Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner - **

Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

This book is so accessable, its examples so memorable, that I'm not going to need to write down a lot of notes.

I wound up giving it two stars because the critical thinking aspects of the book are largely covered in this half-page of notes.

Introduction:

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. Understanding them or ferreting them out is the key to solving just about any riddle.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes.

- When people are initially motivated by something other than money, and money then enters the equation, low sums of money will actually make things worse over time.

Roughly half the white women and 80% of white men declared race didn't matter to them on an online dating site. These white men sent 90% of their emails to white women; the white women sent 97% of their emails to white men.

A little creative lying can draw indignation.

As a leader, you have to have yours first: otherwise, people will start to question your position as a leader.

"A distinction without a difference" -- a nice phrase

Given the rarity with which executions are carried out in this country and the long delays in doing so, no reasonable criminal should be deterred by the threat of execution.
-- contrast this with people walking around with a hand cut off, etc.

The broken window theory: the idea that minor nuisances turn into major nuisances if left unchecked.

To an economist, the background check and waiting period before handguns are purchased makes no sense: regulation of a legal market is bound to fail when a healthy black market exists for the same product. . . A study of imprisoned felons showed that even before the Brady Act, only 1/5 of the criminals bought their guns through a licensed dealer.

"If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is."
-- when he explains this it's clear that he failed to take into account the fact that people don't collect swimming pools the way they do guns. A more accurate way to come up with a statistic would have been to divide the number of guns by the average guns per household in the sample size.

The typical parenting expert, like experts in other fields, is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself. . . an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.

The risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are often very different.
"Imagine that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which cause do you think the members of Congress will open up the coffers for? The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack are infinitely smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up their arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease..."

Motivation is an indicator of success.