Book review Freakonomics - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Book review Freakonomics - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog In the 80s crime rose sharply in the US. Instances of murder, robberies, muggings all went up in the big cities. Experts were crying doom, predicting that it could only get worse. Then it got better. Not just a little, but a lot. The question is Why? Giuliani took credit for cleaning up New York City. The police took credit for having more people and better methods. Politicians took credit for passing tougher laws. But the real credit, according to Steven D. Levitt lies with Roe vs. Wade, the supreme court decision from 1973 that made abortion legal all over the US. Because abortion was now legal, many young, poor, single, uneducated mothers chose that option rather than having children children with the exact background most likely to lead to a criminal future. This is just one of the claims put forward in the book Freakonomics, A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The books motto might be Its all in the numbers if you can get them. There is no one common theme to the book, in which Levitt uses economic and statistical tools to look at areas such as The Ku Klux Klan, cheating in Sumo wrestling and why your real estate agent isnt really interested in getting you the highest possible price on the house youre selling. Rather the books central message is how far you can go by looking at the numbers and that you must keep an open mind to some of the startling and counter-intuitive realizations that might bring you. Reading this book is an unbroken string of Aha-experiences, where common sense thinking is shown to be just plain wrong. Levitt is by all acounts a brilliant young economist, who hasnt yet been tied into one field. A more senior economist is quoted in the book as saying Hes twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe hes going to be one of those people whos so talented he doesnt need one. Hell take a question and hell just answer it, and itll be fine. And anyone with the creativity and open-mindedness to look into the correlation between crime and abortion as explained above (not to mention the guts to take the controversy it has generated) certatinly seems to fit that bill. This has got to be the most entertaining and eye-opening book on economics Ive ever read. Can you apply anything from the book directly to your endeavours? Probably not. But it gave me a sense that the world is more complex than common sense would dictate. And that by looking at what is actually going on, rather that just running on the usual assumption, you can actually get a better, more accurate understanding og the world one that is simple in its complexity. As illustrated in this quote. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related