does not have a central theme, but like a freak show it wanders from a curiosity to something amazing to the unexpected. The difference here is that it is a display of freaky things revealed by economic analysis. The word economics gets used so carelessly that it is not well understood by most people. Possibly the only word more loosely defined is the list of people calling themselves economists. Since it is not a defined profession, almost anyone can call himself (or herself) an economist, and too many do.
  
  By any measure, Steven Levitt, is an economist. He has the academic credentials, academic publications, and actually teaches economics at the prestigious University of Chicago. His co-author, Stephen Dubner, is a journalist from New York who presumably helped smooth Levitt's ideas and observations into generalist reader prose. This is a book that is fairly easy to read even for someone with the barest exposure to economics. For the purposes of this book, economics is how people make choices in their behavior in the face of incentives and disincentives of various sorts.
  
  Levitt makes a big deal out of his not being an econometrician (an economist who expresses his ideas in higher mathematics rather than words and whose research can tend to be studying mathematical behavior rather than flesh and blood human beings). The old econometrician joke goes like this. There were three econometricians out deer hunting and they see a big buck. The first aims and fires, but his shot is five yards left of the deer. The second shoots, but his shot if five yards right of the deer. The third starts walking towards the deer and his companions ask him why he was not shooting at the deer. He replied, that on average they were dead center, so they must have killed the deer. You get the idea.
  
  This book shows us the author's views on why drug dealers live with their mothers despite the popular notion that they make a lot of money, why a swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun, how Roe v. Wade may have impacted the crime rate favorably and is still an inefficient tradeoff in fighting crime, how teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat in response to incentives and how to catch them (very interesting, actually), how and why we know there were never 3,000,000 homeless as Mitch Snyder claimed, and how much do parents really matter (by far the least convincing part of the book).
  
  While this is an entertaining read, and I hope it will spark some young people (and not so young adults) to want to study and read more about economics, I took a full star off because the book too often denigrates mathematical analysis as boring and as if it were unnecessary. Levitt makes a point that he is an economist, but is not all that good at math. Well, since his papers and this book make constant reference to regression (a statistical method), which is a form of applied math, either he or his co-authors had to know something about mathematics and statistics. More than that, his argument with anecdote and sharp observation, while entertaining, is not in itself conclusive. Proof usually is only granted when all debate is overwhelmed by hard mathematical evidence and analysis. Without the math, the author is simply arguing from authority. That is, I am a big deal authority with a bunch of awards so listen to what I am saying because I know more than you. Well, that may cut it in the popular press, but it is not science and, in a way, undermines the purpose of a book like this. The book provides you ways of challenging the kind of authority the author is using to assert his observations.
  
  That caveat aside, this is an entertaining read that can open up some new ways of thinking about everyday events and provide some techniques to enable the reader to go a bit deeper when faced with news stories proclaiming one absurd thing or another.
  
  Recommended!
  
  
• Light reading. Very, Very Light.
  By AR4OY0VT0RI94 on 2005-05-02
  Having read the reviews and blurb, I was excited about the prospect of an essay compilation-style book of economic observations. I've always liked this format for coverage of the social and physical sciences. This book disappoints. Except for the essay on the reasons behind the fall of crime in the 90's, the material is neither interesting nor particularly convincing. He was once criticized by a board member of a fellowship he was seeking for not having a unifying theme. Having no unifying theme is fine as long as each essay stands on its own, but they don't. Many of the questions he asks have an obvious answer and don't need a thorough numbers treatment to prove it. Furthermore, he just doesn't ask many questions. There is about 4 essays in the whole book and it can be read in about an hour and a half. I'll save you the cost of the book and the hour and a half it takes to read it: Crime fell in the 90's because of legalization of abortion.
  One of the oddest things about the book is the quotes from a New York Times article about Levitt that preceeds each chapter. They are basically quotes about how brilliant he is. Most narcissistic damn thing I've ever seen.
  
  
• Though Provoking and Amusing
  By AA8134GH7ZAM0 on 2005-04-13
  This book brings a fresh and interesting methodology to examining the causes of social phenomena. The portions I have read so far are both thought provoking and amusing.
  
