Skip to main content

When To Rob a Bank - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ****

After a certain amount of disappointment caused by the previous Freaknomics inspired book, Think Like a Freak, I was prepared to find the latest equally disappointing. After all, the authors admit this is just a transcription of parts of their blog. In economics terms, as they point out, this is the equivalent of buying bottled water - paying money for something you can get for free. However they do claim to have culled the best from their blog, so you don't have to, which is a useful service.

 Like the huge successful Freakonomics and its successors, the blog is all about taking the tools of economics and statistics and using them in everyday life. Only here the uses are less thought through. Where they might have done a lot of work to get a piece together for one of the main books, here it's usually just a quick thought, without in-depth research attached. However despite this - and arguably sometimes because of this - a good number of the entries are thought provoking, challenging, fun or all three. You'll find everything from a debate with a number of experts on what you should do with $10 in your pocket when passing a drunken beggar and hotdog stall to an idea to 'fix' the UK health service (apparently David Cameron wasn't impressed) and some surprising considerations on what is and isn't good for the environment. Not to mention why most people get the answer totally wrong to 'why has consumption of shrimp gone up'... and, of course, the title question of the book.

 Sometimes you do feel that they are just setting out to be provocative without any great reason to be - for example in the items on terrorism. (Though they do underline the important point that most security measures are for show, not to do the job.) Elsewhere, while what they have is an interesting theoretical solution to a problem, it's usually a classic example of economists not understanding psychology. Even though they make several references to behavioural economics, this is mostly classical economics with its undying belief in markets and assumption that we behave as homo economicus. This comes through, for example, in that UK health service 'fix', which is quite logical, but doesn't take any account of the psychology of the British attitude to healthcare free at the point of source.

 For me, the biggest problem is the sport section, which I pretty much had to skip. Both participants seem obsessed with sport, and specifically with America's very parochial domestic sports, which to anyone outside of the country are likely to be as dull as all the entries on poker will be to non-gamblers. It was also quite sweet that Levitt and Dubner, for all their efforts at putting logic and numbers to the fore, couldn't overcome the US obsession with guns - so in various entries trying to see how it might be possible to reduce deaths and injuries by firearms, there is no mention of what the rest of the world sees as the blindingly obvious - get rid of the guns. Duh.

Despite the extremely boring sports bit and the gun-blindness, there is plenty to enjoy, so it really wasn't a problem. And if you get to the end and think 'I need more', you can always head over to the blog and get your fill in an all-you-can-eat Freakobuffet. Excellent!
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more