Freakonomics

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask but Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life; from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing-and whose conclusions turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They usually begin with a mountain of data and a simple question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner 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. In Freakonomics, they explore the hidden side of everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Klu Klux Klan. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and-if the right questions are asked-is even more intriguing than we think"--Publishers description.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• An Explanatory Note (p. xxiii)
• In which the origins of this book are clarified.
• Introduction: The Hidden Side of Everything (p. 1)
• In which the book's central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.
• Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong
• How "experts"-from crimnologists to real-estate agents to political scientists-bend the facts
• Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life
• What is "freakonomics," anyway?
• Chapter 1 What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? (p. 15)
• In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side-cheating.
• Who cheats? Just about everyone
• How cheaters, cheat, and how to catch them
• Stories from an Israeli day-care center
• The sudden disappearance of seven millon American childern
• Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago
• Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win
• Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt?
• What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think
• Chapter 2 How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like A Group of Real-Estate Agents? (p. 51)
• In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially when its power is abused.
• Spilling the Ku Klux Klan's secrets
• Why experts of every kind are in the perfect position to exploit you
• The antidote to information abuse: the Internet
• Why a new car is suddenly sorth so much less the moment it leaves the lot
• Breaking the real-estate agent code: what "well maintained" really means
• Is Trent Lott more racist than the average Weakest Link contestant?
• What do online daters lie about?
• Chapter 3 Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms? (p. 85)
• In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-interest, and convenience.
• Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic halitosis
• How to ask a good question
• Sudhir Venkatesh's long, strange trip into the crack den
• Why prostitutes earn more than architects
• What a drug dealer, a high-school quarterback, and an editorial assistant have in common
• How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the invention of nylon stocking
• Was crack the worst thing to bit black Americans since Jim Crow?
• Chapter 4 Where Have all the Criminals Gone? (p. 115)
• In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions.
• What Nicolae Ceauşescu learned-the hard way-about abortion
• Why the 1960s was a great time to be a criminal
• Think the roaring 1990s economy put a crimp on crime? think again
• Why capital punishment doesn't deter criminals
• Do police actually lower crime rates?
• Prisons, prisons everywhere
• Seeing through the New York City police "miracle"
• What is a gun, really?
• Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later crack dealers were like Pets.com
• The superpredator versus the senior citizen
• Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed every-thing.
• Chapter 5 What Makes A Perfect Parent? (p. 147)
• In which we ask, from a variety of angels, a pressing question: do parents really matter? (p. 147)
• The conversion of parenting from an art to a science
• Why parenting experts like to scare parents to death
• Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool?
• The economics of fear
• Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture quagmire
• Why a good school isn't as good as you might think
• The black-white test gap and "acting white"
• Eight things that make a child do better in school and eight that don't
• Chapter 6 Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet? (p. 181)
• In which we weigh the importance of a parent's first official act-naming the baby.
• A boy named Winner and his brother, Loser
• The blackest names and the whitest names
• The segregation of culture: why Seinfeld never made the top fifty among black viewers
• If you have a really bad banem should you just change it?
• High-end names and low-end names (and how one becomes the other)
• Britney Spears: a symptom, not a cause
• Is Aviva the next Madison?
• What your parents were telling the world when they gave you your name.
• Epilogue: Two Paths to Harvard (p. 209)
• In which the dependability of data meets the randomness of life.
• Bonus Matter (p. 213)
• "The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You..." (p. 215)
• Selected "Freakonomics" Columns From The New York Times Magazine (p. 233)
• A Q&A with the Authors (p. 261)
• Notes (p. 269)
• Acknowledgments (p. 295)
• Index (p. 297)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Freakonomics Rev Ed (and Other Riddles of Modern Life) Chapter One What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? Imagine for a moment that you are the manager of a day-care center. You have a clearly stated policy that children are supposed to be picked up by 4 P.M. But very often parents are late. The result: at day's end, you have some anxious children and at least one teacher who must wait around for the parents to arrive. What to do? A pair of economists who heard of this dilemma--it turned out to be a rather common one--offered a solution: fine the tardy parents. Why, after all, should the day-care center take care of these kids for free? The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went . . . up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired. 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. Economists love incentives. They love to dream them up and enact them, study them and tinker with them. The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme. His solution may not always be pretty--it may involve coercion or exorbitant penalties or the violation of civil liberties--but the original problem, rest assured, will be fixed. An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation. We all learn to respond to incentives, negative and positive, from the outset of life. If you toddle over to the hot stove and touch it, you burn a finger. But if you bring home straight A's from school, you get a new bike. If you are spotted picking your nose in class, you get ridiculed. But if you make the basketball team, you move up the social ladder. If you break curfew, you get grounded. But if you ace your SATs, you get to go to a good college. If you flunk out of law school, you have to go to work at your father's insurance company. But if you perform so well that a rival company comes calling, you become a vice president and no longer have to work for your father. If you become so excited about your new vice president job that you drive home at eighty mph, you get pulled over by the police and fined $100. But if you hit your sales projections and collect a year-end bonus, you not only aren't worried about the $100 ticket but can also afford to buy that Viking range you've always wanted--and on which your toddler can now burn her own finger. An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. But most incentives don't come about organically. Someone--an economist or a politician or a parent--has to invent them. Your three-year-old eats all her vegetables for a week? She wins a trip to the toy store. A big steelmaker belches too much smoke into the air? The company is fined for each cubic foot of pollutants over the legal limit. Too many Americans aren't paying their share of income tax? It was the economist Milton Friedman who helped come up with a solution to this one: automatic tax withholding from employees' paychecks. There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack "sin tax" is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive. Some of the most compelling incentives yet invented have been put in place to deter crime. Considering this fact, it might be worthwhile to take a familiar question--why is there so much crime in modern society?--and stand it on its head: why isn't there a lot more crime? After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to maim, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail--thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties--is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime, people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong). For certain types of misbehavior, social incentives are terribly powerful. In an echo of Hester Prynne's scarlet letter, many American cities now fight prostitution with a "shaming" offensive, posting pictures of convicted johns (and prostitutes) on websites or on local-access television. Which is a more horrifying deterrent: a $500 fine for soliciting a prostitute or the thought of your friends and family ogling you on www.HookersAndJohns.com? So through a complicated, haphazard, and constantly readjusted web of economic, social, and moral incentives, modern society does its best to militate against crime. Some people would argue that we don't do a very good job. But . . . Freakonomics Rev Ed (and Other Riddles of Modern Life) . Copyright © by Steven Levitt. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

