Edgefactor

It's freaktacular!

It’s 1995 and all across America violent crime is way up. During the last ten years, Americans have been witness to a seemingly never-ending spike towards unprecedented, nay catastrophic levels of crime and violence. Criminologist James Alan Fox predicts teen homicides will increase anywhere from 15% to 100% in the next decade. The future is bleak, the end is nigh, and the sky is quite possibly about to rain down on everyone’s head.

So what happened next caught everyone by surprise. Violent crime began to plunge so rapidly and so universally that by the year 2000, the murder rate in this country was at it’s lowest level in 35 years. So what happened? Why was everyone so wrong with their predictions? How can we show, statistically, that professional sumo wrestling in Japan is rigged? Economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner set out to answer these questions and many more in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

In the introduction to Freakonomics, the authors explain that theirs is a book without a unifying theme, at least, not as one traditionally expects a book to have. Levitt and Dubner take their readers on a journey through society and look for rational explanations to what seem to be fairly mundane issues. The whole idea of their explorations is that, given a big enough pile of data, a person can find the hidden correlations between events that, from the surface, seem to be completely unrelated. Levitt loves to attack “conventional wisdom” which he sees as an enemy of true understanding.

For instance, most people (and the media) ascribe an inordinate amount of significance to how much money a political candidate spends on an election. Most people would say that if candidate A spends twice as much as candidate B, candidate A has a much better chance of winning the election than candidate B; at the very least candidate A must have bought himself a decent number of votes, right? Well, in actuality, doubling your opponents spending is likely to gain you no more than 1 percent of the vote. Similarly, cutting your spending in half is unlikely to lose you more than 1 percent of the vote. The most enjoyable parts of this book are when Levitt strips away idioms and “conventional wisdom” and exposes the true, underlying factors that shape events around us.

Freakonomics really opened my eyes to what economists can actually do. Apparently they aren’t all quite as dull as Alan Greenspan.

By the way, if you want to know why violent crime plumetted in the late nineties, you should buy the book. But I will give you a hint: it all started in 1973.

Book Info
Title: Freakonomics
Author: Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner
Pages: 256
Buy this book at Powell’s