I was impressed by all the good buzz Freakonomics generated a few months ago, so much so that I posted on it and put it on my reading list. I finally got around to reading it over the past few days, and my conclusion is: don't. It's a heavily padded rip-off, and if you've read the extensive reviews, there's little the book will add to your knowledge. There's no doubt Steven D. Levitt is a talented, iconoclastic economist, but the only rationale for his authorial collaboration with journalist Stephen J. Dubner seems to be opportunistically capitalizing on the interest in Levitt generated by Dubner's 2003 profile of him in the New York Times Magazine (which is quoted extensively between the book's chapters; if you can find the article, you'll probably get 90% of the value of the book.)
I still love Levitt's fundamental idea: a willingness to ask challenging, even shocking questions, backed up by rigorous quantitative analysis, will reveal many hidden truths that are papered over by traditional assumptions and conventional wisdom. But the book doesn't deliver on the promise of that idea, leavening occasional insights with pages and pages of excursions into random topics bearing just the slightest relevance to the issue at hand. It felt like Dubner couldn't quite get enough out of Levitt to turn the article into a full-fledged book, so he had to resort to cleaning out his research topic filing cabinet. My notes are littered with phrases like "a book with A.D.D.," "no depth," "insultingly stupid analogies," and "outrageous padding," and finally, "a total waste." I don't want my money back, just the time I spent.
