I expected a lot more. Did not live up to the hype. Too much oversimplification, and too much black/white speculation.

Wikisummaries has a good summary of Freakonomics.

The only lesson I really learned from my AP Statistics class in high school was this: You can make numbers say anything you want. It’s all about how you look at them.

Steven Levitt has a very unique way of looking at numbers. Lest you’re concerned about reading a book written by an economist, rest assured that his collaborator, journalist Stephen Dubner, makes sure reading Freakonomics isn’t a painful experience.

There are six chapters in their book, and each answers a question using a myriad of true-life examples. What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Cheating, turns out, and American tax payers, Isralei parents with kids in daycare, and corporate patrons of a bagel business aren’t any different.

The book addresses other intriguing questions. How is the KKK like a group of real estate agents; why do drug dealers still live with their moms; what makes a perfect parent, and, perhaps most controversially, where have all the criminals gone? (It’s not a pleasant theory.)

Along the way, Levitt and Dubner weave all kinds of anecdotes into their pages to help you understand, from the rule of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to how a sociologist found similarities between McDonalds and a crack gang.

Some of the conclusions are a bit outlandish if you ask me. Sure, the numbers back him up, but do you really want to throw caution to the wind and parent any way you want to just because parenting isn’t shown to have much of a difference on your children’s test scores? The book is an attempt to make sense of data from the past, not to create solutions for the future. If you keep this in mind, you should be able to get through the book – its most controversial chapter included – with a cool head.

This book makes one think. The intelligence of the authors is apparent, which is why their hackneyed attention on African-Americans troubles me.

The fact remains that the poor, uneducated, and criminal people of this country are mostly white, since whites constitute the vast majority of U.S. citizens. If they had chosen to do so, Levitt and Dubner could have easily and legitimately limited their discussion to “high end whites and low end whites”. There was absolutely no need to place so much emphasis on the black segment, which is such a relatively small percentage of the population. Let’s quit focusing on percentages, anyway, and start dealing with actual numbers.

Out of the 300 million U.S. citizens, over 215 million are white. That is more than 6 times the black population! www.census.gov How can one logically hold these two groups side by side for comparison? Don’t get me wrong, I think it is also irresponsible and irrational when black economists do the same in reverse.

Whether it was intended to or not, this engaging book has serious potential to leave its white readers with very damaging, negative, and skewed views concerning the black people with whom they actually interact throughout their lifetimes. Many of whom are among the middle to upper classes, and among the educated segment of the black population. Let’s face it: whites usually don’t frequent black neighborhoods, and blacks (other than servants) rarely have the opportunity to get up close and personal with whites unless they hold a similar socioeconomic status.

Levitt and Dubner mention more than once that their book has no unifying theme. Well, I was clearly able to identify it: “White=good, smart, rich. Black=bad, ignorant, poor.” And their reference to Ted Kaczynski at the end came across as a sloppy attempt to conceal their theme.

I appreciate the simple concept of taking daunting ‘Economics’ and making it more palatable for those without a business heavy background.

The authors make this very fascinating, entertaining, and most of all very understandable.

I love a book that will challenge its reader to ascertain reasoning on their own and not always accept what is spoon fed to them by the media. This is one of those books.

Yup, can’t say enough good things about it. Numbers never lie…ehem, except when you want them to. Its a fresh look at the real reason behind crime, behind scholastic testing, behind your own name. If you are analytical in any way, you will love this book.

I just finished Freakonomics and there’s a lot to like. This book’s been dogged with moral and economic controversy, particularly in regards to what’s seen as Leavitt’s main thesis (the link between Roe v. Wade and the crime rate decline in the 90s), but there’s so much more to the book than that. I think that if you keep an open mind and take the authors’ claims with a grain of salt, you’ll enjoy the book. After all, they tell you to take what the experts say with a grain of salt: since they put out the book, they’re ‘experts’ too.

Cured my fears of driving and flying (at least a little).

This is a very entertaining book, casting doubt on conventional wisdom and suggesting other ways of looking at common assumptions. Prepare to be challenged.

One of the more interesting examples was an analysis of the Chicago crack gangs that uncovered an organizational structure indistinguishable from McDonalds’. The teenage crack dealer earning $3.30/hr believes this is his best ticket to the lucrative “board of directors.” However, because the field is competitive, the pay is not. Many dealers have to live at home.

They abstract this organizational structure to that of a tournament. In concept, the dealer could be a shortstop or editorial assistant (or pilot or intern or ..) In a tournament, you must start at the bottom, enduring long hours and hard work at substandard wages (because competition is fierce), to have a shot at the top. Advancement is done by proving yourself to be exceptional at what you do. If/when you realize you’ll not make it to the upper levels, you’ll likely abandon the game. (For example, when turf wars started, the street dealers’ risk versus reward shifted… severely.)