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|  | Authors: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Publisher: Allen Lane
List Price: £20.00
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Rating:  141 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition 5th Printing
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.3
ISBN: 071399990X
EAN: 9780713999907
Publication Date: October 20, 2009
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Showing reviews 16-20 of 141
 `Many of life's decisions are hard.' July 3, 2010
J. Cameron-Smith (ACT, Australia)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Three of the five chapters of this book are presented as questions:
How is a street prostitute like a department store Santa?
Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance?
What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?
The other two are:
The fix is in ... and it's cheap and simple
Unbelievable stories about apathy and altruism.
These two chapter titles aren't quite so catchy, but there is some really good material buried within on topics such as the benefits of hand washing and the benison of fertiliser. Posing questions in the form of catchy chapter titles is one way to get people's attention, and much of the material presented is entertaining and thought-provoking. But what about the conclusions? Can it possibly be true that there is a cheap fix for climate change? But how do we (globally) measure `cheap', and who determines whether it is effective?
I found the various anecdotes interesting and generally entertaining. But I found myself wondering whether this book added materially to the ground already covered so successfully in `Freakonomics'. Clearly, for some readers, it does. I'm not convinced.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
 The dangerous delusions of mathematicians June 26, 2010
T. Burkard (Norwich, England)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Mathematics is a powerful tool--modern civilisation could not exist without it. But mathematics can only answer questions, and it is only an abstract tool: the trick is to ask the right questions, and understand how the answers apply to the messy world of human affairs. The sub-prime crisis can be rightly be blamed on quants--number crunchers--who devised complex mathematical tools to analyse and manage credit. Their formulae worked, up to a point, and they made a lot of cutting-edge hedge fund managers very rich. But they didn't ask all the right questions, and when the unexpected happened, the house of cards came tumbling down.
Freakonomics isn't quite so dangerous, and of course it's a jolly good read that makes a lot of interesting points. But if you have some background in the subjects he covers, you can see a lot of things that he, as a mathematician and an outsider, has missed. For instance, he dismisses school choice on the basis of data from the Chicago public schools, which has a long-standing 'choice' system. But as he admits, parents who want to opt for a school other than their neighbourhood school merely enter a lottery. Otherwise, as he says, good schools would be over-subscribed and bad ones left empty. Well, ...yes. That's rather the point of school choice. Why should failing schools be kept on life-support systems, thereby condemning their pupils to a third-rate education? Failing schools almost always cater to poor parents who can't afford private schools, and who can't afford to move. In Chicago, there was never any serious intention to improve schools with normal market mechanisms. Levitt seems to have missed the point: the Chicago 'choice' system was merely intended to desegregate schools. And up to a point, it did that.
Levitt also has a grudge against estate agents. He quotes statistics which show that estate agents get better prices for their own houses than for those they sell for their clients. He shows that agents hang on longer to get a better price when selling their own house, but that the increased commission they get for squeezing the last buck out of their customers' houses insn't worth the risk of losing the sale. No doubt this is true, but he doesn't really get into the heads of the buyers, sellers, and estate agents. In my younger days, I worked for a broker in the Detroit suburbs, and most of my life I've bought and sold property for as a profitable sideline to working as a builder, both in the UK and the US. Sellers usually have compelling reasons to sell, and they can't afford to hang on for the top price. Agents can look at it as a business; they know that for any given house at any given time, there are only a very limited number of potential buyers. And it works the other way, too: most buyers have a pretty firm idea of what they want, and in any given area there are not likely to be many houses on the market that fit their picture of an ideal home. Inevitably, most buyers have to compromise. So for the seller, if you don't have any time pressures, you can afford to wait for the magic moment when there's a desperate buyer who wants a house just like yours, and is willing to pay a bit more.