  One of the many examples the author discusses a correlation between the legalization of abortion and a decreasing crime rate 20+ years later.
  [...]
  Conservatives will probably appreciate another of the author's examples, the findings that selling crack on an inner city street corner pays far less than flipping burgers and is far more likely to get you killed than being a soldier in Iraq.
  
  
  
  
• Highly Overrated
  By A275NWEU3PLEZP on 2005-12-12
  I expected much more from this book, including some actual economic theory and discussion of what separates insightful research from background noise. The only thought-provoking piece in this motley collection of entertaining (to some) factoids is the one about abortion being the cause of declining crime. Beyond that, everything the book touches is either mundane or rehashed from somewhere else, primarily the New York Times article by co-author Dubner.
  
  A main premise in the book is that asking the right questions in life is important. It then proceeds to ask almost none of them. For instance, what do sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common? I guess the headline itself is good for a snicker, but then we assume that it will move on to discover some heretofore hidden connection of value to us. Don't get your hopes up. Instead, after pages of unnecessary background on educational competence testing, it is revealed that - no! - teachers have cheated to boost their students' scores. What's more, shhh, occasionally sumo wrestlers have cheated to improve a friend's ranking by letting him win. Again, shocking? Not at all. Both of these revelations have been explored before and cheating doesn't expose any commonality between teachers and sumo wrestlers that doesn't stem from both groups being merely human. People cheat. Teachers and sumo wresters are people. Therefore, they both cheat and that's what they have in common. Some groundbreaking research, eh? The authors could just as easily have chosen any arbitrary group of people, found a human trait, and then shown how both groups exhibit it. For instance, what do umbrella sellers and plumbers have in common? Both take advantage of urgent situations to charge higher prices. What do Balinese dancers and corporate lawyers have in common? Both eat smaller lunches during busy seasons.
  
  This book's subtitle is, "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". A more appropriate one would have been, "An Ordinary Economist Ponders Too Long About the Widely Known Side of a Few Unimportant Subjects". Randomly put together, I might add, and that's another annoying point. The book has almost no organization whatsoever. Rather than taking the time to organize the book into a logical manner, the authors joke about it being a disorganized collection of points and claim that as proof of their rogue status. If that's rogue, I'll take conventional any day.
  
  It's clear that these authors are intelligent men who probably have something worthwhile to write. Unfortunately, they didn't write it in this book. The "Freak" in Freakonomics is supposed to refer to offbeat analysis or an original perspective. Instead it refers to the strange fact that, so often in publishing, what's of lasting value goes out of print and what's fleetingly entertaining climbs the charts.
  
  You would do well to skip this one.
  
  
• An Entertaining Lesson on Breaking Out of the Mold
  By A3NCIN6TNL0MGA on 2005-05-06
  This book succeeds at analyzing sociological developments in a way that is entertaining because Steven Levitt, an economist who strays from convention, has a knack for unpeeling layers and layers of assumptions and myth and showing the real causes behind trends. He shows, to name some examples, how our names affect our career paths; how abortion and the crime rate are related; how a man used his cunning to humiliate the Klu Klux Klan rather than rely on conventional methods; how easy it is to identify the role of public school teachers when they help their students cheat on standardized tests; why drug dealing is only lucrative for the dealers at the top of the pyramid; the myth that real estate agents are looking for our best interests.
  
  The book, co-authored by Stephen J. Dubner, is breezy and anecdotal, which is an effective format for presenting a lot of sociological trends without being dry or losing the scintillating reportage in dense prose.
  
  The lesson of this book is that we should be leery of trusting society's common assumptions or common wisdom. In other words, the book encourages us to keep our mind alert and break out of the mold in the way we see things. By looking at social trends with a fresh eye, the book succeeds at making economic trends a fun, adventurous endeavor.
  
  If I were to criticize the book, it would be that it is too short. It's barely 200 pages and if you take out the blank chapter pages, the charts, the lists, and so on, it's really closer to 150 pages. Because the material is so current and topical, the method of "freakonomics" presented here would make a good format for a monthly magazine. My guess is that there will be many sequels.
  
  
• An Entertaining & Educational Read For Everyone.
  By AZLAP0BM0WNLN on 2006-08-09
  One need not be well-versed in either microeconomics or macroeconomics to enjoy this non-fiction work. It is simply written and informative, with great entertainment value. The authors, Levitt and Dubner, utilize economics to explain a multitude of phenomena. This does not sound strange or out-of-the-ordinary, but what economists use economic analysis (e.g., regression analysis) to find out why many young people, who are drug dealers, still live at home with their moms. Interesting thought! The answer is presented so simply that ANYONE can understand. You will, undeniably, come away with a different view of life around you after reading this book, while assuredly being entertained.
  
