Bookclub Meeting 6pm-8pm - Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt

Please come over for some chai and snacks! I would love to discuss this new book I just picked up. It's available at the library as a audio book (my favorite format listen on commute) or the book copy with many multiple copies available.

Summary

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.

Directions to Apt Complex - Hunt Club Apts

1. Depending on where you are coming from - route to 83N if you are coming from Baltimore.
After the 695/83 Junction - Take Exit 17 Padonia Rd Exit

2. Getting off the highway, take a RIGHT onto PADONIA RD.

3. At the Second Light, Take a LEFT onto YORK RD and stay in the right lane of York Road.

4. At the second Intersection, Take a RIGHT onto CRANBROOK RD.

5. At the next intersection (with a light) take a RIGHT onto GREENSIDE DR.

6. Immediately take a LEFT onto SORLEY RD.

7. Immediately make another LEFT into WOODLAKE DR. - INTO Hunt Club Apartments Complex.

8. I am in the first building on the right just past the garbage dump. Apt F on second floor.