chock full of fascinating facts & information. Love it. ( )

funny book

Meh. After all the buzz around Levitt, I am so not impressed. ( )

For someone like me who hated economics throughout my late high school life, and early uni life, this book taught me something different - that economics is everywhere around me AND fun! It's funny, intuitive, sobering and quite an eye-opener. Don't let economics as its subject deter you - it is better than your bearded lecturer ^_^ ( )

An interesting read that provides fodder for thinking about all the other ways in which cause and effect can work in life, for instance, how does my misbehavior or sin affect those around me and for how long? ( )

I don't have a lot to say about this book. The discussions of unusual economic questions, such as why drug dealers live with their moms or how abortion is related to the crime rate, were thought-provoking but I was hard-pressed to take them all at face value. Perhaps that's the idea, but without a more detailed explanation of the data used, it's hard to do anything but take the authors at their word. Which is fine for such a shallow treatment of the subject, but I found this book wanting by the end. All the same, it's a decent book for introducing the layperson to the surprisingly not-boring world of economics. I guess this just tells me I need to read further on the subject - and such motivation is certainly not a bad thing. ( )

Although this book turned out not to be of particular relevance to the essay I'm working on, I very much enjoyed reading it--it's engagingly written, thought-provoking and is persuasive in trying to explain complex phenomena in a way that is clear and easy to understand but based on solid analysis of data. ( )

This book provides a good case of using data analysis to shake common "wisdom". To put it in other words, like it or not, this is yet another example of hard evidence based analysis which may be considered a panacea against 'expert opinions' (especially about parenting!), empty-headed political speeches, etc. Even though the authors are highly criticized for their next book (and I don't think I'll spend time to read Superfreakonomics) I'll sincerely recommend this book to lots of my friends.

PS: No, of course I won't let my child go and play at a house in which the parents have a handgun or a rifle no matter what authors tell about the bigger dangers of swimming pools. :) ( )

Over-hyped, but not bad. It is just microeconomics - there is nothing 'Rogue' about it.

Uses economic methods to study aspects of various social problems. Moderately interesting. ( )

Fresh viewpoint of what economics covers - ok, everything - from cheating sumo wrestlers to what parenting is all about - it asks strange and often unasked questions. And you go "aha!" or "really?" or "no waaaayyyy...." or ... [insert]. What it will do is provoke you to think!Easy to read and popularized, it reminds me a bit of how Stephen Hawking was able to make science much more accessible (although it pales in comparison to Cosmos, its a great attempt). ( )

I had been meaning to read this for ages, but I have to say, I was a bit disappointed (to be honest, anything with cover blurbs like "Genius... has you gasping in amazement" is pretty much asking to disappoint, but that's another issue).

The book consists of largely disconnected studies with surprising outcomes; for example, the legalization of abortion is given as the cause for a decline in the US crime rate: the people who were most likely to become criminals (unwanted, from low-income families with teenage mothers, etc.) just weren't born in the first place. I really enjoyed reading the individual stories and found that the pages went by very quickly, but at the end, I was left with the feeling that the whole was actually less than the sum of its parts. This may have been due to the fact that the treatment of the last issue was by far the weakest, or by the fact that the main book ended very abruptly and was followed by several related articles. Or it may have been due to the fact that the overarching theme (if it can be called that) that things aren't always what they appear and common knowledge can be deceiving isn't nearly as shocking and earth-shattering as it was apparently supposed to be.

At a more nit-picky level, I was also a bit irritated by the feeling that the reader was sometimes deliberately being misled in order to make for a better narrative. We're repeatedly told that the key to making interesting discoveries like the ones in Freakonomics is to ask interesting questions--but the silly questions that appear in the book were obviously made up after the fact. Somehow I'm just not convinced that Levitt started with the question of what do teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common and worked from there to discover that both of them had incentives to cheat and did in fact do so. Especially in a book that purports to be about how the techniques of economics can be applied to real-life situations with surprising results, it seems a bit strange too that an actively misleading approach was taken.