  
• Thought-Provoking and Insightful
  By A1PFX4WA0OL0FP on 2005-05-03
  FREAKONOMICS introduces a different perspective on economics for those not trained in what has traditionally been labeled the "dismal science." Levitt and Dubner go out of their way to make theis book anything but dismal - more like entertaining and, occasionally, mind-bending.
  
  This is a classic example, like Carl Sagan and Michio Kaku and Brian Greene in physics and John Allen Paulos in mathematics, to simplify a complex field for the benefit of laymen. Levitt and Dubner expand the definition of economics to mean data analysis, to ask new and different questions and seek out data that can explain certain social phenomena. In doing so, they often find themselves shattering the conventional wisdom by simply looking at real data rather than just forming opinions.
  
  The best example in this book is their contention that the dramatic drop in crime rates in New York and throughout the United States was the result of legalized abortion. Some 18-20 years after Roe v. Wade, the national crime rates began to fall, just at the time those aborted children would have been hitting their late teenage years. Levitt and Dubner argue that these children - unwanted, from broken families and/or underaged and impoverished mothers - would have been more likely than average candidates for criminal activities.
  
  Amazon review readers should take particular note of a negative review below authored by John Lott claiming that Levitt and Dubner have used faulty data. Not only is Mr. Lott a so-called resident scholar at an ultra-right wing "no-think tank," he is also the author of a book whose outrageous thesis is that more guns in America will make us safer. I'd love to see how Levitt and Dubner would shred such a farcical argument.
  
  
• Superficially Entertaining but Flawed and Cheap
  By A1A66811066C07 on 2005-06-29
  At first read, this book seems extremely intelligent. On closer examination, it's full of manipulated facts and disorganized thinking. For instance, to prove that money does not influence who wins elections, Levitt states that winning candidates who cut their spending in half for the following election only lost one percentage point. At first glance, a cogent point. On deeper examination, it doesn't hold. The only reason an incumbent candidate would cut his spending in half would be if he had a huge lead. Otherwise, why not spend more? It's this type of selective research that mars the entire book.
  
  Levitt then states that not that much money is spent on elections, because the total amount equals the amount of money spent on chewing gum in a year. It's a stupid comparison: any person can buy chewing gum any day of the year, only a fraction of one percent of the population runs for office.
  
  And finally, while Levitt does state that there is no unifying theme to his book, that does not excuse jumping around like an ADD kid who just downed a six pack of Coke and entire pound of sugar. Topics are started and never finished, whole chapters should have been cut, and the butt-kissing excerpts at the beginning of every chapter are disgusting.
  
  Avoid this book. You'll be a lot smarter.
  
  
• One star off for over-brevity
  By A2ZZ9C2U9ITFNH on 2005-10-13
  I really enjoyed the book and came away with lots of good conversation pieces and (especially) the basic insight that economics can provide an interesting lens with which to view social/cultural trends. It's a quick read, I do recommend it. CAVEAT The book is, however, only a slight elaboration on the New York Times magazine piece from which it was developed. Not only does it rehash many of the same case studies, it also quotes at length from the article itself. Seems the book was hastily written.
  That said, still very much worth reading. You'll enjoy.
  
  
• An empirical book based on faulty numbers
  By A2E612F97JB6X2 on 2005-05-02
  Published Thursday, April 21, 2005, in Wall Street Journal
  
  Abortion Legalization and the Crime Rate
  
  Not surprisingly, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book "Freakonomics" ignores their academic critics, but Steve Landsburg's review disappointingly does so too (Leisure & Arts, April 13). Take just the book's first claim: Unwanted children are more likely to grow up to be criminals and that abortion can therefore reduce crime, a plausible idea that has been around since the beginning of the abortion debate. Yet, despite Messrs. Levitt and Dubner's claims, legalization doesn't explain 75% of the drop in murder rates during the 1990s, and if anything the reverse is true.
  
