Freakonomics Rev Ed

**A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything**

By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

**Estimated Reading Time:** 90 minutes

**What You'll Learn**

Why crime really dropped in the 1990s. How real estate agents secretly work against you. What crack gangs and McDonald's have in common. Why parenting books sell a lie. How to see through the stories experts tell when they're hiding something. And why the right question, paired with real data, beats conventional wisdom every time.

**Who This Book Is For**

Anyone who has ever suspected that the official story isn't the whole story. Anyone who wants to understand why people really do what they do. Anyone willing to set aside moral outrage long enough to look at what the numbers actually say.

There is a gap between how we think the world works and how it actually works. Most of us spend our lives on the wrong side of that gap. We believe what sounds right. We trust experts. We accept explanations that feel satisfying. We confuse correlation with causation. We mistake what we hope is true for what is true. And we do all of this without ever realizing we're doing it. The result is a world governed by what John Kenneth Galbraith called conventional wisdom: beliefs that are widely accepted not because they are accurate, but because they are simple, comfortable, and convenient. Conventional wisdom tells us that money wins elections, that good parenting techniques produce good kids, that drug dealers are rich, and that the police saved New York from crime. Conventional wisdom is often wrong. Steven Levitt is an economist who refuses to accept conventional wisdom at face value. But he is not the kind of economist who spends his days forecasting interest rates or analyzing trade policy. Levitt is a detective who happens to use economic tools instead of a magnifying glass. His method is straightforward: find an interesting question, gather real data, and follow the numbers wherever they lead, even when the destination is uncomfortable. This approach has taken him into the financial records of crack gangs, the answer sheets of Chicago schoolchildren, the rituals of the Ku Klux Klan, and the birth certificates of millions of California babies. In each case, he found something surprising. In each case, the data told a story that nobody was telling. The central insight of Levitt's work is that economics is not really about money. It is about incentives. How people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. Incentives come in three basic flavors: economic (fines, bonuses, prices), social (shame, praise, belonging), and moral (guilt, pride, doing the right thing). Every human decision,…