Freakonomics

I started off really liking this and found it very thought provoking. However it gets bogged down in a couple of significant but overlong explorations on education and names and this tends to lose the 'punchiness' of the initial approach. Good to make you think in different ways and to stress the need for caution in any analysis, but left me feeling it could have had much greater scope.

Statistically seeing the world is a very fascinating approach to break down social issues and common wisdom. This is the book that provide how to see the world in this way. Through various examples, the author presented ways to apply statistical tools and methods to different topics of wide-spread interest. Although the conclusion is either mind-blowing or anticipated. Thinking purely from statistics and the power of it are the true prizes of this book.

Good, but it obscures some difficult problems with clever stories.

It's interesting, but has a basic problem. One of the premises of the book is that you should question conventional wisdom - that 'what everyone knows' tends to be glib and simplistic and could be just plain wrong. But the examples of his own theories, though they may spring from a rigorous methodology, once distilled into a chapter of a book become glib and simplistic. And could well be just plain wrong.

See my blog post on it:

http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2005/07/booknote-freakonomics.html