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    SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
    Unavailable
    SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
    Unavailable
    SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
    Ebook392 pages5 hours

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

    By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    SuperFreakonomics was an instant New York Times bestseller that caused a media uproar, continuing the amazing success begun with the groundbreaking, worldwide sensation Freakonomics. SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:

    • How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
    • Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?
    • How much good do car seats do?
    • What’s the best way to catch a terrorist?
    • Did TV cause a rise in crime?
    • What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?
    • Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?
    • Can eating kangaroo save the planet?
    • Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?

    Freakonomics has been imitated many times over -- but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 24, 2011
    ISBN9781554688456
    Unavailable
    SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
    Author

    Steven D. Levitt

    Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most influential American economist under forty. He is also a founder of The Greatest Good, which applies Freakonomics-style thinking to business and philanthropy. Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning journalist and radio and TV personality, has worked for the New York Times and published three non-Freakonomics books. He is the host of Freakonomics Radio and Tell Me Something I Don't Know.

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    Reviews for SuperFreakonomics

    4/5

    68 ratings73 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Amazing! I definately want to purchase for my special "owned" home books. This is definately a keeper.
    • 3/5
      This was good but not that good (and not nearly as good as the original). I felt like this lacked focus on actual research and had more rank speculation about things that someone might maybe do in the future and how the world might maybe respond to those things.

      Non-serious spoiler alert: the answer to the teaser on the front cover is super lame. Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance? The answer is not, as I expected, some interesting and surprising bit of trivia borne out by research that shows that intended suicide bombers die more frequently by other means. Nope, suicide bombers should buy life insurance because then data profilers will be less likely to identify them as potential suicide bombers.

      In other news, if you want to get away from somewhere without being noticed, you probably should try walking calmly and blending into a crowd, instead of running for your life. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or an economist) to tell you that if you don't want to be identified as different from everybody else, try doing the things that everybody else does.
    • 2/5
      Just didn't dig this one like I did the first.
    • 2/5
      Behavioural economics an interesting subject area, and although the topics this book covers are interesting, and the results thought provoking the book itself is light-weight and has a lot of padding. Not the follow-up to Freakonomics I was looking for.
    • 4/5
      Ok. This book is by no means perfect. More so than in the original Freakonomics, the arguments Levitt and Dubner make do have some clear holes in them, and this book doesn't really seem very well-organized--Levitt and Dubner go on some SERIOUS tangents on multiple occasions. That being said, though, Super Freakonomics was still VERY enjoyable: its subject matter was more fascinating than Freakonomics' was (who doesn't want to read about capuchin monkeys who use money or sulfur-belching garden hoses that could prevent global warming?), and the very way that Levitt and Dubner write is still so engrossing. All in all, I guess, this book does in some ways feel like the "Freakonomics for Dummies" book that Levitt and Dubner so didn't want to write (as per their introduction to this one) in that it feels really, really contrived at points, but it is worth reading just because it's so satisfying.
    • 5/5
      Picks up right where the first left off - documenting real-world instances of unintended consequences.
    • 4/5
      This is a great book to listen to while driving in ones car. I did that with Freakonomics and enjoyed this book in the same manner. The sequel probably isn't quite as fascinating as the original, but it's pretty darned close. These two guys have a really unique way of looking at why things work as they do in the world. They also have their fingers on the pulse of some fascinating solutions being considered for global warming. If you have an interest in why the world works as it does, I'd highly recommend this book.
    • 5/5
      Second time reading and still worth the read. It can be a little disheartening to know that some (many / maybe most) of the things discussed didn't make it into mainstream in the past 10 years. That is a lesson in itself and the concept is supported by a few of the stories in SuperFreakonomics.
    • 5/5
      In their follow-up book to Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt (economist) and Stephen J. Dubner (journalist) explore the microeconomics behind such diverse topics as prostitution, the banking preferences of terrorists, and whether a simple, elegant solution can be found to global warming.Like the first book, this takes on diverse topics, and gives lots of numbers but doesn't always have an ultimate solution. That being said, the conversation starters themselves are fascinating, and make you look at real life situations - like giving away money to charity or other potentially altruistic endeavors - in new ways. The audio is read by co-author Stephen Dubner; he does a good job for a non-actor (probably aided by the fact this is nonfiction), so it added to the experience to hear one of them, especially showing the dry sense of humor that doesn't always come out clearly in text.
    • 5/5
      I read this book in about two days. Personally, I love books from this genre, a collection of fascinating anecdotal stories coupled with brilliant experiments and research about all sorts of topics.

