very simple

Last Saturday, I read a book in one day. It helped that I had a 3-hour haircut and a 4-hour bus ride to the parents’ house in the country – it’s amazing what you can do with a solid block of 7 hours with no television or computer access!

Anyway, the book was Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and it was pretty awesome. Levitt is an economist, and Dubner is a writer for the NY Times, and they met a few years ago when Dubner was assigned to do a profile on Levitt. Levitt was getting profiled because he was the somewhat controversial guy who posited that lowering crime rates during the 90s in major urban areas were actually, at least in part, a result of the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade.

Although the authors somewhat jokingly claim that there is no unifying theme in the book, throughout the book they take those nuggets that we refer to as "conventional wisdom", and attempt to show that our assumptions about why things are the way they are is often wrong. We assume that A causes B simply because they move in the same direction, but we pay no attention to C, which is affecting both A and B. They’re looking for that C.

The book is engaging and enlightening, which I really never thought I’d say about a book about economics. read it.

Tags: books