A freaking good read

My favorite sections in bookstores are General Fiction and Biographies. Once in awhile, I venture to History/World Affairs. But very rarely do I go to the Business section, because frankly, everything screams "Intimidating!!" to me.

But I bought Freakonomics because I read somewhere long ago that it was a good read, plus the first few pages that I browsed from the open copy got me hooked. It also helped that it was only around P300+, pretty cheap for a book if you ask me (tapos may less 10% pa ako, hehehe).

I finished it in two days and must say that it has forever changed my views about economics...and economists.

Freakonomics isn’t a book about economic news and theories, but an attempt by a hip young economist to answer certain “freakish questions” using very basic, very understandable economic formula.

Some of these freakish questions:

1) What do sumo wrestlers and schoolteachers have in common?
2) Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
3) If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their parents?

The answers:

1) They both cheat to win.
2) A swimming pool! A kid has a 1 in 11,000 chance dying in a house with a pool, versus 1 in 1 million-plus in a house with a gun.
3) Only the top guys get rich from the drug trade. Once the profits are split, the pushers on the street make lower than the minimum wage!

It’s not always this whimsical though. One of Levitt’s more controversial theories is his claim that there was a drop in the crime rate of the United States in the 1990s because—get this—of Roe vs. Wade, the 1970s court case that paved the way for abortion to be legalized throughout the US. Levitt’s reasoning—Women who considered abortion are those who think/know/believe they will be unable to raise their child well; if these children had been born, they would have grown up in an unsuitable environment and most likely ended up leading lives of crime. Thanks to Roe vs. Wade, these children—who would’ve been at crime-capable age by the 1990s—no longer exist. From a moral point of view, it’s quite disturbing, but you have to give Levitt credit for thinking out of the box (and having data to back it up). There’s also his theory that the Ku Klux Klan (an American white supremacist group) and real estate agents have something in common, but that’s not so disturbing (unless you’re a real estate agent).

Overall, it’s a very easy book to read, at times funny, many times making me go “Why didn’t I see it that way!” Everything is in layman’s terms, there is no jargon whatsoever, and there are hardly any charts or graphs; the only methods of illustration are tables which are no more than 2 columns wide. It’s perfect if you want a different way of looking at the world.