Executive Reading: Freakonomics

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By Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Wm Morrow, ISBN: 006073132X, May, 2005

Reviewed by Margaret Teichert and Oleg Kaganovich

In 2003, New York Times Magazine journalist Stephen Dubner wrote a pro? le of an award-win-ning but thoroughly unconventional economist. The article, which focused on Steven Levitt and his “freaky” the-ories, was fascinating and provided an ample diving board for an entire book. “Freakonomics,” co-written by Dubner and Levitt, is a close look at the amazing (if un-sexy sounding) ?eld of behavioral economics.
     Levitt proposes that economics isn’t boring; the science just asks boring questions — an oversight the authors ably correct.
     In essence, behavioral economics combines the logic of economics with a keen understanding of human behavior, and then draws connections among seemingly unrelated forces.
     Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes, that incentives gov-ern life, conventional wisdom is usually wrong and “informational advantage” can be used to pursue unstated agendas are central ideas in “Freakonomics.”
     These unremarkable-sounding premis-es blossom in the face of questions such as whether a gun or a swimming pool is more dangerous, what schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common, why drug dealers still live with their moms, or how a child’s name affects their success later in life. And perhaps most contro-versially, what kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on the declining violent crime rate in the early ’90s?
     The authors carefully draw the distinction between morality (the way we want things to be) and economics (the way things are) before delving into some of the meatier topics. And they do an exceptional job of presenting Levitt’s theories in engaging, ac-cessible terms.
Continued...

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