Freakonomics

Yesterday’s meeting with Jarod was definitely a success (though not in my car’s gas tank. It was on E, when Jarod led me all the way back to where I was familiar with lol), and further meetings would most certainly be productive (though I think I may have freaked him out a little with all my devil’s advocate methods)

Anyways, I had promised myself that I wouldn’t spend any money. But the lure of the bloody bookstore was too much. I just had to walk in there and get myself something, and so, as you may have guessed it: I got myself a book called Freakonomics.

The one thing I can tell you about this book is that it’s GREAT! (Or, if you’re an economist, you’d be asking if I said this book is Great to justify my purchace, or was it because this book is Great that I bought it)

Regardless, Steven Levitt (to those in BBus, he was in your Microeconomics text book by Parkins) displays an uncanny ability to see things in different lights. He asks well.. freakish questions like “Why the Ku Klux Klan is like a group of Real Estate Agents“, and slowly, and clearly, he shows the link between both. (That’s actually chapter 2 – similarities between the KKK and Real-estate agents)

Levitt and Dubner makes simple Micro-economics easy to understand, and everything in the world, from the Klan to how to be a good parent, has got to do with economics. (One example Levitt used was a day care centre in Haifa, Israel). The “Hidden Side of Everything” reveals itself in due course through economic understanding.
Interestingly, I share similar worldviews with Levitt, namely:

• Incentives are the conrner stones of modern life
• Conventional Wisdom (not the Buddhist kind, the “it’s common knowledge that…” kind, coined by John Kenneth Galbraith) is often wrong
• Dramatic effects always have distant causes, usually something small
• Experts always use the leverage of their knowledge in their field for their own agenda.
• Data must be looked in the correct way, it makes the world simpler. (To me, everything boils down to statistical data)

Lol.. maybe I should pride myself that I have been thinking like an economist for some number of years now.

In some ways, I had always suspected math at play behind the scenes of everything (technically still true. Chaos Theory has its bases in mathematics), but these two authors put the math in an economic worldview, and how people react to things (Bagel cheating, for example).

Nothing too complicated, but yet it explains the fundamentals of economics (supply and demand, incentives, scarcity) in such simple, daily terms, that I now regret taking my Microeconomics with such a boring lecturer that put me to sleep. (Just kidding about that part. I still got decent results- B+ for my Microeconomics)

This book is a little short though, in the excess of 200 pages, and I finished it in one sitting (the Freakonomics blog archives printed in the book was an interesting insight to things, but read the blog yourself. It’s better), but still, this book has gotta be the best 30 bucks I spent in the last 2~3 months. Lovely, lovely book. It also proves getting yourself an Economics degree isn’t necessary to succeed in life but it definitely can’t hurt. – Steve Levitt did it!

Ah, speaking of economics… I’m supposed to be living an economic life, but I spent RM100 on a RM50 budget. Some great economist huh. XD