A next generation economist and an unusual maverick with rogue approach towards contemplating reasons behind the scenes giving in-depth analysis of what our instincts and insights might have ignored rather than giving importance to conventional wisdom, we are talking about Steven D. Levitt the coauthor of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. As the name says the author makes a freakish approach to economics explaining wide and unusual range of topics. Most books put forth a single theme, crisply expressed in a sentence or two, and then tell the entire story of that theme: the history of salt; the fragility of democracy; and the use and misuse of punctuation. This book boasts no such unifying theme but opted instead for a sort of treasure-hunt approach. Yes, this approach employs the best analytical tools that economics can offer, but it also allows us to follow whatever freakish curiosities may occur to us. Levitt is regarded as among the most creative thinkers in contemporary economics, gifted at drawing connections between seemingly unrelated forces.
True to their word, the chapters in Freakonomics have no unifying theme, although it is obvious that Levitt with Indiana Jones kind of digging deep through the data to uncover lies and cheating and producing astounding conclusions over wide range of topics. The various topics put forth by the authors in book are as follows :
1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?
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 million American children…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.
2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?
In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially when its power is abused.
Going undercover in the Ku Klux Klan…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 worth 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?
3. Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?
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 stockings…Was crack the worst thing to hit black Americans since Jim Crow?
4. Where Have All the Criminals Gone?
In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions.
What Nicole Ceausescu learned—the hard way—about abortion…Why the 1960s were 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 super predator versus the senior citizen…Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed everything.
5. What Makes a Perfect Parent?
In which we ask, from a variety of angles, a pressing question: do parents really matter?
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.
6. Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?
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 name, 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.
Some of these answers might seem obvious and some might surprise you. When Levitt has access to detailed data over a course of time, he can explain in it a way that makes it seems obvious. Mr. Levitt repeatedly reminds us that economics is about what is true, not what ought to be true. They also take on the idea of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom usually comes from self-interest or convenience. If someone can propose a theory to explain certain "truths," too often this theory is just the most palatable or serves to fill an underlying need. Once conventional wisdom on any topic is accepted, it becomes difficult to prove otherwise. Undaunted, Levitt isn't afraid to take on some sacred cows. His most controversial topic concerns the sharp reduction in the crime rate in the 1990s. After expert upon expert warned of a crime rate that could exponentially increase and consume our society, it suddenly began dropping dramatically in all areas of the country. Many reasons were suggested for this decrease, and Levitt gives some of these ideas credit for some of the drop in crime. Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Or due to the new arms act? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt.
Levitt's theory for the decrease is unique. He doesn't pretend to settle the matter, but in just a few pages he constructs exactly the right framework for thinking about it and then leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions. This assertion may astound you, offend you, and tempt you to toss the book aside. Levitt, though, makes an interesting and credible case for his theory.
With Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner have given us a new way to look at our world.
We can correlate the authors approach in writing to our real life. our conventional wisdom tells us to follow a particular path to reach the collage. What if the conventional path is under some repair? Then we can no longer rely on our conventional wisdom. Here we have to go for a realistic approach of life where all the pros and cons of a particular action have been calculated and the actions have to be taken accordingly.
Though there is no unifying theme to Freakonomics, there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world. All it requires is a novel way of looking, of discerning, of measuring. This isn’t necessarily a difficult task, nor does it require super sophisticated thinking. The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising.
Freakonomics proposes four basic notions: that incentive governs life, that conventional wisdom is often wrong, that "dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes" and that expert sometimes use their "informational advantage" to pursue private agendas.
And finally to conclude about this book it’s an eye-opener for people with conventional wisdom approach towards things that happen in and around us.
