Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is an interesting book. It poses and answers a series of interesting, unrelated, marginally economic questions, such as why drug dealers tend to live with their moms and whether children’s names effect their success in life.

The most appealing aspect, at least for me, is that it’s driven by statistical instead of politically correctness. The questions themselves are generally quite interesting, and it’s written well enough to keep the pages turning. It’s what my friend would call a crapper, meaning you can read the whole thing in one sitting. It’s a short book.

No major complaints. Well, if I have to complain, I’ll bring up two: the lack of a unifying theme, declared early on in the book, actually did turn out to bother me a bit, because I wasn’t sure the book was finished even though it ended. Second, the chapter on parenting was very entertaining and enlightening, and appealed to the smug side of me that wants to believe the my lax attitude is just as good for the kids as the type double-A super moms that litter the neighbourhood. However, something got fishy at the end of that chapter: after spending a lot of time explaining that various factors are not important to the success of a child, as measured by early academic achievement, the ending casually drops a paragraphs on the success of children adopted by successful families, as measured by success later in adult life. The statistician suddenly changes the success criteria, leaving me feeling I’ve been paying intentionally misled to pay attention to the wrong criteria all along. In other words, if early academic success is not a great indicator of adult life success, as that paragraph seems to suggest, why have we been paying it so much heed for the whole chapter?

In any case, this is a good short read, I recommend it.