  Their data had a serious error. The Planned Parenthood affiliated organization that supplied them with the data incorrectly claimed that when abortion was legalized during the late 1960s and early 1970s, states went from a complete ban to complete legalization, but abortions had been allowed before complete legalization when the life or health of the mother was endangered. The Centers for Disease Control data show that before Roe v. Wade many states that had allowed abortions only when the life or health of the mother was endangered actually had higher abortion rates than states where it was completely "legal."
  
  If Messrs. Levitt and Dubner were correct, crime rates should have first started falling among younger people who were first born after legalization. Only as they aged would you start seeing crime fall among older criminals. But in fact the precise opposite is true. Murder rates during the 1990s first started falling for the oldest criminals and very last for the youngest.
  
  John R. Lott Jr.
  Resident Scholar
  American Enterprise Institute
  Washington
  
  
• A Dangerous Abuse of Statistics
  By A1IG28U8M4D36O on 2006-07-17
  In the beginning of the book, I found the author's use of simple statistics to find new ways of looking at social phenomenon interesting and refreshing. By the end of the book I was outraged when he started "proving" his theories by statistics. Linear regression is powerful tool in understanding simple systems with one or two variables. Applying it to the complex realm of the social sciences to draw the far reaching conclusions Leavitt draws is irresponsible. If you are going to use science, use it appropriately. If you read this book, PLEASE read a good book on the PROPER use of statistics and know that THIS is not it!
  
  
• It has next to nothing to do with Economics, freaky or otherwise!
  By A2VD2D1QHCMF9Q on 2006-03-24
  This is a hodgepodge of thoughts on many different topics including cheating Sumo wrestlers, cheating teachers, drug dealers' salaries, abortion of future criminals, adopted children's disadvantages, lower class people's names for their children, etc. The one common thread throughout the book, though, is not economics. It is presenting a contrarian view of these issues. But maybe not that either . . . giving your child an oddball name will likely condemn your child to the underclass . . not because of the name but because you had the wherewithal to give the child that name to begin with. That really isn't contrarian, it's common sense, if anyone ever bothered to think about it.
  
  Some of the statistical treatment in the book was just too dull, too involved, and too irrelevant to add anything to the book. And in other instances, claims were made, particularly about drug dealers, that were so outrageous, that one wonders if the author hadn't just made them up.
  
  A most annoying feature of the book was the author inserting a quotation from an external source about how innovative, intelligent, great, or sensitive he is in front of every chapter. How crass. How about quotes saying how false, incorrect and difficult the author is . . why did none of them get into the book. Some one some where must have voiced or written those opinions too.
  
  In all, the book was not worth going through to pick up just a handful of information that may have been worthwhile. And it has next to nothing to do with Economics, freaky or otherwise.
  
  
  
• Amazing Book That Will Open Your Mind
  By A3K0J5SPBDP4AZ on 2005-04-16
  In the world of economics, Steve Levitt is a rock star. He's the hot ticket out there. His seminars are packed; students and other professors travel across world to study and work with him. He received tenure at the University of Chicago two years (!) after getting his Ph.D. He has already won the most prestigious prizes economics has to offer at age 37, he received tenure at the University and there is little doubt that one day, 20 or 30 years from now, he will win The Prize. He is just that good.
  
  Why? Like Gary Becker before him, he takes economics out of the realm of the stuffy and dry and boring and it applies to topics no one had ever thought about it applying it to before. He is a genius at making the data sing.
  
  His questions will challenge you, his answers may anger you, but you won't ever see the world the same way again. And his writing is completely accessible to non-economists.
  
  Some examples of the questions he asks: Did crime in the 1990s go down because there were more cops on the streets, we were betting winning the war on drugs, or because of Roe v. Wade?
  
  Just how profitable is it to be in drug gang versus working in McDonalds? And just what are the economic profits from dealing drugs?
  
  Is Sumo wrestling fixed?
  
  Does having your real-estate work on commission mean that he/she will work to make sure you will get the highest sales price out there?
  
  Does campaign spending determine the outcomes of elections?
  
  In all these questions, Levitt relishes in challenging common perceptions and "wisdom". And he gets his answers not through crazy complicated math but by the getting data to reveal its secrets to him in unique ways.
  
  If you like being intellectually challenged, if you want to see the world in a new way, if you want to read the writings of one of the most creative and sharpest minds alive today, then buy this book.
  
