Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything is perhaps the most famous "popular economics" book of recent years. Authored by a prominent economist from University of Chicago (Steven Levitt) and a New York Times journalist (Stephen Dubner), this 2005 book grew out of a profile Dubner wrote about Levitt in New York Times magazine in 2003. The book comprises a number of articles in which economic theory are applied to analyze a diverse range of unusual subjects, ranging from phenomena of cheating among Sumo wrestlers to factors affecting how babies are named). Naturally, the academic content is based on Levitt's research work, while Dubner contributes his ability to translate the content into engaging, more accessible style suitable for general audience.
Interestingly, Freakonomics does not have an unifying theme, though according to the introduction it is based on some fundamental ideas, quoted below:
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life
The conventional wisdom is often wrong
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes
“Experts” – from criminologists to real-estate agents – use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
Indeed, one of Freakonomics's main strengths comes from Levitt's ability to come up with unconventional questions and then analyze massive amounts of hard data to discover the answers. Some of the discoveries, such as socioeconomic factors affecting children names, are fascinating although probably of little practical use. Some other, like how information asymmetry affect behavior of real estate agents, can be very useful to many people. And there are discoveries that might downright offend a number of people, or simply contradicts conventional wisdom. The book provides comprehensive list of citations and sources of data used though, and at various points Levitt shows samples of data used in his research, and the steps he used to derive the conclusions. As the authors state in the book's introduction:
"Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work – whereas economics represents how it actually does work"
At the end of the day, the value of Freakonomics is perhaps not so much about its conclusions and more about how it shows that asking the right questions and analyzing the right data can lead us to more accurate view of the world than simple reliance on "conventional wisdom".
2 comments:
Akhirnya selesai juga baca buku ini. Waktu kamu cerita, terdengar menarik sih... Jarang ada buku yang ditulis ekonom tapi isinya bukan seputar angka, ekonomi makro dan mikro, dll.. yang tentu saja tidak aku mengerti hehe...
Selain karena topik-topik yang dibahas nggak biasa, jadi mengingatkan aku kalau statistik itu penting! Duh, kok udah lupa ya sama kuliah statistik dulu.. :P
Haha. Tapi Freakonomics emang ga' banyak membahas konsep ekonomi sih.. Mungkin lebih cocok dibilang buku tentang penerapan data mining, dengan sedikit pembahasan tentang gimana orang membuat perhitungan cost dan benefit :)
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