Freakonomics: A Rouge Economist Explores the Hidden side of Everything.
The Arthurs of Freakonomics take a very unusual approach to explaining economics. In fact there are a lot of things in the book that are downright bizarre. But of course this is what Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J Dubner set out to achieve. They wanted a book that went beyond convention and challenged everything that people ordinarily thought about economics. In a lot of ways they wanted to shock people with their outrageousness hypothesizes. To me the book was definitely different and some things I understood well and others I didn’t quite get the gist of. Many people found the Arthurs to be near geniuses in their willingness to think outside the box in an effort to provide new insights to economic and social issues that are often difficult to address. These guys used several different themes and fundamental ideas through out the book such as Positive verses Normative Analysis, the Nature of Scientific Inquiry, an understanding of Incentives in the Marketplace and exploring Conventional Wisdom.
Chapter one “What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers have in Common?“ This begins with a study of how incentives can influence the way we behave. The guys take all these different people in many different situations and circumstances who are otherwise honest people who find ways of beating the system to get ahead when the incentive has been placed in front of these people. The Arthur’s define an incentive as a means of encouraging people to do more of a good thing or less of a bad thing given the situation and describe three different types of incentives. Economic incentives are those that ...