Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)

Firstly, the title is misleading. It's not all that freaky after all and I am not dazzled. Basically this book has been written based on a few fundamental ideas:

1) Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.

2) The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

3) Dramatic effects have distant, even subtle, causes.

4) "Experts" use their information advantage to serve their own agenda.

5) Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

" Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does work. Economics is above all a science of measurement. It comprises an extraordinary powerful and flexible set of tools that can reliably assess a thicket of information to determine the effect of any one factor, or even the whole effect. That's what "the economy" is after all: a thicket of information about jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the tools of economics can be just as easily applied to subjects that are  more - well, more interesting "

The problem I have with this book is I don't find it mind-boggling. Okay, maybe I didn't know about what school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common before this. But once I knew their dark side is cheating, I can see why. Just the same as why hundreds or millions of people faking or exaggerating their personal information on online dating sites. It all boils down to human nature which responds to incentives. The same reason why your dentist or real-estate agent is using his informational advantage to make more bucks. This is hardly something hard not to be able to comprehend. So the "findings" or "discoveries" in this sense are kinda  nothing new to me. And it was hard to get excited over something that u have already figured out all this time.

However, we gotta give the author(s) credits for not simply accepting conventional wisdom - the crime rate didn't just take a historical plunge because of stronger economy, increased number of police or all other explanations like what was being told in the media by the journalists or politicians, though it is not hard to relate abortion ban with the increase in crime rate twenty years down the road, especially when I am pro-choice.

" But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors - let's call them X and Y - but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It's possible that X causes Y; it's also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being  caused by some other factor, Z. " 

Overall, I would rate 3 stars out of 5.