Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything - Couverture souple

In the summer of 2003, the New York Times Magazine sent Stephen J. Dubner, an author and journalist, to write a profile of Steven D. Levitt, a heralded young economist at the University of Chicago. Levitt was not remotely interested in the things that interest most economists. Instead, he studied the riddles of everyday life from cheating to crime to child-rearing and his conclusions turned the conventional wisdom on its head. For instance, he argued that one of the main causes of the crime drop of the 1990s was the legalization of abortion twenty years earlier. (Unwanted children have a greater likelihood of becoming criminals; with so many unwanted children being aborted in the 1970s, the pool of potential criminals had significantly shrunk by the 1990s.) The Times article yielded an unprecedented response, a deluge of interest from thousands of curious, inspired, and occasionally distraught readers. Levitt and Dubner have collaborated on a book that gives full play to Levitt s most compelling ideas. Through forceful storytelling and pungent insight. FREAKONOMICS will reminds us all that economics is, at root, the study of incentives how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. Among the questions it answers: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? What makes a perfect parent? And, of course: What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? (Answer: they both cheat.)

Provocative...eye-popping (New York Times Book Review: Inside the List)

Levitt employs statistical tools that are simple yet elegant. He cuts to the heart of a question and picks topics that are fascinating. All social scientists should ask themselves if the problems they are working on are as interesting or important as those in this superb work. (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

If Indiana Jones were an economist, he d be Steven Levitt... Mr. Levitt is famous not as a master of dry technical arcana but as a maverick treasure hunter who relies for success on his wit, pluck and disregard for conventional wisdom. Mr. Levitt s typical quarry is hidden not in some exotic locale but in a pile of data. His genius is to take a seemingly meaningless set of numbers, ferret out the telltale pattern and recognize what it means... Freakonomics reads like a detective novel... Economists, ever wary of devaluing their currency, tend to be stinting in their praise. I therefore tried hard to find something in this book that I could complain about. But I give up. Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae.... The cherry on top of the sundae is Mr. Levitt s co-author, Stephen Dubner, a journalist who clearly understands what he is writing about and explains it in prose that has you chuckling one minute and gasping in amazement the next. Mr. Dubner is a treasure of the rarest sort; we are fortunate that Mr. Levitt managed to find him. I think I detect a pattern. (Wall Street Journal)