I was going to wait until I finished the book to write about it, but knowing me it’d collect dust in my “Draft” folder and never be published (or written for that matter). Anyway, yesterday Ryan surprised me with a book! (Yay presents!) The title: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side of Everything. And I can’t seem to put it down. Steven D. Levitt (boasting an undergrad from Harvard and a PhD from a MIT) takes the otherwise dismal science and applies it to everyday occurrence hoping to explain… well, everything. And he’s sincere about it.
What I think is most enjoyable about this book is that it’s written in plain English. I’ve read the reviews and between the praise are complaints that the book is too “dumbed down” to reach a broader audience. I think it’s because I’ve been spending the last seven weeks digging through hundreds of pages of economic verbiage to find “the point”, I’ve gazed at econometric functions trying to decipher the meaning of their p-values and translate all these deltas, betas, and alphas into concepts like “economic welfare” and “technological growth.” I’ve gotten sick of the as what Orwell indentifies as verbal false limbs and pretentious diction. It’s to the point and it’s easy reading. Would go so far as to say it’s even fun.
And now to continue reading, am soon approaching the chapter, “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?”