  
  
• Insightful and entertaining
  By A2HV81CA7I2TV7 on 2005-04-18
  Steven Levitt has a remarkable gift for using the tools of traditional economics to illuminate completely un-traditional problems. While some of the topics covered in FREAKONOMICS are loosely connected to business (the chapter on crack gangs is especially interesting in this regard), the real delight of this book is the light it sheds on issues that many of us have perhaps thought about but never considered rigorously: What effect does a kid's name have on his or her future? Do teachers graded on how well they prepare kids to take tests cheat? What accounts for the precipitous decline in crime in the U.S. in the 1990s? Levitt's answers are not always perfect or completely provable, but they are always intriguing.
  
  The book is not perfect: the prose is sometimes too glib, and the authors occasionally embark on digressions that aren't really all that compelling. Nor should you expect a coherent through-line to the book: the only real connection between the various subjects is that Levitt worked on them. But in the end this doesn't really take away from the pleasure of reading the book. It's enormously enjoyable, as well as being provocative. If you like counterintuitive thinking like Malcolm Gladwell's THE TIPPING POINT or James Surowiecki's THE WISDOM OF CROWDS, you're pretty much guaranteed to love this.
  
  
• Political Advocacy Masquerading as Economic Analysis
  By AEN83KHJ572FY on 2005-07-12
  Levitt and Dubner have one thing right: Economics is a "soft science" that has little to do with mathematics and more to do with analysis--typically involving cause and effect, postulates and outcomes, etc. The authors then take full advantage of this fact and proceed to play fast and loose with so-called economic analysis, drawing connections and conclusions in cases wherein none should rightfully be drawn.
  
  Take, for instance, the authors' stand that the U.S. crime rate fell during the mid-1990s thanks in large part to the legalization of abortion in 1973 resulting from the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. The authors contend that, because a lot fewer unwanted babies were being born during the mid-1970s, it resulted in fewer adult (twenty-something) criminals during the 1990s--hence leading to the fall in the crime rate. There are myriad problems with this simplistic view of abortion as related to crime, not the least of which include the authors' misguided, erroneous assumptions that crime is largely committed by people in their twenties who started out in life as unwanted babies, and that the legalization of abortion had a majority of its effect in urban areas. (In fact, statistics indicate that a vast majority of abortions in the U.S. took place in the suburbs from 1973 to 2000, while the number of children born out of wedlock in urban areas actually grew on a year-by-year basis during that period.)
  
  At best, this is an extremely simple-minded, misguided--and therefore patently irresponsible--connecting of two unrelated social issues. At worst, this is political advocacy masquerading as economic analysis, the taking of an intended outcome ("abortion is good because it reduces the crime rate") and then working backwards to fill in all the appropriate blanks to arrive at the pre-determined conclusion. The authors are clearly guilty of either intellectual laziness or dishonesty, thereby revealing themselves as rogue manipulators, rather than rogue economists. And, judging by some of the other reviews of this book, other readers have seen right through the authors just as I have.
  
  The authors may possess degrees in economics, but the social ideas that they spew forth in this book have nothing whatsoever to do with honest, serious economic analysis.
  
  
• Best book I've read in several years.
  By ATN1SSKTJD8Z8 on 2005-04-15
  Rarely can a book balance intelligence and truly unique insight with the ability to be amusing and accessible. This one does it seemingly without effort and you will absoultely tear through it, feeling wiser when you finish.
  
  I was an economics major in college and was fortunate enough to have a professor who made micro-economics usable, interesting, and fun the way Levitt does in this book. Levitt analyzes some of our society's really interesting questions like the real reason crime went down in the 90's and the real ability parents have to impact their kids. His approach and his answers are equally fascinating and you don't need any economics background to understand or enjoy what he's saying. Instead of the typical "follow the money" approach, Levitt uses a slightly broader and more micro-economic approach of "follow the incentive." The results will leave you shaking your head in amazement at how obvious they seem now that they've been clearly presented to you.
  
  Levitt has done nothing short of presenting a new and insightful way to look at the world in a manner that is both penetrating and fun. Quite an accomplishment. Very highly recommended.
  
