This book, by the author of Moneyball, is essentially a biography of the two men who did more to change the way we think about thinking. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are Israeli psychologists who discovered heuristics and connected the fields psychology and economics, helping create the new field of behavioral economics. If you recognize either name, it is probably Daniel Kahneman who wrote the outstanding book Thinking, Fast and Slow a few years ago. At the beginning of that book he writes about his […]
Outdated, but easy to see why it’s popular.
I’m afraid I don’t really have much interesting commentary to contribute to the discourse around Freakonomics. The first edition was published over 10 years ago, and I strongly suspect that the contents seemed much more “rogue” then, than they do now, in the thick of a Big Data revolution where these type of interdisciplinary data-mining projects to form sociological hypotheses have become altogether common and trendy. Clearly, Levitt and Dubner have a good sense for interesting topics and an accessible approach to exploring them, as […]
Too much of the latter, not enough of the former
This is my first review in weeks, in part because reading this took soooooo long, and I knew I’d be reading this book for a solid year if I didn’t commit to finishing it. As it stands, it took me three months of false starts to completely read its four hundred pages. It’s a hard book to assess, in part because I found the subject matter interesting, and my favorite parts of the book probably would need to be trimmed in order to make it […]
Stupid things people do, explained by a smart guy
First published: 2008 Revised and Expanded: 2010 Recommended for: People whose bosses have just told them they need to give a presentation on Behavioral Economics to some senior marketing leaders Stars: 4. I debated giving it 3 because you can get the same info from TED talks, but walking into my presentation with a hardcover book with pages tagged earned me some points for initiative, so I’m sharing the love. Ok so I didn’t pick this book up by choice, exactly. I work in marketing communications, and the […]