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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? How
did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent
crime? |
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| These
may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask.
But Steven D Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded
scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life — from
cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing — and
whose conclusions turn conventional wisdom on its head. |
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Freakonomics
is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen
J Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They usually
begin with a mountain of data and a simple question. Some
of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have
an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study
contained in this book: freakonomics.
Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and
Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives
— how people get what they want, or need, especially
when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics,
they explore the hidden side of... well, everything. The inner
workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents.
The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating
schoolteacher. The secrets of the Klu Klux Klan. |
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| Imagine
for a moment that you are the manager of a day-care center.
You have a clearly stated policy that children are supposed
to be picked up by 4 pm. But very often parents are late.
The result: at day's end, you have some anxious children and
at least one teacher who must wait around for the parents
to arrive. What to do? A pair of economists who heard of this
dilemma — it turned out to be a rather common one —
offered a solution: fine the tardy parents. Why, after all,
should the day-care center take care of these kids for free?
The economists decided to test their solution by conducting
a study of ten day-care centers. The study lasted twenty weeks,
but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first
four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number
of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late
pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the
fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving
more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each
incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill,
which was roughly $380. After the fine was enacted, the number
of late pickups promptly went... up. Before long there were
twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original
average. The incentive had plainly backfired. |
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What
unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world,
despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is
not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and — if the right
questions are asked — is even more intriguing than we
think. All it takes is a new way of looking.
Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality
represents how we would like the world to work, then economics
represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers
of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories
to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can
provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way
we view the modern world. |
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 Freakonomics
reads like a detective novel … it has you chuckling
one minute and gasping in amazement the next.
— Wall Street Journal |
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Freakonomics:
A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Forget
your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about
fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on
more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your
baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow
economists as one of the best young minds in his field led
to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and
that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded
look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all
sorts of behavior. There isn't really a grand theory of everything
here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts
have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even
when it's wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything
from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to
baby-naming patterns. Underlying all these research subjects
is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we
find the right perspective.
 Available
to buy from amazon.com
and amazon.co.uk |
|
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Freakonomics
Audio CD
Economics
is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences.
The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives
as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature,
or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that
economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with
finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In
Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues
that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to
be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even
more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing
connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent
crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further,
to the Roe v Wade decision that preempted the existence of
some people who would be born to poverty and hardship.
Available
to buy from amazon.com |
 |
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The
Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference:
Malcolm Gladwell
The
Tipping Point is a book about change. In particular, it's
a book that presents a new way of understanding why change
so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does.
For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York
City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown
author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in
greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the
country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so
powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at
teaching kids how to read? The answer to all those questions
is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and
products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious
disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an
examination of the social epidemics that surround us.
Available
to buy from amazon.com
and amazon.co.uk |
|
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Blink:
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: Malcolm Gladwell
Blink
is a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking
that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone
for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking
of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your
mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions.
Blink
is a book about those two seconds, because those instant
conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really
important and, occasionally, really good. You could also
say that it's a book about intuition. What goes on in that
first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking —
its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates
a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate,
conscious decision-making that we usually associate with
"thinking." What is going on inside our heads
when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments
good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we
do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?
Available
to buy from amazon.com
and amazon.co.uk |
 |
|
Thousands
of books have been written offering the 'secrets' to personal
fulfilment and happiness. But which ones can really change
your life? Tom Butler-Bowdon has sorted through the bewildering
array of choices to bring 50 of the most important life-changing
ideas together in one book.
50
Self-Help Classics
|
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At best
you have 18 years to teach your kids how to manage money skillfully.
If you fail to do that, you're setting your kids up for a
lifetime of miserable debt. But if you teach them to be effective
money managers now you will send them into the world with
the gifts of confidence and self-determination.
Debt-Proof
Your Kids |
 |
|
Millions
of middle-class families can no longer afford to live on two
incomes. A generation ago, middle-class families lived on
the income of a single breadwinner. In recent years it has
taken two working spouses to live the modern middle-class
dream.
Discover
how to break out of the debt spiral |
 |
|
The Total
Money Makeover isn't theory. It's a proven plan for financial
fitness. The success stories speak for themselves. It works
every single time. It works because it is simple. It works
because it gets to the heart of the money problems: you.
The
Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness |
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|
Most
people think the average teenager isn’t capable of much
beyond hanging with their friends and wasting time. But Zach
Hunter isn’t your average teenager. He's only fifteen,
but he's working to end slavery in the world — and he's
making changes that affect millions of people.
Be
the Change |
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