He may have won the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, but Levitt focuses on offbeat issues, e.g., why do so many rich drug dealers live with their moms? (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Though the idea of listening to an economics text may bring to mind nightmarish visions of incomprehensible facts, figures and graphs, this audiobook is refreshingly accessible and engrossing. Journalist Dubner reads with just the right mix of enthusiasm and awe, revealing juicy morsels of wisdom on everything from what sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common (a propensity to cheat) to whether parents can really push their kids to greatness by buying them Baby Einstein toys and enlisting them in numerous before- and after-school activities (not really). The only section that doesn't translate well to the format is the final one on naming conventions. The lists of "White Girl Names" and "Black Girl Names," and "Low-End" names and "High-End" names can be mind-numbing, though the text that breaks up these lists will intrigue. Overall, however, these unusual investigations by Levitt, the "rogue" of the subtitle, make for meaty-and entertaining-listening. Simultaneous release with the Morrow hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 14). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

In this fascinating best-seller, the authors apply an economic way of thinking to tackle issues traditionally classified outside economics, from abortion and the crime rate to the relationship between first names and successful lives. Levitt (economics, Univ. of Chicago, recognized in 2003 by the American Economics Association as the best US economist under 40) and Dubner (writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker) write colloquially, often using personal anecdotes, and keep the economic analysis at a level accessible to all readers. Most examples are relevant, vivid, and well researched, though a few with surprisingly little data verification or strong connection to the core of the topic seem included just to catch the reader's eye. This weakness aside, Freakonomics will help most readers think differently about the world around them. Its style and unusual application of economic thinking bring to mind another must-have book for every library, Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist (CH, Mar'94, 31-3884). ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Public and academic library collections, lower-division undergraduate and up. M. Clerici-Arias Stanford University

Booklist Review

Award-winning economist Levitt and journalist Dubner join forces to strip a layer or two from the surface of modern life and see what is happening underneath. The authors' worldview as they explore the hidden side of many issues is based on a few fundamentals--among them, incentives are the cornerstone of modern life, and conventional wisdom is often wrong. They look at many different scenarios in a treasure-hunt approach, employing the best economic analytical tools but also following any freakish curiosities that they encounter--hence the study of Freakonomics. They evaluate intriguing questions such as What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? How is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents? Where Have All the Criminals Gone? and What Makes a Perfect Parent? We are counseled to think sensibly about how people behave in the real world and to ask a lot of questions. This excellent, readable book will enlighten many library patrons. --Mary Whaley Copyright 2005 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Why do drug dealers live at home? Levitt (Economics/Univ. of Chicago) and Dubner (Confessions of a Hero Worshiper, 2003, etc.), who profiled Levitt for the New York Times, team up to demolish conventional wisdom. To call Levitt a "rogue economist" may be a tad hyperbolic. Certainly this epitome of antistyle ("his appearance is High Nerd: a plaid button-down shirt, nondescript khakis and a braided belt, brown sensible shoes") views the workaday world with different eyes; the young economist teases out meaning from juxtapositions that simply would not occur to other researchers. Consider this, for instance: in the mid-1990s, just when the Clinton administration projected it was about to skyrocket, crime in the U.S. fell markedly. And why? Because, Levitt hazarded a few years ago, of the emergent effects of the Roe v. Wade decision: legalized abortion prevented the births of millions of poor people who, beset by social adversity, were "much more likely than average to become criminals." The suggestion, Dubner writes, "managed to offend just about everyone," conservative and liberal alike, but it had high explanatory value. Levitt hasn't shied away from controversy in other realms, either, preferring to let the numbers speak for themselves: a young man named Jake will earn more job interviews than one with the same credentials named DeShawn; the TV game show The Weakest Link, like society as a whole, discriminates against the elderly and Hispanics; it is human nature to cheat, and the higher up in the organization a person rises, the more likely it is that he or she will cheat. Oh, yes, and street-level drug dealers live at home with their moms because they have to; most earn well below minimum wage but accept the bad pay and dangerous conditions to get a shot at the big time, playing in what in effect is a tournament. "A crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise," Levitt and Dubner write, "you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage." An eye-opening, and most interesting, approach to the world. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.