Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
2005, HarperCollins, 242p

This book was a best seller when it came out nearly twenty years ago, and I was curious. As they mention in the introduction, there's "no unifying theme," it's just a bunch of different topics that Levitt and Dubner thought would interest the world. I'll allow others to attempt to describe the book.

From the authors' afterword: "Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular. To claim that legalized abortion resulted in a massive drop in crime will inevitably lead to explosive moral reactions. But the fact of the matter is that Freakonomics-style thinking simply doesn't traffic in morality. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world." They're referring to what they did in the book as "economics," I suppose because Levitt is an economist. But largely it would be more accurate to refer to huge chunks of the book as "statistics" as much of it has little to do with money.

Another description, this time from Wikipedia:

• Chapter 1: Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers, as well as a typical Washington, D.C. area bagel business and its customers
• Chapter 2: Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents
• Chapter 3: The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low earnings and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers
• Chapter 4: The role legalized abortion has played in reducing crime, contrasted with the policies and downfall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu
• Chapter 5: The negligible effects of good parenting on education
• Chapter 6: The socioeconomic patterns of naming children

Did I like the book? It was interesting. But I think everyone should read How to Lie with Statistics before they read this book. Not that I think the authors of this book were trying to lie, and apparently Sumo Japan thought they were telling the truth (look up "Freakonomics" on Wikipedia and read the fallout), but looking for truth in statistics is a slippery path. I believed them, but I'm not entirely sure I should and will keep an open mind going forward.