      The Freakonomics books lack a coherent theme, which is part of what makes it so interesting. The chapter headings, like the subtitle of the book, are extremely enticing. And while the chapter opens and closes with a particular subject matter, they jump all over the map with the stories and research within the chapter to prove the original point.

      It's well written, easy to read, and full of fascinating studies that will leave you dumbfounded. I'd highly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      The anecdotes, quotes, statistics, and experiments are all absolutely fascinating. Sadly, the conclusions the authors draw from these things are very often completely incorrect and pointed out ad nauseum by those far more intelligent and expert than myself.
    • 3/5
      Good! The main reason I gave it three stars is that it basically just more of Freakonomics - a book I loved. It's also short and feels like a few good magazine articles put into a hardcover binding.
    • 3/5
      Interesting tidbits of useless information for the average person. Probably would be more interesting for students studying economics and psychology. I learned more about prostitution than I ever actually wanted to know.
    • 4/5
      The authors have done it again. The topics mentioned in the book divulge some very useful pointers and helps in critical thinking about the world around you.It was nice to recall Ignaz Semmelweiss's story about saving mothers.My views about global warming has definitely taken a turn. CO2 is not that bad after all!Somehow I felt the book was dry at places and that's why it lost a point. Nevertheless, I'll definitely read if their next version comes out.
    • 5/5
      The Stevens have done it again. The follow-up to the immensely popular Freakonomics could have easily been a rushed cash-grab, but the authors took their time crafting an entry worthy of the series and it paid off. SuperFreakonomics is another home run.
    • 3/5

      I did not enjoy this (quite short) book as much as I did the original Freakonomics. Some of the topics covered are well-covered in other places, like in Malcolm Gladwell's books. There was less highlighting of Levitt's work and more of other economists and psychologists.

      A brief hodgepodge of things you can glean from this book:
      Horses were essentially the climate change problem of the late 1800s. Your odds of dying from a horse-related accident in NY in late 1800s higher than dying from a car accident today. Manure caused pollution, sanitation issues. Demand for horses and horse feed drove up prices of food.

      The market for prostitutes. Prostitutes in Chicago are more likely to be paid for sex by a cop than be arrested by one. This chapter was a bit tough to stomach. An educated woman leaves her job in finance in order to become an expensive escort, makes a lot of money, and then later decides to leave her job to go back to school-- to become an economist.

      Behavioral economists used experiments to show that humans were inherently altruistic-- contra Darwin's theory of natural selection-- until other behavioral economists showed that people were only altruistic when they were asked to participated in experiments conducted by behavioral economists.

      Monkeys have been shown in experiments to be irrational like humans-- loss averse, and capable of understanding money as a medium of exchange.

      Education is positively correlated with bad outcomes like suicide bombings and preventable diseases in hospitals (doctors do worse at washing their hands than lesser-educated assistants).

