Freakonomics: You Have to Read it to Believe it
By JJ Ossola
IV Leader Associate Editor
I had the opportunity to be the first student to read “Freakonomics, A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner this summer because it had arrived at Jacob’s Library a few days before I started looking for it. Usually I choose a book based solely on its title, how much time I think I have to read it, and it has to promise some revelation, either on the back or the inside cover. I have taken a few economics classes here at IV and have decided that it is probably not the field for me but this book promised to “explore the hidden side of everything,” which is way too tempting to pass up.
While the book did not live up to exposing grand universal secrets, it did look into a variety of subjects that I would never have correlated on my own. It’s a wonder that someone who graduated from MIT and Harvard would see a relationship between street crime and abortion, let alone how effective a parent actually is in a child’s development. Levitt and Dubner also explore incentives for cheating, specifically in Sumo wrestling and the Chicago education system. They delve into the baby name game (does a person’s name influence their eventual successes or failures?) and into the relative safety of the home (which is safer, a home with a pool or a handgun?) The only chapter that you would expect an economist to take interest in also has a twist, “Drug Dealers Living with their Moms” where they explore the crack cocaine phenomena of the 80’s. They also take a look at the nature of experts and specialists in a chapter oddly named, “Ku Klux Klan and Real Estate Agents.”
With all of these crazy correlations and odd chapter names you would think that this were a book on conspiracy theories or a work of fiction. Instead, Freakonomics is a surprisingly easy read with no prerequisite knowledge necessary. It is just over 200 pages so you will probably be able to read it in a day or two. I found myself rereading interesting chapters but that was because I couldn’t believe where their findings were taking me. The only downside was that it reads like a collection of news-clippings and they gloss over the research that they used to reach their conclusions. It’s a double-sided sword that allows everyone that is not an economics major to understand their work but also leaves you wondering how credible their findings are.
In conclusion, I highly recommend this
book to everyone with a curious mind about modern America and as a bonus, it is
available at Jacob’s Library.