by Rod Lott (with permission by Bookgasm.com)
SuperFreakonomics is a BEbabes November Top Pick
Why aren’t you people terrified of elephants? Sharks killed only four people when we all went nuts over them in 2001, but elephants took out about 200. Blame it on the media. As Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner write, “A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it.”
That’s as good a description as any for their book SUPERFREAKONOMICS: GLOBAL COOLING, PATRIOTIC PROSTITUTES, AND WHY SUICIDE BOMBERS SHOULD BUY LIFE INSURANCE. Naturally, it’s the sequel to their 2005 smash-hit FREAKONOMICS, and this one is just like that one: equal parts sociology experiment, trivia trove and front-to-back fascinating.
The “rogue economists” put their unconventional spin on a variety of topics — involving monkey prostitution, kangaroo farts and mosquito assassination — to show why and how people respond to incentives. Their experiments and investigations often yield surprising results.
For example:
• A Chicago cop is more likely to utilize a hooker than arrest her.
• Terrorists tend to be well-educated because their acts are political, which means they’re more apt to be voters.
• The events of 9/11 caused an upsurge in traffic deaths (because people stopped flying), but a decrease in the flu (because people went fewer places).
• Going to the emergency room actually increases your odds of dying.
• Women ER doctors are better than male counterparts at keeping patients alive.
• Hospital personnel wash their hands less than half the time they should, with doctors being the worst offenders.
• Chemotherapy doesn’t do much good, and neither do child car seats.
Why is this? How are these arrived upon? Read.
One of the more interesting chapters is short on statistics, but long on optimism, as the authors profile a team of inventors/scientists who have developed relatively cheap, simple and seemingly workable methods to prevent hurricanes and reverse global warming. SUPERFREAKONOMICS shares other reassuring facts, too, such as that your chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is 1 in 5 million, and if you drove constantly at 30 mph, you’d have to travel for 285 years before you could expect to perish in a traffic accident.
In other words, people: Calm down. Stop being so fearful.
Speaking of fear, people revert to the story of Kitty Genovese when talking about violent crime and an apathetic society. But Levitt and Dubner demonstrate how that story may not be more fiction than fact, turning everything you know about the sordid tale upside-down. That unpredictability is one of the many reasons you’ll lap up SUPERFREAKONOMICS.
Best of all, you don’t need to be a math freak, psych expert or econ major to do so. But you just might want to be afterward. Here’s hoping the FREAK flag continues to fly in further volumes.