Freakonomics
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner · 2005
Freakonomics (2005) is a book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner on Hidden incentives & everyday economics. An economist and a journalist ask absurd-sounding questions and let the data answer, revealing that incentives, hidden information, and distant causes secretly govern cheating, crime, parenting, and daily life.
Once you see that incentives, not intentions, run the world, you can never un-see the hidden machinery behind schoolteachers, sumo wrestlers, crack dealers, and crime itself.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Freakonomics pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life, and they come in three flavors, economic, social, and moral. Design any incentive scheme and you simultaneously create the incentive to game it, which is why teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat in mathematically detectable ways.
- The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Levitt treats received opinion, from 'crack money is easy' to 'a good name holds a child back', as a hypothesis to be tested against data, not a fact to be trusted.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Hidden Side of Everything
- What Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common
- How the Klan Is Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents
- Why Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms
- Where Have All the Criminals Gone?
- What Makes a Perfect Parent?
- A Roshanda by Any Other Name
- The Bagel Man and the Real Point
Finish Freakonomics tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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