  
• What cause? What effect?
  By A2RAFSK935XFZJ on 2005-05-10
  Let's see. Since 1973, as the abortion rate goes up, the crime rate goes down. Do abortions, then, cause a decline in the crime rate? That is the authors' claim. Since 1973, Americans have consumed more cola. Does cola consumption cause a decline in crime, as I am now arguing? Think about it. As people's bellies are fully of the bubbly, they are more bouncy, not wanting to bop boys on their brains. Both the abortion rate and the cola rate correlate inversely with the crime rate. Which, if either one, has a strong, I mean a knock your stinky socks off strong, negative correlation with reduced crime? You see, many things correlate with reduced crime, but not all are strong enough to be truly important. If one was ever scientifically fortunate enough to show a cause to reduced crime, that person might have a best selling book and become rich and appear on talk shows. Cause and effect. How, then, do we go about studying that? We have two proposed strong causes to the reduced crime rate: the increased abortion rate and the increased consumption of liquid candy. To test the two hypotheses, that either abortion or cola consumption causes a decline in crime, we would have to do an actual experiment, not play silly games with correlational statistics. Let's see. We'll randomly assign 100 women to an experimental condition, where they have an abortion. We will randomly assign another 100 women to a control condition, where they will give birth to their children. Now we can compare the 100 children in the experimental group with the 100 children in the control group to see which group commits more crime. Whoops! I forgot. The 100 children in the experimental group are dead. How can they bop boys on the brain now? Does this mean that we can't even discuss cause and effect here? Whooooo. How, then, can the authors talk about cause and effect for abortion and crime? Are their brains bopped?? No genuine science here.
  
  
• Interesting and Entertaining Read if You Want a Different View of Economic Science
  By A1AHG76Y8S89BJ on 2006-08-17
  
  One thing you will certainly find in this book: A lot of interesting facts and controversial points of view about many things and aspects of the actual world that the most of us consider important. The book is written in a conversational way, and treats everything using a language that is understandable by anyone.
  
  If you don't understand the first thing about economics this book is for you, and if you consider yourself an expert on economic theory this book is still for you. Written by an unorthodox and intelligent economist together with a journalist, this book is absolutely a very interesting and eye opening read. Even when you don't agree with the authors' points of view on an specific topic, you will find yourself thinking about what they said.
  
  
• Soft-serve popularizing without much meat
  By A2LZIWZEGD0XD7 on 2005-04-24
  After reading the New York Times profile of Steven D. Levitt, I looked forward to reading this book, which he co-authored with Stephen J. Dubner. Unfortunately, it was a disappointment.
  
  Nothing wrong with Levitt's ideas - they're interesting and suitably against the grain - but the book is too dumbed-down, too amorphous, and too self-celebratory. And too short - there's very little in this a-lot-of-white-space 200 page book to justify paying $26.95 for a handful of insights with very little depth.
  
  Since this is an economics book, a few statistics to bear out my comments: of the 208 numbered pages of text, 8 pages are quotes from the New York Times magazine article; 12 pages are white paper (literally); and approximately 11 pages are lists of childrens' names which surely didn't require the amount of space required. So, out of an already skinny 208 pages, about 31, or 15%, are filler. (In the interests of fairness, I should mention that there are another +/- 30 pages of notes, index, and mutual thanks and acknowledgements.)
  
  Nor are the remaining 170 pages particularly dense with information or economics. Since the subtitle of the book is "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything", I'd expect (say) an exploration of everything rather than (for example) snippy remarks about ugly coffins, or quotes from the Enron trials. These, and countless other examples, are inane detours in the exploration of the hidden side of everything - particularly when the book delivers only 170 pages in which to deliver all this exploration.
  
  Absent the rigorous proofs which would presumably have accompanied his published academic work, the book seems too much like a pastiche of insights packaged in a lightweight style. The New York Times piece which may have given rise to this piece was a better (and shorter and less expensive) explanation of why Steven D. Levitt sounds like an interesting guy.
  
  For better books with a similar slant, try one of Levitt's teachers, Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winner: for example, "A Treatise on the Family" (not 'popular', but try reading it by skipping the formulas). For similar insights into people's tendency to misunderstand statistics in a popular package, there's John Allen Paulos' "Innumeracy".
  
  
  
• A Most Interesting Way To See The World
  By A3PWF2AQ5XYALW on 2005-04-14
  The authors have written a most interesting book. The author, Steven D. Levitt, is an economist who studies the riddles and complexities of everyday life.
  