In truth, most agents grossly over-price houses. They do this just to get the listing. Being a real-estate salesman isn't about selling houses: no amount of soft-soap will get anyone to sign a thirty-year mortgage for a house they don't want. Rather, it's about talking people in to listing their houses with you. So most agents give out inflated valuations. The broker I worked for didn't: we'd always give a fair valuation, with no 'cushion' for haggling. The keen prices brought in the buyers, and we turned over houses quickly. So instead, our reputation was based on the fact that we sold houses quickly. And for a lot of sellers, this is of crucial importance: if you've got a good job waiting for you elsewhere, the last thing you need to do is to hang on in hopes of getting a few thousand extra.
The last time I had a house to sell in the US, I implored the agent not to over-price it, and 5 months down the road we still didn't so much as a sniff of an offer (the house was in a desirable area, too). I sacked the agent, flew to the states, and got another agent in. He too wanted to over-price the house. I asked for his book showing recent sales in the area, and very quickly realised that both agents were asking far too much. I told him to take $10,000 off the sales price, and it sold in a matter of weeks. Working out comparable values takes a certain amount of knowledge, but not that much: when I first started selling houses in the early 1960s, it only took a couple of weeks to get the 'feel' for house prices.
In short, Levitt uses numbers to bolster some of his own prejudices. Most of the time, I think he's on the side of the angels. But numbers on their own are useless without an understanding of the reality they represent.
 Freaking Good June 25, 2010
Mr. Christopher Lancaster
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The first book was a worldwide success... and this builds on that success. Strange and bizarre views and facts on things that you'd never previously thought of, it made me see a lot of things in many new ways. The authors question everything from why more women don't become prostitutes (as it can pay very well at the high end) to why child car-seats are so ineffective (apparently), and if you can ignore the fact that it's quite obviously written from an American point of view, it's informative, amusing, and makes you ask, many times, 'why on earth does.....?' If more people questioned things in the same way that Levitt and Dunber, the authors, do, then the world might just be a better place.
 Surprisingly super June 22, 2010
C. Young (London, England)
Back in 2005, Freakonomics pioneered popular socioeconomics, covering such topics as the business practices of crack dealers and the apparent effect of abortion legislation on crime levels. Since then the area has been successfully colonised by a host of other economists and writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Harford and Robert H Frank. Levitt and Dubner's response in Superfreakonomics is to explore even more extreme subject areas such as street sex and global warming. They kick off with the economics of prostitution, including the market for various sex acts (less interesting than one might suppose). Through this they explore their familiar themes of incentives; positive, negative and unintended. Through entertaining scenarios they then show how data analysis (and data mining) can be used to uncover large but hidden trends such as the efficiency of doctors and treatments. Exploring altruism they return to a favourite theme of the difference between what people say they do and what they actually do, and how this can be exposed by ingenious experimentation. A diversion to pet peeve on the safety efficiency of child car seats is followed by the most `controversial' or even heretical section, their contention that global warming can be `fixed' by relatively simple technical solutions. In a sense the whole book leads to this. By establishing early on that scientific analysis can be used to deconstruct emotionally-charged contexts, the authors' techno-positive stance thus seems surprisingly reasonable. They are not as I had thought climate change `deniers', but believe, rather charmingly, that "humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems".
A must read! fantastic! June 17, 2010
Guy Grobler (Israel & UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An absolutely fantastic sequel even better then the first one in the series ("Freakonomics"/Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner). This book deals with more of the same as we had in the first book but digs deeper into how the world works by economic rules and how people around the world are living their life unaware that their behaviour is actually predictable when using economic tools. There's more to it though - the book deals with old and new moral questions (prostitution, suicide bombers, altruism and environmentalism) and it exposes time after time how even when the problem looks very critical or complex their might be an easy (and cheap) solution. The epilogue is outstanding. I wont say a word about it but you simply must read it even if you don't intend to read the book (and its only 6 pages) - it really blew my mind away to the many possibilities it opens. READ THIS - ITS BRILLIANT!!!!!
Showing reviews 16-20 of 141
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