Freakonomics - the book

'Freakonomics' is one of those books I enjoy re-reading every few years. I first read it when it was initially published, then again when I started working in business intelligence, and again just recently.

The book asks, and attempts to answer, a series of questions either using publicly available data or by performing experiments.

Some of the questions the book takes up include:

• Do teachers cheat for their students on standardized tests?
• Do real estate agents' and their clients' interests align?
• What was the cause for the decline in crime in the 90's?
• What attributes of the childhood household inform future success?

More than the questions, or even the answers, I find it interesting for the focus on formulating questions and using available data to answer questions. As an example, I found the question of teachers cheating on standardized tests especially interesting.

If teachers were to cheat, how would they do it and how could you detect it?

My first thoughts were retesting the classrooms with unbiased observers in the room or looking for groups of students whose performance pattern looked something like low, high, low in three consecutive years or examination periods. But, assuming you wanted to identify suspicious classrooms without retesting all the classrooms, and assuming you had access to the actual answer sheets (which they did), you could look for patterns in the answers. I hadn't considered that, but of course, as soon as the book started heading in that direction, I jumped to it as well.

Steven Levitt is an economist with a sociology bent. Levitt teamed up with Stephen Dubner, a journalist, and the partnership seems to work well. The result is an easy-to-read series of anecdotes written in a conversational tone with references to the papers or articles that have more detail - good for someone looking for a quick read but also someone who wants to dig into more detail.