  Our standards of morality and religious conviction determine how we would like the world to work. However, it is the economics in the world that determine how the world actually works. "Freakonomics" turns up the hidden side and secret aspects of almost anything in life whose economics determine the reality of the world in which we live.
  
  The authors show that economics is the study of incentives - how people get what they want, or need, especially when in competition with others who want or need the same things. They provide the readers with many interesting and fascinating topics to make their case that economics of all sorts (legal, illegal & even strange) determine the nature of the world in which we live. Complex ideas are presented in a straight-forward and enlightened way to the reader.
  
  
  
  
• Absolutely Horrible
  By A1HX5FHIQX0XHE on 2005-06-17
  This book is super-disappointing. It is a 5-7 page NYT Magazine article blown up into a 200-page, lots of filler, large print book.
  
  Yes, we get it -- Levitt is unorthodox and smart. Unfortunately, if you take out all the sections of back-patting and condescending pseudo-analysis, you're left with little more than interesting theory about abortion and crime rates.
  
  With that in mind, the subtitle "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" is laughable. I'm baffled at how this book is a bestseller. I'm embarrassed my boss gave it to me.
  
  
• Challenging orthodoxy? Yes. Accurate? No.
  By A377XQC7JJYVF5 on 2006-01-21
  I read Freakonomics expecting to see something well reasoned and well analyzed. I concluded that the book is worse than poorly done, it is downright dangerous.
  
  Economics is one social science that regularly influences public policy. It's techniques are sufficiently arcane that most people just assume that the conclusions are right. After getting my Ph.D. in psychology with a lot of methodology courses beyond those required, I worked for several years in a research institute dominated by economists. I concluded that econometrics should be restricted to economics.
  
  It is said that to the man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The problem with Levitt's work is that he uses the hammer of econometrics to study the fragile landscape of social relationships. He looks at variables that can be used by his standard set of econometric tools, rather than thinking more deeply about whether those variables are relliable or valild or better analyzed with different techniques. Most dangerously, he uses time series data without considering the historic conditions that affect the changes in the numbers over time. I checked his bibliography. He does not venture into the literature of other social sciences.
  
  I am a college professor teaching in a department of criminal justice, so I know best the literature related to his work on crime. Long story short, he gets it wrong. The data he uses are strongly affected by the policies of the criminal justice agencies collecting and compiling the data. The death penalty work must take into account the complete moratorium imposed by the Supreme Court in the 1970's. (That is where Erlich got his analysis completely wrong, as has been convincingly demonstrated by actual criminologists.)
  
  If Levitt is going to explore the world outside of economics, he should take the time to inform himself about that world by listening to the people who have been living in that world for decades. He wrote a book that is INTENDED to change the way people look at the world. If they follow his conclusions, the policies they advocate, based on errors, will most probably make the world worse, not better.
  
  
• Over-rated, simplistic
  By A129JVGP0TP88U on 2006-08-11
  Between the generous margins, double spacing, gratuitous data tables and lists, quotes by various media sources attesting to the author's intellectual greatness, and the fact that they draw out their points and explanations so much, one wonders whether they are striving for clarity or just filling up space. There are some interesting issues discussed, but in such an unsophisticated manner why even bother with a book? I can get the same level of quality and depth of gee-whiz information from Headline News, and much quicker at that. And the, as the authors put it, "penultimate" chapter on how parents are unable to make any difference in their children's future is just downright confusing. Not because the point is difficult to grasp, just that it's so poorly explained. The point is that parents' actions do affect how their children turn out but there is really nothing that they can do through conscious effort to improve their parenting skills. Now this is nowhere stated explicitly in the book. And in fact the chapter seems to say that on the one hand parents do have an effect on their children based on such and such data, but on the other hand they do have NO effect. What?
  
  Further, the book is sensational. Not that that should come as a surprise considering its title. Moreover, the authors have supposedly brought us all this profound and "unexpected" wisdom from a few studies and anecdotes and present it as if the questions it addresses are settled. But even the author admit that "... an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention (148)." Is this ironic or sort of a knowing wink at readers?
  
  This book is an extremely easy read and I would seriously hope that anyone with a half-way decent college education would find very little value in this other than mindless entertainment.
  
  

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