Freakonomics: A Book Review

Statistic and economy are two different issues that link one to another. Statistics are the root of all research. Every research needs certain amount of testing, observation, or experiments. Those activities gives the scientist a data. Statistic is the only way to process the data and make it ready to the next stage.


Economy are studying about how people produce, distributing and consuming goods and services (or something like that). Economic study is very interested in one thing called insentives. Insentives is why people do something, like stealing, working, or resting. There is three kind of insentives: social, moral, and economy. And this book trying to understand everything in our daily activities based on these insentives and also other economic theory.

The chapters of this book are:

• Chapter 1: Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers (See below)
• Chapter 2: Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents
• Chapter 3: The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low wages and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers
• Chapter 4: The controversial role legalized abortion has played in reducing crime. (Levitt explored this topic in an earlier paper entitled "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.")
• Chapter 5: The negligible effects of good parenting on education (instead, the authors assert that it is what the parents are, not what they do, that makes a difference)
• Chapter 6: The socioeconomic patterns of naming children

It's weird huh? There is no common theme for this book except curiosity, and here curiosity doesn't kill the cat.