Book Reviews: Book Review of Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner -- Blue Rectangle

FAQ



del.icio.us	Reddit	Digg It!	Email to friend
SELL US YOUR BOOKS To sell books or sell textbooks to us, enter your ISBN numbers here, one book per line. Please include all 10 or 13 digits. Enter as many books as you like: EXAMPLE: 1864502800 1741040914 978-0195174625 ENTER ISBNs THEN CLICK HERE

Freakonomics

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Buy this book
from Amazon

More from this reviewer

See other book reviews:
Non-Fiction
Politics & Economics
All Book Reviews
New Book Reviews

"Well, I read Freakonomics partly 'cause of the title, because it's annoying, and I figured I'd give them a chance to show me that even though they came up with a cutesy title, the book really does something worthwhile. But intellectually, economics is the one subject — I'm sure I'm not alone in this — that I've studied over the course of my lifetime that left me kind of bored. The book doesn't really focus on money all the time. It's certainly not like an account's treatment of economics; it's much more like a cultural theorist's treatment of economics. It's a quirky economist guy and this reporter who helps him write this book and gets out to people that economics is really how we can understand the way humans do things. A range of examples come up in this book. The ones that come up — that come to mind in the body of the book are things like why the KKK was so successful and why it finally petered out, how realtors make decisions about how they prioritize sales versus profits for the people that they're helping sell a home, how teachers make decisions about whether to be honest or whether to cheat, a whole bunch of topics that just treat sort of dilemmas that we're familiar with and that maybe we've thought about in our own way but we'd never really come up with a satisfactory explanation for them. What I like about the book is that it's a very, very accessibly written book, even though it does treat sophisticated topics. You can tell that behind the writing is a very bright, very quantitative an analytical economist. I would certainly recommend it to people like me who aren't interested in economics terribly and who don't have a very strong background in it." For me, this is a four-star book. I enjoyed it a lot; I feel I learned a lot about how to loosen up my somewhat tight-ass vision of what economic theory, economic treatment really has to be.