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Freakonomics
is a New York Times best seller written by Steven D Levitt
and Stephen J Dubner. Levitt is Director, Initiative on Chicago
Price Theory, at the University of Chicago Department of Economics.
He is the latest receiver of the John Bates Clark Medal awarded
every two years to the best American economist under 40. Dubner
is basically a journalist writing for New York Times
and is the national best-selling author of two books, none
of which is relating to core economics. He met Levitt to interview
him for writing a profile for the New York Times, with
the prior experience that economists generally speak in English
as if it were a fourth or fifth language. Levitt had an impression
about interviewing journalists as not being "robust".
Economics
could be a boring subject to the uninitiated. But this book
makes it interesting even to such persons, may be because
it has less of economics! The book is not a typical economics
text book explains some freak incidents which can abound.
Actually, the economic principles that are brought out in
the book are not direct, but are tangential. It does not deal
with traditional issues like price theory, market behavior,
international trade, etc., but such mundane issues like; what
do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common, why
drug dealers still live with their moms, what makes a perfect
parent and so on.
The
book hints that it does not have an apparent unifying theme.
Even the subjects are disjointed and are apparently not unified
enough to be grouped together. But this is as far as the explanatory
note offered by the authors is concerned. The capacity to
see the daily facts of life differently, to link the available
data and arrive at the results, and the ability to distinguish
between cause and effect are not common among all economists. |
