|
Loading... SuperFreakonomics (2009)by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
  
No current Talk conversations about this book. Just didn't dig this one like I did the first. (  ) CSDaley | Mar 28, 2018 |  Behavioural economics an interesting subject area, and although the topics this book covers are interesting, and the results thought provoking the book itself is light-weight and has a lot of padding. Not the follow-up to Freakonomics I was looking for. ( ) malcrf | Oct 29, 2017 | Very well written, always engaging and thought provoking. As much as this book purports to be neutral, and based only on data, it has a political agenda in places. For example, the chapter on climate change uses a quote from Boris Johnson (Mayor of London and part-time comedian) to show that environmental sciencists are a bunch of religious nuts who don't need to be taken seriously. (  ) davidmasters | Oct 13, 2017 | Another foray into the world of microeconomics - how using statistical analysis and asking the right questions can find sometimes unusual and counter-intuitive solutions to all sorts of issues and problems. Like the original [b:Freakonomics|1202|Freakonomics A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything|Steven D. Levitt|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157833345s/1202.jpg|5397], this second book is a good read with some interesting insights, but for me seemed a lighter read. I'm not sure if this was a deliberate decision on the part of the authors or simply because they do less background explanation than in the first book, assuming that has been gotten out of the way, but it does leave the whole feeling a little too anecdotal and throwaway. Reading any non-fiction book (especially a book involving 'science' of any sort) the reader has to accept that the authors have done the hard work to back up their findings, and this is especially true of a social science like economics (which, like sociology, relies on statistics and asking the right questions, so cannot help but be influenced by the attitude of the economist)and in this case it was perhaps the lack of data that left the book lacking some authority. The case studies were still worthwhile - the fascinating figures that between 1910 and 1920 1 in 50 American women in the twenties worked as prostitutes, because social mores meaning that sex outside wedlock was difficult to get in any other way and this meant that an income at least four times that of working in a shop or factory was very tempting for many, and the chapter on our society's ludicrous acceptance of complex solutions over potential cheap simple fixes - but I would have like to seen more on the theory that we had in the first book; how it is the interrogation of the statistics, the questions that you ask, that get you to the right solutions. (  ) Pezski | Jun 8, 2017 | Picks up right where the first left off - documenting real-world instances of unintended consequences. (  ) bensdad00 | Jan 10, 2017 |
 Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner's new book "Super Freakonomics" is a follow-up to their super smash 2005 bestseller, "Freakonomics." Thank goodness they are back -- with wisdom, wit and, most of all, powerful economic insight.  If ever two writers were likely to suffer from "difficult second book" syndrome, it's Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the smash-hit Freakonomics, which made them the rock stars of the economics world.  The economist and the journalist again attack the concept of the rational man, via studies involving monkeys, banking records, and doctors. Yet there’s an artfulness missing this time around in their circuitous paths toward obvious conclusions like “technology isn’t always better” and “men and women are different.” The difficulty with the book is that while the focus may be fairly fuzzy to begin with, it gets a lot fuzzier as it goes on. There’s a long passage about how people behave differently when they’re being scrutinised – thus making a nonsense of most behavioural experiments – and an even longer one about global warming. Is a (non-series) sequel to
References to this work on external resources.
|
 Google Books — Loading...Popular coversRatingAverage: (3.7)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
7
Wikipedia in English (7)
1