2005;
268 pages. Full Title : Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side
of Everything. New Authors? : Yes
and Yes. Genre : Economics; Sociology;
Statistics; Data-Mining, Non-Fiction. Laurels:
2006 Book Sense “Book of the Year” in the “Adult Nonfiction” category. Overall Rating : 8½*/10.
What the heck is Freakonomics?
Well,
I’ve always figured it was a clever name for something to do with economics, and
I don’t read that genre of books.
Reading someone’s predictions about whether the stock market is about to
go up or down, or whether the national economy is on the verge of tanking just isn’t for
me. But Freakonomics
is not
about economics, despite one of its co-authors being an economist.
I then
decided the book is probably about statistics.
I’ve taken courses and attended seminars about statistical analysis. I’ve learned how to calculate a standard
deviation, make and use control charts, and the meaning of the phrase “six
sigma”. It’s all rather enlightening,
but also quite boring. But Freakonomics is not about statistics; there’s
nary a calculation in it.
What Freakonomics is all about something
called “data-mining”, which is the practice of examining large databases of information
and extracting logical (and hopefully valid) conclusions therefrom. Or, as one of the authors puts it…
"How
to look at the world like an economist."
What’s To Like...
Freakonomics
is divided into ten sections, a lot of them with witty, provocative titles:
An explanatory note (pg. xxiii)
Introduction: The hidden side of
everything (pg. 1)
Ch. 1. What do schoolteachers & sumo wrestlers
have in common? (pg. 15)
Ch. 2. How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of
real-estate agents? (pg. 51)
Ch. 3. Why do drug dealers still live with their
moms? (pg. 85)
Ch. 4. Where have all the criminals gone? (pg. 115)
Ch. 5. What makes a perfect parent? (pg. 147)
Ch. 6. Perfect parenting Part 2: Would a Roshanda by any other name
smell as sweet? (pg. 181)
Epilogue: Two paths to Harvard (pg. 209)
Bonus Matter (pg. 213)
The
chapters cover the authors’ most popular and controversial subjects, and the
data they used to arrive at their conclusions.
Ch. 1. Schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers both
cheat, although only the teachers got fired.
Ch. 2. Klansmen and realtors both take advantage
of us by implying that they have superior, “secret” knowledge. And so might
your doctor.
Ch. 3. Drug gangs and McDonald’s both have
remarkably similar, top-heavy organizational charts.
Ch. 4. Legalizing abortion is the biggest cause of
a steep drop in the crime rate.
Ch. 5. Factors that do, and do not, influence how
a child does in school.
Ch. 6. What the name you give your child says
about you.
A
whole bunch of fascinating anecdotes and other bits of trivia are sprinkled
throughout the data-mining. There’s the
couple who named two of their kids “Winner” and “Loser”. Yeah, guess which one did better in
school. There’s also the story of the
“invention” of halitosis, which I had read about years ago, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s (when he was Lew Alcindor)
account of growing up “white” in a black neighborhood, which was sobering.
You’ll learn about the inherent discrimination in the voting on “The
Weakest Link” (and
no, it’s not against blacks and women), what crack cocaine has in
common with nylon stockings, just how inflated those profiles on dating
websites are, and the economics that justify a typical prostitute earning more
than a typical architect. There's also some riveting insight
into the daily life in a tough Chicago street gang.
I
found the Explanatory
Note, Introduction, Epilogue, and Bonus Matter sections all to be
worth my reading time, and the Index section in the back came in quite handy. The pros and cons of giving gift
cards as Christmas presents was enlightening, and if you find you need a daily
Freakonomics fix, their website is www.freakonomics.com.
Excerpts...
The sixty-six
highest-ranked wrestlers in Japan, comprising the makuuchi and juryo
divisions, make up the sumo elite. A
wrestler near the top of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated
like royalty. Any wrestler in the top
forty earns at least $170,000 a year.
The seventieth-ranked wrestler in Japan, meanwhile, earns only $15,000 a
year. Life isn’t very sweet outside the
elite. Low-ranked wrestlers must tend to
their superiors, preparing their meals, cleaning their quarters, and even
soaping up their hardest-to-reach body parts.
So ranking is everything. (pg. 38)
The conventional
wisdom on parenting seems to shift by the hour.
Sometimes it is a case of one expert differing from another. At other times the most vocal experts
suddenly agree en masse that the old wisdom was wrong and that the new wisdom
is, for a little while at least, irrefutably right. Breast feeding, for example, is the only way
to guarantee a healthy and intellectually advanced child – unless bottle
feeding is the answer. A baby should
always be put to sleep on her back – until it is decreed that she should only
be put to sleep on her stomach. Eating
liver is either a) toxic or b) imperative for brain development. Spare the rod and spoil the child; spank the
child and go to jail. (pg.
147)
When there aren’t enough
hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads. (pg. 142 )
I
don’t really have anything to nitpick about in Freakonomics. The f-word gets used a couple of times, but
only when the authors are citing a direct quote of someone they’re
interviewing, and you gotta respect that.
I do have a caveat, however.
Data-mining is equal parts art and science. So the authors are to be applauded for giving
the rationale and (some of the) data they used to formulate their
conclusions, but it’s also okay if the reader finds some of their logic to be
non-persuasive. What Steven Levitt and
Stephen Dubner perceive as “cause and effect” can be seen by others as simply
“commonality”.
This is particularly relevant when reading the section on the authors’
most controversial hypothesis: that legalizing abortions is the most important cause for a steep decline in the crime rate twenty years later. This startling assertion is noteworthy for
pissing off both the right-wing anti-abortionists and the left-wing political
correctness advocates, the latter resenting blacks being singled out as the
culprits for the rise in crime.
8½ Stars.
One last bit of trivia, courtesy of
Wikipedia: Freakonomics is currently banned from
Texas prisons, presumably due to Chapter 4.
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