Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Freakonomics; A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

The Story: Yeah, not much of a “story.”  They even say in the introduction that the information presented doesn’t really have particularly clear ties to any of the other information.  Each chapter kind of takes on a life of its own and has little do to with the chapters before and after. So, moving on.

The idea behind this book is using concrete data to explore things that most people would never think to explore.  One chapter, about cheating, talks about No Child Left Behind and how that has lead to increased cheating, by teachers, on the yearly standardized tests.  The author took the data from Chicago city school and lined up the answers to try to find information that pointed to cheaters.  The other half of this chapter was about how sumo wrestling in Japan seems to be rigged and provided a lot of data on that.

Most of the book seemed to focus on different crime-related issues.  There was a chapter on drug dealers and how much money they make, a correlation between the legalization of abortion and a drop in crime around 15 years later, the ku klux klan, and sneaky real estate agents.

The last two chapters were on parenting.  The first one was about what makes a “good parent.” The next one was about names and how they effect the kid’s life.

I bought this book recently so the copy that I have has a lot of “bonus material” in the back- mostly interviews and articles from other papers.  I have to admit that I just skimmed most of this, so I’m not sure what it was all about.

What I Thought: I really like charts and graphs and numbers, so long as someone else is putting them together.  I know that this is the nerd in me coming out, but that’s always my favorite part of USA Today, how they have fun little graphs on the front of each section.

So this book was pretty much one huge USA Today graph for me.  Just strange data compounded to make pretty interesting points.  My favorite chapter was the first one.  The information on the Chicago teachers cheating on the standardized testing was totally fascinating to me.  Political views aside, my younger brother fell victim to the “no time to teach, we have to test” mentality and really fell behind in school.  I knew that that attitude was fall-out from No Child Left Behind, but I never considered that teachers would straight up change kids’ answers. Totally fascinating.

The other part that really made an impact on me was the part about parenting.  We are getting ready to become parents so we’ve been doing a lot of reading.  There are so many “theories” out there on what makes a good parent, a good kid, a functional family.  It was nice here to see some data to go with what they were saying.  The chapter on names was pretty incredible too.  I had never really thought about the “trickle down” effect of names, that higher income families use them then they end up with the middle class and then the lower classes. Makes sense, but I’d never thought about it.  Well, lower class, get ready for an influx of babies named Aiden any time.  The middle class HAS to be about done with it, right?

If I could find a real “fault” in the book, it is that it is total information overload.  I was in love with the book and wanted to learn more so I kind of raced through it.  By the end, I had a hard time describing it to my husband because I had too many facts and figured going through my head.  But is that really a fault? Probably not.  I really loved this book.

I saw at the book store that there is a follow up book now, but I’m a big time cheapskate so I probably won’t get that for a few years, when I can find it at the thrift store.  I paid full price for this (via gift card) and it was a huge deal in my house.  Going to the bookstore to BUY something? Novel idea! Pun intended.