E-Book, 268 Pages
Non-Fiction/ Sociology
By: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 1/2
“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
I picked this book upon seeing it on a friend’s favorite books shelf and the title intrigued me. I am trying to read more books about business and economics and unfortunately this book did not help with that. It is more of a sociology book but I still enjoyed it overall.
The book tries to answer some weird questions from an economic point of view and we are mostly talking about incentives here. I think my statistics professor would be thrilled by reading this book because it talks a lot about numbers and correlations and how to interpret them and to be honest, I thought it was smart because it opened my eyes to new ways of looking at things and I don’t think I ever understood the meaning of correlation rather than causation more than now.
Some of the questions are interesting and some of them are meh, I think some of the analysis also went over my head too. Looking through some of the top reviews you can see there is a discrepancy in the ratings and I can understand it. I think some of the data and things in the book should be taken with a pinch of salt but they way the authors present it makes it very convincing and hard to argue against.
Summary: I enjoyed the book and I think it was a smart one, It kind of reminds me of Gladwell’s books and I was surprised to see him quoted on the cover. It uses an economical point of view as it employs incentives to analyze some weird questions but other than that it is not an economic book. I think it will help me look at data differently in the future which is something!
The book prescription 