 "Don't buy this book - it's full of misleading "facts" and lies." | 2009-11-17 |
| - Reviewed By User: A4KPK5IAEP4DG |
The book's introduction should tell you right off the bat that these two authors have strayed away from science and reasoning towards controversial statements meant to generate... well, controversy and revenue. From now on, their books should be in the fiction sections of bookstores and libraries. Don't try to pass off a work of fiction as fact.
Advocating drunk driving in any condition borders on the side of evil. Don't tell me that the book suggests that drunk people should call a cab or hitch a ride with a friend. When someone is drunk and they're holding car keys, do you really think they're going to do anything other than drive? Shame on you Steven and Stephen. Shame. |
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 "Overcrowded Space" | 2009-11-17 |
| - Reviewed By pamalajure |
Loved their first book Freakonomics, and when Superfreakonomics was released, I had to read it.
This is a one-sitter read, i.e. a book you can be read in one sitting. It's written in a humorous way and is really a page-turner. Levitt and Dubner have written the book like a Conan O'Brien opening act, where one snippet is connected to another. In this case it's drunk driving or drunk walking and terrorist profiler etc.
When Freakonomics was released it had opened a new area of interest (econometrics and behavioral economics) to common reader, now this space is overcrowded and you have a lot of decent books that are better in observing and explaining discrete things, against common knowledge.
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| "The chapter on climate change is embarrassingly wrong" | 2009-11-10 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1YX7VZPHC25LR |
| Read Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog for a review of the growing chorus of outrage at how lazy and incompetent the authors were in their scholarship on this issue. It really calls into question how much you can trust other things that they have written. |
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| "You Can Stop at SuperFreak..." | 2009-11-09 |
| - Reviewed By User: AYXYAET72G2VJ |
There are good books that attempt to think out of the box on social issues and economics. Try "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell or "The Next 100 Years" by George Friedman. You only have so much time to read, don't settle for unworthy books or a lame pretense to cutting edge. This book is horrible; do not think about it for another second.
If you do not read much you will find interesting insights offered by these authors. However, the more you read the more easily you can tell good books from not so good books. This is not a good book. The authors seem titillated by talking about prostitutes and the cost over time of various sex acts, at least in most of the first 55 pages until I threw this book in the trash. I bought it at an airport and paid $30.00 and decided to trash this garbage than finish it, or leave it behind for someone else to suffer through.
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 "More formulaic, easier to read than the predecessor" | 2009-11-09 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3LIHCD2CIS6ES |
Superfreakonomics is the new sequel to the best-selling book Freakonomics by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
This book roughly follows the same formula its predescessor established, although the original book seems rough and a bit disorganized compared to Superfreakonomics, which flows smooth and is even easier to read.
The pattern, of course, is to start each chapter with a shocking or strange statement that, at first glance, appears to make no sense. The rest of the chapter leads up to a point where that statement makes perfect sense once you've been exposed to the underlying statistical data the authors enthusiastically present. Each chapter contains an assortment of short stories about related events or historical analysis for perspective on each of the studies discussed.
The most memorable parts of the original Freakonomics, for me, were the chapters on Chicago drug dealers and the chapter that suggested that the falling urban crime rates in urban areas like New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago during the 1990s was due less to bureaucrat policies and more to do with the fact that the landmark Roe v. Wade case had occurred roughly 20 years earlier, thereby allowing legalized abortion. This allegedly decreased the number of children born into poor, single-parent homes that would have basically been bred into a life of crime. The conclusion was that crime rates fell in these urban areas because the would-be criminals were never born.
If you read the first book, you'll remember the stories and conclusions about inner city gangs and drug dealers. The researchers had to employ some unorthodox methods of data collection because of the closed nature of gang society. THat is, members of inner citty gangs are not going to welcome some college professor into their inner circle with open arms. Even if they did speak to a stereotypical economics researcher, it's unlikely they would provide entirely truthful or reliable data to the researchers. As a result, these studies required much more effort on the part of the researchers to blend in and become a trusted individual. It was, essentially, an undercover operation that revealed some surprising facts about how gangs and drug dealing worked (and didn't work).
So, what about this new book? This time they've brought us economic analyses of current and past practices of prostitution. How is "the worlds' oldest profession" enduring? Well, it depends. It apparently depends on who the prostitute's target customer base is. Prostitutes who "work the street" pretty much all make the same hourly rates and have to deal with some pretty serious side effects of their work including violence, disease, and the (relatively low) possibility of being caught and arrested by the police.
Prostitutes that work as high-class escorts, are well educated, and can carry on conversations with wealthy customers can earn hundreds of dollars per hour. In fact, it seems the more they can charge, the longer their engagements are. Their patrons are less interested in engaging in a single act and more interested in living out a fantasy of living with an "ideal" mate.
What else is in this new book? An interesting study on infant and child carseats. My state just made it a law that children under the age of eight must use car seats or booster seats in a car. The studies done by the authors of this book suggest car seats and booster seats may offer no real added protection to children over the age of two compared to plain old seat belts.
In this new book, the authors take on global warming. I found this interesting because I'm what you might call a "skeptic" or a "denier." I don't believe man has much at all to do with what some call "global warming" (or, more recently, "climate change," because there hasn't been any warming for a while.)
I was a bit disappointed that Dubner and Leavitt didn't take on the plethora of data that suggest historic warming has actually been caused more by solar cycles rather than emissions of greenhouse gases. While acknowledging there is no real concensus (sorry Al Gore), they went with the assumption that global warming/climate change is a real problem we must solve and concentrated their investigation on the proposed strategies to solve it.
Most governments want to "solve" our climate woes by capping emissions, taxing production, and thereby stiffling economic growth across the board. This will, of course, impact humanity globally, probably much more than any changes in the climate will. The costs for these measures are estimated in the trillions of dollars, most of which will come from developed nations. Dubner and Leavitt suggest that in many, if not most, cases, the best solutions to problems are often the simple and least expensive solutions.
They outline some solutions proposed by a small group in the northwestern US called Intellectual Ventures. One of their global warming proposals, for example, involves putting supposedly harmfull emissions into a higher layer of the atmosphere. Doing this would be uber-cheap and would effectively stop warming (assuming there is warming). They know it will work because volcanoes do it when they erupt and it cools the planet for a short period of time by blocking the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface.
I applaud the authors for taking on so many issues and showing that the way we typically approach problems is often the wrong way.
Freakonomics is available now in hardcover for a suggested price of $29.99. |
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 "Fascinating and Fun" | 2009-11-09 |
| - Reviewed By User: AUTTSD6P8A5FC |
| I found Superfreakonomics to be interesting and thought provoking. It reveals the unexpected truths driving a wide variety of phenomena, proving that the reasons behind things often aren't what we might first assume. It also establishes that unintended consequences can be more consequential than the intended ones. I highly recommend this book. |
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![SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance [Hardcover]](product_images/4981000/superfreakonomics-global-4981818.jpg)
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