Freakonomics – S. D. Levitt and S. J. Dubner

Freakonomics promises to “explore the hidden side of everything“. Well, it doesn’t … obviously it can’t. Nevertheless it’s funny to read and there are a couple of interesting things in the book.

A few notes:

• There are three different kind of incentives: moral, social and financial; Incentives are the cornerstones of modern life.
• Everybody cheats, that’s nature.
• The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Just because you feel comfortable with something it doesn’t mean it’s correct. Use hard data to check whether something is really true.
• Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.
• Experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda >> information asymmetry

The final two chapters are mainly about parenting and children names … which was not particularly interesting for me, but might be for others. Just one thing: there’s almost no other area where false conventional wisdom is so widely spread like in parenting.

I’d say out of five stars it gets three.