Freakonomics

[sawyl]

Coming late to the party, it's hard to see why Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics caused quite such a storm when it was first published. But I'll admit, that despite not really getting it, I generally found it more enjoyable than I'd expected.

While the theories being expounded seemed rather lightweight — for all the promises in the foreword about this not being economics 101, it really was — the examples were, by and large, well chosen and largely interesting. Of these, I particularly enjoyed the examination of cheating in high school tests and on the sumo wrestling circuit. I was struck by the statistic that street drug dealers were at a higher risk of death than inmates on death row. But I was rather less taken with an entire chapter on the popularity and significance of names, most of which seemed to be padded out with table after table of data.

But for all that the book might claim that it doesn't feature the sorts of stories told in econ 101, that's only true as far as the examples go: the book is really just a lightweight description of a handful of standard economic tools with fancy illustrations tacked on. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the book really isn't half as radical as it pretends to be.