Freakonomics
Steven D. Levitt, 2005
Economics & business Popular sciencePsychologyContemporary fiction
An economist’s case that the world is stranger than it looks: cheating teachers, sumo wrestlers, and why a backyard pool is more dangerous than a gun.
Feels like curiosity and wonder. About time.
A page from the book
What a lottery ticket and a vote actually buy you.
After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it’s fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you’d spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy. Steven D. Levitt.Levitt won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2003; the book grew out of a New York Times Magazine profile of him by co-author Stephen J. Dubner.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Freakonomics like?
- Feels like curiosity and wonder. About time.
- What should I read after Freakonomics?
- If you liked Freakonomics, try The Psychology of Money (Morgan Housel), Rich Dad Poor Dad (Robert T. Kiyosaki) and Atomic Habits (James Clear).
A taste of the feed
The expensive thing is rarely the thing you're actually buying.
Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch. But what you probably want is respect and admiration. And you’re more likely to gain those things through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.
The Psychology of Money · Morgan Housel
The quiet arithmetic that decides what your work is worth.
Workers work hard enough to not be fired, and owners pay just enough so that workers won’t quit.
Rich Dad Poor Dad · Robert T. Kiyosaki
A few degrees at takeoff, a different city entirely.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Atomic Habits · James Clear
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