Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded] 怪诞经济学：无赖经济学家的明察秋毫（亚马逊网站2005年美国十大畅销书之一）

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their morns? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?
　　These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and childrearing--and whose conclusions turn conventional wisdom on its head.
　　Frealfonornics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They usually begin with a mountain of data and a simple question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.
　　Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives--how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonom/cs, they explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Klu Klux Klan.
　　What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and--if the right questions are asked--is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.
　　Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.

Amazon.com Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. For example, Levitt traces the drop in violent crime rates to a drop in violent criminals and, digging further, to the Roe v. Wade decision that preempted the existence of some people who would be born to poverty and hardship. Elsewhere, by analyzing data gathered from inner-city Chicago drug-dealing gangs, Levitt outlines a corporate structure much like McDonald's, where the top bosses make great money while scores of underlings make something below minimum wage. And in a section that may alarm or relieve worried parents, Levitt argues that parenting methods don't really matter much and that a backyard swimming pool is much more dangerous than a gun. These enlightening chapters are separated by effusive passages from Dubner's 2003 profile of Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, which led to the book being written. In a book filled with bold logic, such back-patting veers Freakonomics, however briefly, away from what Levitt actually has to say. Although maybe there's a good economic reason for that too, and we're just not getting it yet. --John Moe --This text refers to the Roughcut edition. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isn't really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it's wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt's controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit. Malcolm Gladwell blurbs that Levitt "has the most interesting mind in America," an invitation Gladwell's own substantial fan base will find hard to resist. 50-city radio campaign. (May 1) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Roughcut edition. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Freakonomics sounds like a text on the business structure of rap music. The subtitle is similarly puzzling. What's a "rogue" economist -- one who has stopped taking calls from his CIA handler? Who wears disguises when he sneaks into the library to crunch numbers? Turns out Freakonomics is about the field of behavioral economics, which attempts to combine the pure-logic tools of classical economics with understanding the emotional impulses of human behavior. And the book's principal figure, Steven D. Levitt, is anything but an outsider. Levitt is a chaired professor of economics at the University of Chicago, meaning he sits at the very pinnacle of his profession's establishment. Nothing "rogue" about that.

Levitt is regarded as among the most creative thinkers in contemporary economics, gifted at drawing connections among seemingly unrelated forces. He believes, for example, that there is a relationship between legalization of abortion and the decline in crime -- more on that in a moment. Levitt is the latest winner of the American Economics Association's John Bates Clark Medal, granted biennially to the top economist under the age of 40. Clark medalists often become influential figures: Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton and a closely read columnist for the New York Times, was a Clark winner, for instance. In typically dry economics-speak, the Clark judges declared, "Steven Levitt is the most innovative empirical researcher in his cohort." American Economics Association, just come out and say it: The guy is interesting!

Freakonomics presents Levitt's findings in accessible, non-academic terms. It is an engaging and always interesting work, rich in insights, full of surprises. Readers, though, may find themselves in a perpetual state of confusion regarding just what it is they are reading. The book is by Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, a writer whose previous books include Turbulent Souls and Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper. You're never sure who is speaking. Sometimes Levitt or his work is spoken of in the third person, as if Dubner were writing of them in a detached way; sometimes the text sounds like Levitt addressing the reader; sometimes the book spends pages discussing work done by people other than Levitt, yet the impression given is that it's all Levitt's thinking. Often the reader must flip to the source notes to try to figure out what's going on.

The mishmash quality of Freakonomics seems to trace to its origin. In 2003, Dubner wrote a New York Times Magazine article on Levitt's quirky theories. The piece was a great read, and Levitt and Dubner began to collaborate on articles. According to Freakonomics, Levitt then agreed to write a book, but only if Dubner actually did the writing. (Writing is work, as any economist will tell you!) Yet it seems the two never resolved the question of whether Dubner would ghostwrite for Levitt or write about Levitt. The result feels too much like a magazine article padded to book length. Each chapter of Freakonomics even begins with quotations from the Times piece, as if it merited study by future historians.

Confusing structure aside, Freakonomics is packed with fascinating ideas. Consider Levitt's notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, Freakonomics shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade. Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of un……