Freakonomics
June 20th 2007 09:45
I’ve been reading Freakonomics by Steven Levett and Stephen Dubner. I picked it up (less GST, which was a nice surprise) at the Whitcoulls in Auckland airport, and had been enjoying the lateral thinking ever since. I’m just about finished it, and will now have to start reading the blog in order to keep getting my fix of off-the-wall approaches to economics. This is economics in a very broad sense, not the limited idea most of us have of the subject, that is, of it being something primarily
concerned with money and how it works in society. Levett has been accused of being a sociologist rather than an economist, but in fact, there are people in both disciplines who’d pooh-pooh that idea. He’s an economist who’s taken the subject and made it accessible to ordinary readers – well, ordinary in the sense that he still expects you to have your wits about you. The book only occasionally has its longeurs; for me it was when they went on about the way names affect people’s futures. There were just too many lists at that point, for me.
I’ve always had a theory about names anyway, but it’s nothing like Levett’s (Dubner is the ‘writer’ of the two, in the sense that he takes Levett’s unwritten material and brings it to a readable level. Levett can write, of course!) I’ve always felt that there were links between people with the same name – often quite undefinable links, but links nevertheless. Of course this is something the Hebrews believed way back, and they were probably right. Give a child a certain name and he may well grow into it. But if you think about friends and acquaintances who have the same name, can’t you see something that ‘joins’ them in some way? I often can. It’s not an indisputable theory, by any means. Just one of those quirky things that get into your head and you become more convinced about it, the longer you hold it.
I’ve never sat down and done any stats on it, but maybe that would be an interesting thing to do at some point.
Anyway, Freakonomics is well worth reading – I’ve got the revised edition which includes some updates and some changes as a result of correspondence after the previous edition came out. It’s possible it’s one of those books you either love or hate. I loved it.
I did hate the cover of this edition, by the way. It seems to me to be one of the most badly designed covers I've seen in a long time, and doesn't really tell you a lot about the book. Fortunately, the book sold itself.
I’ve always had a theory about names anyway, but it’s nothing like Levett’s (Dubner is the ‘writer’ of the two, in the sense that he takes Levett’s unwritten material and brings it to a readable level. Levett can write, of course!) I’ve always felt that there were links between people with the same name – often quite undefinable links, but links nevertheless. Of course this is something the Hebrews believed way back, and they were probably right. Give a child a certain name and he may well grow into it. But if you think about friends and acquaintances who have the same name, can’t you see something that ‘joins’ them in some way? I often can. It’s not an indisputable theory, by any means. Just one of those quirky things that get into your head and you become more convinced about it, the longer you hold it.
I’ve never sat down and done any stats on it, but maybe that would be an interesting thing to do at some point.
Anyway, Freakonomics is well worth reading – I’ve got the revised edition which includes some updates and some changes as a result of correspondence after the previous edition came out. It’s possible it’s one of those books you either love or hate. I loved it.
I did hate the cover of this edition, by the way. It seems to me to be one of the most badly designed covers I've seen in a long time, and doesn't really tell you a lot about the book. Fortunately, the book sold itself.
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