Name: SuperFreakonomics
Rating: 3.781818181818182 (110 reviews)
ISBN: 9780061927577

Steven D. Levitt

Stephen J. Dubner

Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

SuperFreakonomics

Gavin

Contrarianism unbound by prior plausibility. Most chapters contain something wrong and/or harmful. e.g. the drunk-driving vs drunk-walking claim.
https://www.americanscientist.org/art...

I'm relatively fond of geoengineering, but their uncritical acceptance of Myhrvold's irreversible schtick is scary and foolish. 

A bit more reliable than Gladwell, but this isn't saying much.

global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance

Superfreakonomics

Prashanth Srivatsa

Ridiculously flawed, stunningly entertaining.

Nelson Zagalo

I've written a long review about this book on my Blog in Portuguese.

Chris Aldrich

Not quite as interesting or as compelling as their first book, but worth the time. There seems to be a fair amount of overlapping material with parts of "The Rational Optimist."

Lance Willett

Love this kind of book: thought-provoking, questions things, bust myths. It doesn't delve deep, but it gets your brain juices flowing. Basic thing I got out of it: "in order to change the world, you first need to understand it."

Rui Zhi Dong

great bang value e.g. monkey prostitution

Ilia Markov

SuperFreakonomics is an amusing book which should NOT be taken too seriously. As literature it is lightly written with a big degree of fresh humor and it makes excellent reading (I listened to it in my car and it's really easy to concentrate and follow the authors' line).

It gives credit to Levitt and Dubner that they warn us against taking the book too seriously. Also, even in the introduction they mention that finding a unifying theme of the book might prove somewhat daunting task.

The problem comes from people who'd try to take the book too seriously - as a recipe for what governments ought to do and how we can solve global warming with some very simple, cheap and even wackier solutions.

Hemanth Soni

Avec Freakonomics, leur premier livre (Folio actuel numéro 132), Levitt et Dubner ont transformé notre regard sur le monde en appliquant les méthodes de l'économie aux petites bizarreries de la vie quotidienne. SuperFreakonomics aborde une nouvelle série de questions aussi insolites les unes que les autres. La méthode économique n'est ici ni une simple discipline universitaire ni une stricte explication mathématique de l'"économie", mais un instrument dont il faut se servir pour décrire comment nous prenons des décisions : c'est le mariage de la méthode économique et de la curiosité iconoclaste. Finalement, il ressort de toutes ces démonstrations une redoutable évidence : les êtres humains, que l'économie traite en sujets rationnels et calculateurs, ne font qu'obéir aux incitations.

SuperFreakonomics Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

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