Book Review - Freakonomics
I decided I needed to see what all the hullabaloo with this book was all about. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner has been chatted up in lots of articles and several of my friends read it and loved it.
The authors used economics to explain/find the correlation between various events and their possible causes. Among the questions they asked were:
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
Why do drug dealers still live with their Moms?
How much do parents really matter?
What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?
How is the Klu Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents?
What's the affect of having an ethnic first name?
It was very thought provoking and fascinating.
Probably the most controversial finding was that legalized abortion was the real cause of the drop in crime rates. Not more cops, more guns nor capital punishment. The gist of it is that when lower income women couldn't get abortions they had children who were more likely to become criminals. Legalized abortion meant fewer unwanted, low income children in the population. There's more to it than that but I'm only going to go with the quick summary here.
Another interesting study was the comparison of nature versus nurture on a child's life. Turns out that nature is significantly more important. So, all of those uber parents may be just wasting their time.
Good stuff - I give it a thumbs up.
The authors used economics to explain/find the correlation between various events and their possible causes. Among the questions they asked were:
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
Why do drug dealers still live with their Moms?
How much do parents really matter?
What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?
How is the Klu Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents?
What's the affect of having an ethnic first name?
It was very thought provoking and fascinating.
Probably the most controversial finding was that legalized abortion was the real cause of the drop in crime rates. Not more cops, more guns nor capital punishment. The gist of it is that when lower income women couldn't get abortions they had children who were more likely to become criminals. Legalized abortion meant fewer unwanted, low income children in the population. There's more to it than that but I'm only going to go with the quick summary here.
Another interesting study was the comparison of nature versus nurture on a child's life. Turns out that nature is significantly more important. So, all of those uber parents may be just wasting their time.
Good stuff - I give it a thumbs up.
