Freakonomics

~ Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

This book helped me look at life through a different lens and has inspired me to write all about the hidden economics in my life.

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3 Interesting Things About Freakonomics

1. Freakonomics teaches you that things aren’t always as they seem and that you need to dig deep to try and find the truth.
2. It perfectly represents the power of incentives and shows how they can change and manipulate people’s actions.
3. Teaches you to challenge the status quo and ask questions because not everything is as it seems.

3 Favorite Quotes From Freakonomics

1. If you ask enough questions, strange as they seem at the time, you may eventually learn something worthwhile.
2. What this book is about is stripping a layer or two from the surface of modern life and seeing what is happening underneath.
3. Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.

Notes

Freakonomics is currently my favorite read. It is very eye-opening and follows a few fundamental ideas which change the way you see the world:

• Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life
  • Understanding what the incentives are is how you can answer any question
• Conventional wisdom is often wrong
  • Don’t be afraid to question the status quo because more often than not it is wrong. We find the truth by questioning conventional wisdom.
• Dramatic events often have distant, even subtle causes
  • The smallest, even seemingly irrelevant events can cause large changes decades later.
• Experts use their information advantage to serve their own agenda
  • Free speech and the internet are helping decrease the information advantage that experts use to push their ideas.
• Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so
  • Understanding what the data you are collecting is and what it means is important but being able to explain what the data means is even more important.

One of my favorite chapters from the book is Chapter 4: Where Have All The Criminals Gone? It talks about the crime spike from the 1960s to the 1990s and how after the 90s crime significantly decreased.

They concluded that the reason was because of the Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade in the 70s. So the legalization of abortions allowed women to not have to raise children in a bad situation and therefore these kids wouldn’t turn toward a life of crime. It took roughly 20 years to see this effect and it took even longer to uncover that that was the reason for the decline in crime.

Freakonomics is one of the reasons I started a blog. I learned how to uncover the hidden side of things in my life and decided to keep a log and write down my ideas and thoughts.