Freakonomics

I find economics fascinating: I am actually reading a textbook on International Economics right now despite having a full time job as a senior manager and being a dad to two kids. But as a political science major and history buff, I often favored historical explanations over rational choice models. Explanations that assume utility maximization by rational actors are just too abstract to account for complex events in any satisfying way.

Levitt and Dubner’s work, however, demonstrates how powerful economic analysis can be when the right questions are asked and when applied against the right set of data. Conventional explanations about crime reduction in the US or misplaced notions about the impact of excessive parenting on education all fall apart when confronted by rigorous data analysis. Catching cheating in school testing and in sumo tournaments just by looking at the data is, too me, really an ingenious piece of analytics.

Thick anthropological description, contingent historical explanations, and psychological analyses all have their place in completing the story of an event, but Freakonomics just showed how economic analysis can be a compelling tool for understanding not just market forces, but the rest of society as well.