Freakonomics: Six Lenkas

Freakonomics: Six Lenkas

Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in their book talkes not only about incentives, as I mentioned in my last blog, but also about hot topics, like abortion, crime, drugs or diminishing power of Ku-Klux-Klan. Not being an expert in any of these areas, I felt slightly manipulated by the data presented there.

Abortion stopped the wave of crime in 90's

I bet abortion is very controversial topic in the US, since it's a nice theme for gaining points in the political game. But it's a also very serious subject and linking abortion rights with low crime is, well, strange. At least.

Although I do support the right for abortion, the assumption that the crime wave in New York stopped, due to the legalization of abortion is quite a strong argument that I can't easily swallow.
The author's illustration of that phenomena by using a revolution in Romania that went wild, due to all these unwanted babies is quite off. How come that the champion in statistical data somehow omit to consider other fallen regimes in that time, I don't know.
Am I also unwanted baby, since I was active student back in 1989, as many, many other students? I hope not.
On the other hand, I see the correlation between the pressure of communistic governments at that time, economical wealth and the desire for for revenge. The more you control, the more likely people hate you.

Six Lenkas I know

Final chapter is about parenting. I love first couple paragraphs.

"A baby should always be put to sleep on her back - until it is decreed that she should only be put to sleep on her stomach".  I laughed almost five minutes.

The rest of that chapter is not as humorous as that. Well, playing with all these lists of popular names was interesting at the beginning, but I lost track after reading the third list.

Popular names are subject to fashion, so what? There were three other Pavels in the class of 20 people, when I was a kid. There are 3 Lenkas in Sun@Prague that I work with. My sister is also Lenka, my sister in law is Lenka and my neighbor is Lenka too. The generation of Lenkas. Waves come and go, but how it's related to good parenting, I have no clue. It's difficult to apply St&St's method on non-clustered population, as Czech Republic.

Read it or leave it?

Mmm, depends. If you're looking for quick solutions, buy a cookbook, some sort of Economy for Dummies or 100 Advices for Anything. Even though I'd be careful to take all the data and ideas as granted, as there are too many assumptions, it's very refreshing reading. Very easy to understand and sometimes funny.
And don't worry, it is not a book that requires an university degree in economics. On the contrary, all these real examples are very vivid, it's about life not numbers.

To sum up, if you like interesting questions, that stimulate other thoughts in your mind, go and read it.

Posted at 09:38PM Nov 04, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Books  |  Comments[2]