Finished reading on 23 May 2005.

According to Steven Levitt, economics isn’t about money. Economics is really a set of tools for studying the real world. All you need to study any phenomenon using these economic tools is the right data (and the right questions). If there were enough available about terrorists, he thinks, he would be able to find ways to catch them.

His career seems to have centred on finding clever ways to investigate questions people thought were impossible to answer before – by showing that the data really were available to answer the question, except nobody thought to look there. In this book, he studies the reasons for the drop in crime rate in the 1990s, whether sumo wrestlers and schoolteachers cheat, whether the name you give a kid affects how their lives turn out, etc – questions you wouldn’t consider “economics”. So he’s renamed his field “freakonomics” instead, hence the title of this book.

It’s a very quick read, quicker than I expected – I rather thought it would be longer than 206 pages for the price! I wish it was. It’s very interesting, and I would recommend it, though I would wait till the paperback if I wanted to buy it. Read it at your library in the meantime. It’s also made me regret (slightly) not having taken any economics courses at college – although, keeping in mind that they probably wouldn’t have been anywhere as interesting as this, maybe it was the right decision. I also wish this book had included a bit more info about the statistical tools he uses to study these things, but that would have disqualified it from being “popular”, I guess. Maybe the extensive endnotes have something about it.