Despite all my criticisms, though, this was definitely an enjoyable book overall, and I'm glad that I read it. It was an easy and interesting read, just not as important and amazing as it wanted to be. ( )

This book looks at the hidden side of the economy and things that you never thought would have related to the economy but yet the author is able to show correlations. ( )

Mr. Levitt makes economics relevant and just plain fun. ( )

I don't have a mind for economics at all. That's why I think this book was perfect for me. I still don't know much about economics, haha, but this book definitely taught me a lot about thought process, different ways of observing patterns, correlation, it was truly a captivating read. And for a non-fiction book (in my case), that's impressive!

It was pretty controversial in some ways, relating abortion to crime rates, etc, but still a thoroughly good and educating read. ( )

Feast for a curious mind

Fascinating. It made me think incentive is something we really need to be aware of!

I had avoided this book for a while because I figured it would be way over my head with economics jargon. Boy, was I wrong - I finished this book feeling like I needed to sign up for some econ classes and learn to do what Leavitt does! ( )

What a hoot - a gifted economist who thinks like a sociologist goes data mining! Identifies the link between the relaxation of abortion controls with the drop in crime rates 19 years later - when the unwanted boys would have been hitting the streets. Plus the sumo fixers, the real estate agent gougers and much much more. Good fun. Read July 2009. ( )

As I’m always weary of dubious, statistic-laden arguments to shore up various precautionary commercial-pitches, political agendas, or graduate thesis projects, this was a perfect book for me. Levitt – as a “rouge economist” – also utilizes sundry statistics and studies to expose aspects that tend to counter certain agendized truisms and the foundations of common-knowledge issues such as those espoused by irrefutable sources like the Today Show or some old guy at a bar. As the author eloquently states, “emotion is the enemy of rational argument,” so he takes seemingly random selections from the world of random things and posits arguments about how such things as personal incentive and marketing begin to dominate the way we operate and understand the world. Through a selective assemblage of studies, he debunks or sheds light on certain misconceptions such as my long-held belief that dealing crack simply has to be more economically viable than the continuation of an architecture career (turns out – in Chicago anyway – most of the dealers make less than minimum wage, whereas I’ve always exceeded minimum wage by at least a couple bucks).

I suppose my only issue with this book is the seemingly self-serving inclusion of fragments of Dubner’s interview with Levitt as chapter heads. Certainly they have some relevance to the chapters itself, but seem like bothersome hagiographical inclusions that imply he’s the only economist looking at the world from such a unique vantage point. It reminded me of that horrible Pollack documentary for Frank Gehry (when I say “for,” I mean it in the literal sense that this had to have been a birthday gift…maybe a White Elephant gift). In this piece (or POS, if you will), Gehry is portrayed as the only creative light within a world of pencil-pusher, technocrat, Organization-Men architects. Much like one could easily counter that there are tons of better, more creative, and certainly more relevant architects than Gehry (though few using million-dollar-plus aerospace software programs), here I will only point out that the vast majority of Levitt’s examples were proposed, studied, and concluded by other, presumably not-rogue, economists. He simply assembled them into a narrative (assuming he wrote all of this and not his NYT colleague).

That being said, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read but, alas, he points out that the typical prostitute does make more money than the typical architect. As he also eloquently observes, “an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa.” Of course, he wrongly assumes that we can afford such luxuries. ( )

If my econ courses in college had been this awesome I probably wouldn't have majored in English. This book is so interesting, and presents information in such an informative, yet entertaining, manner, it's hard to put down. Literally everyone you know (assuming they can read) will benefit from reading this book. It's stellar. ( )

There's nothing deep here. The early chapters are fun and entertaining; good reading on the train. But eventually the humor dissolves into lists of baby names differentiated by the race and social standing of the parents. The author purports that the book will deliver us from the grasp of conventional wisdom; but in the final analysis it lacks any serious unconventional wisdom. ( )

This was an okay read with a couple of interesting anecdotes and facts, but it failed, for me at least, to make any truly interesting assertions or draw any compelling conclusions. ( )

A very interesting look at some of the seemingly indirect relationships between random events and closely correlated outcomes. Very engaging, and an excellent read! I recommend reading this along with "The Tipping Point" and "Bl!nk" for a good view of opposing paradigms on socio-economic patters and their relative outcomes. ( )