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Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Levitt, Steven D.
Adult Nonfiction 330 L
Levitt, Steven D.
Adult Nonfiction 330 L
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| Contents | Page |
|---|---|
| An Explanatory Note | p. xxiii |
| In which the origins of this book are clarified. | |
| Introduction: The Hidden Side of Everything | p. 1 |
| In which the book's central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. | |
| Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong | |
| How "experts"-from crimnologists to real-estate agents to political scientists-bend the facts | |
| Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life | |
| What is "freakonomics," anyway? | |
| Chapter 1 - What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? | p. 15 |
| In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side-cheating. | |
| Who cheats? Just about everyone | |
| How cheaters, cheat, and how to catch them | |
| Stories from an Israeli day-care center | |
| The sudden disappearance of seven millon American childern | |
| Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago | |
| Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win | |
| Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt? | |
| What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think | |
| Chapter 2 - How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like A Group of Real-Estate Agents? | p. 51 |
| In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially when its power is abused. | |
| Spilling the Ku Klux Klan's secrets | |
| Why experts of every kind are in the perfect position to exploit you | |
| The antidote to information abuse: the Internet | |
| Why a new car is suddenly sorth so much less the moment it leaves the lot | |
| Breaking the real-estate agent code: what "well maintained" really means | |
| Is Trent Lott more racist than the average Weakest Link contestant? | |
| What do online daters lie about? | |
| Chapter 3 - Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms? | p. 85 |
| In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-interest, and convenience. | |
| Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic halitosis | |
| How to ask a good question | |
| Sudhir Venkatesh's long, strange trip into the crack den | |
| Why prostitutes earn more than architects | |
| What a drug dealer, a high-school quarterback, and an editorial assistant have in common | |
| How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the invention of nylon stocking | |
| Was crack the worst thing to bit black Americans since Jim Crow? | |
| Chapter 4 - Where Have all the Criminals Gone? | p. 115 |
| In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions. | |
| What Nicolae Ceauşescu learned-the hard way-about abortion | |
| Why the 1960s was a great time to be a criminal | |
| Think the roaring 1990s economy put a crimp on crime? think again | |
| Why capital punishment doesn't deter criminals | |
| Do police actually lower crime rates? | |
| Prisons, prisons everywhere | |
| Seeing through the New York City police "miracle" | |
| What is a gun, really? | |
| Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later crack dealers were like Pets.com | |
| The superpredator versus the senior citizen | |
| Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed every-thing. | |
| Chapter 5 - What Makes A Perfect Parent? | p. 147 |
| In which we ask, from a variety of angels, a pressing question: do parents really matter? | p. 147 |
| The conversion of parenting from an art to a science | |
| Why parenting experts like to scare parents to death | |
| Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? | |
| The economics of fear | |
| Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture quagmire | |
| Why a good school isn't as good as you might think | |
| The black-white test gap and "acting white" | |
| Eight things that make a child do better in school and eight that don't | |
| Chapter 6 - Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet? | p. 181 |
| In which we weigh the importance of a parent's first official act-naming the baby. | |
| A boy named Winner and his brother, Loser | |
| The blackest names and the whitest names | |
| The segregation of culture: why Seinfeld never made the top fifty among black viewers | |
| If you have a really bad banem should you just change it? | |
| High-end names and low-end names (and how one becomes the other) | |
| Britney Spears: a symptom, not a cause | |
| Is Aviva the next Madison? | |
| What your parents were telling the world when they gave you your name. | |
| Epilogue: Two Paths to Harvard | p. 209 |
| In which the dependability of data meets the randomness of life. | |
| Bonus Matter | p. 213 |
| "The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You..." | p. 215 |
| Selected "Freakonomics" Columns From The New York Times Magazine | p. 233 |
| A Q&A with the Authors | p. 261 |
| Notes | p. 269 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 295 |
| Index | p. 297 |
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