Dispatches from the Frontier
Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Thursday, April 21, 2005
An Economics Book I Couldn't Put Down (What?)
Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Thursday, April 21, 2005An Economics Book I Couldn't Put Down (What?)
I picked up Freakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner last night, and I couldn't put it down. As far as I can recall, it's the first book written by an economist that had me laughing out loud. Freakonomics is funny at times, but also provocative.
The book has no particular theme, but it "has been written from a very specific worldview, based on a few fundamental ideas." These are:
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them...is the key to solving just about any riddle...
The conventional wisdom is often wrong...Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devlishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes. The answer to a given riddle is not always right in front of you.
"Experts"...use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. However...in the face of the Internet, their informational advantage is shrinking every day...
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. If you learn how to look at data in the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible.
As the authors conclude, "The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising."
6:31:35 PM 