The Book: Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

The Story: Just like the original Freakonomics, this second book is pretty  much story-less.  They kind of just take these different ideas and combine bits of information that don’t seem like they go together to make some pretty interesting points.

Because there is not much of a story and the information is totally all over the place, here is a list of stuff that you’ll find between these covers:

Why walking drunk is more dangerous (for the drunk) than driving…

Why some prostitutes only work during “peak season”…

What really effects the wage gap between men & women…

If a sex change can boost your salary…

How to catch a terrorist…

How hand washing saves thousands of lives (and who figured that out)…

The roots of altruism and if we are really as altruistic as the numbers show…

If car seats are, in fact, more safe for children than old-fashioned lap belts…

Quite a few solutions to global warming that seem all-too-simple…

And how, if given the right conditions, monkeys figure our system out  pretty quickly…

What I Thought: If you remember, I was head over heels for the original book.  I would always pick up the newer one at the bookstore, but never bought it.  The other day, I was on the library’s website when I happened to think about it, so I requested it.  I am so glad I did.

While I didn’t think that this was as good the second time around, I was still totally in love.  Because of how this book is set up- in 5 chapters- I flew through this book.  It was absolute information overload, but I loved it.

There was a lot here that I found interesting, but the part that really got me thinking was the last chapter.  The whole chapter was on the environment and what is going on out there and why.  This isn’t refuting global warming or agreeing with it, just laying out facts that are often brushed under the rug.  He also visits with a small (but rich & powerful) company that is coming up with cheap solutions that seem off the wall at first glance, but may just work.  To be honest, I didn’t really see the economic connection here and felt like maybe the authors had gotten in over their heads with some of the stuff that they were talking about, but the concepts that were presented were interesting and different and I was glad to read them.

I was kind of annoyed at the car seat bit for a few reasons, the most obvious one being that these men have clearly never ridden in a car with a 4 year old.  The argument here was that in the crash tests that they looked at, being in a front-facing child-size car seat prevents fatalities less than just a shoulder/lap belt.  While that may be, a 4 year old would never set perfectly straight up & still in a regular adult seatbelt.  They’d slump over to take naps, jump around, reach for stuff they dropped on the floor, put the shoulder belt behind their backs… anything but wear the seatbelt properly.  There was no data to account for that and I think it kind of renders their research null and void.  They kind of made it sound like the car seat companies were out to get consumers, but this is one time when I’d rather spend a little money and feel like my kid was strapped down and safe.

I think that the best thing about this and the worst thing about it are exactly the same: there is a LOAD of information here.  At times, I was kind of overwhelmed and wondering how all this fit together and how these tangents were going to connect. To be honest, sometimes they didn’t.  The upside being: there is tons of information presented.  These are facts and figures that you couldn’t really find in other places and it was interesting to see it all laid out.  Kind of mind blowing, really.

I thought that the writing and the presentation was second-rate in comparison to the first book, but still a really fun, pretty quick read that got me thinking about things that would normally not even cross my mind.  Fun stuff.

Conclusion: If you liked the first one, I’m sure that you’ll like this one.  If you haven’t read either, read the first one first because it is better, but keep this one on your radar for later.

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.