Freakanomics Synopsis

The book entitled Freakonomics by Steven D. Levit, and Stephen J. Dubner gives answers to usually unrelated or thought provoking questions by applying simple and standard economic principles and analysis. This creates answers that are unexpected and that don’t appear on the surface. In this book, the authors use their economic ways of thinking to attack questions that do not necessarily have anything to do with economics. They use statistical analysis to go beyond the practical and common sense answers, and look for deeper correlations in data, based on patterns that have been overlooked. These authors believe economics essentially is a science of measurement, which can be used to examine extraordinary amounts of data and determine the affects of a factor upon the data presented. In this book these authors use these tools to examine problems themselves claim are more interesting than that of the average problems faced by economist.
In facing these problems the author describes certain basic economic principles and other ways of thinking that they use to view and manage the data in solving the questions they have proposed. The first economic principle the author lays out is that incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. The author suggests that studying a person’s responsiveness to incentives is a main component in explaining things from violent crime to online dating. The authors second way of thinking is that conventional wisdom is often wrong. Their prime examples for this outlook is the faulty reasoning that crime did not soar in the 1990’s, money does not necessarily win a person an election, and drinking certain amounts of water has little effect on ones health. This book creates a circumstance in which the reader is forced to use these tools themselves to arrive at their own conclusions, and examine each individual case in its own way.
The last two basic principles that the authors provide is an insight into the means in which experts and clients... [continues]

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