      The chapter on global warming is a large part of the book and has been the most controversial (read their entire blog post response). Dubner and Levitt highlight some very smart researchers who decry the simplistic messages put out by the media and Al Gore. Reducing CO2 emissions, for example, will not be helpful and will cost more than it will help. They have simple solutions, like putting SO2 into the atmosphere, that can be done very cheaply and have the effect of counteracting global warming. Sea levels have been rising for thousands of years as the oceans warm. As they warm, they expand, and it has nothing to do with glacial melting. These researchers are frustrated with the archaic and outdated models usually used by climatologists. I assume Dubner and Levitt highlight them for no reason other than they don't think they've been getting fair press. They highlight the simple inventions that trump conventional wisdom. The global warming examples are similar to that of the child safety seat-- the safety seat has not been proven to be more effective at preventing child death/injury than the standard safety belt, and yet the government keeps pushing for children to use them for longer periods.

      3 stars out of 5.
    • 3/5
      A interesting read, especially the stuff about prostitution and monkeys using money. What let the book down was the love-in that the authors see to have developed with the people who worked for IV.
    • 2/5
      While this book contains little tidbits of information, it is far from the teaching and referencing tool that the original book was. It almost seems like this book was an after thought compiled with information that was leftover from the first book's research.
    • 3/5
      Not as good as I remember the first one being, but still an interesting read.
    • 3/5
      This second installment in the "Freakonomics" series was an interesting listen but fell short (same with the first book). I really enjoy the Freakonomics bit on NPR and think it would be easy to translate this into a book format but for some reason the books aren't as interesting or compelling. I can't say it wasn't an entertaining read because it did keep my attention the whole time. Some topics I enjoyed more than others and if Levitt wrote another book like this, I would audiobook it in a heartbeat since it makes for a great "listen".
    • 4/5
      This is a great book to listen to while driving in ones car. I did that with Freakonomics and enjoyed this book in the same manner. The sequel probably isn't quite as fascinating as the original, but it's pretty darned close. These two guys have a really unique way of looking at why things work as they do in the world. They also have their fingers on the pulse of some fascinating solutions being considered for global warming. If you have an interest in why the world works as it does, I'd highly recommend this book.
    • 3/5
      Not as good as Freakonomics, they lost me in a few of the chapters. I may have to read it again to fully "get it."
    • 3/5
      I like that this shows up in the search list above "The Use and Abuse of Logic," because, yeah. Like its predecessor, this is a lovely popcorn read but not very convincing. Lots of broad sweeping conclusions, not-very-detailed discussions of data, and an increasingly disturbing pattern of racist and classist assumptions. I'm not unhappy to have read it, but I can't bring myself to defend it.
    • 4/5
      Another fascinating book by these two authors, Superfreakonomics looks at everything from bystander apathy to the difference having a pimp makes for a Chicago prostitute. The writing style is wry and entertaining, and the topics covered are explored through real-world data and have real-world repercussions. I definitely hope these authors write more books in this vein.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating follow-up to Freakonomics! Days later, I am still thinking about it. I recommend these books for anyone interested in learning more about how the world works.
    • 4/5
      This followup to Levitt's Freakonomics is just as interesting, funny and insightful as the first installment. Recommended!
    • 4/5
      I think I'm probably pretty much satiated with the application of (sciencey thing) to (everyday thing) book genre. At least in regard to (sciencey thing)=(economics). Which, I suspect, is unlikely to stop me picking up other books in the genre in the future. I did feel like I'd read a whole heap of this before in one form or another though.
    • 4/5
      The Sequel to Freakononics still a good book but simply not as fascinating and mind-blowing as it's predecessor. Sometimes the themes aren't so good (the one with global warming was... well, I simply don't understand why it was in the book) sometimes simply not interesting enough. But was a god read still. I enjoyed especially the economics of prostitution and some odd litlle details (the perils of drink-and-walk, why footballists have their birthday in the first months of the yeat, etc.)
    • 4/5
      While I thoroughly enjoyed the first book, Freakonomics, I felt that SuperFreakonomics lacked some of the spark the first book had. The book still applied humor and economics in laymen terms, but maybe the topics weren't as interesting. While I still recommend this book, I suggest if you had to pick between this book and the first one, you pick the first one.
    • 2/5
      interesting stories, some of which are worthwhile knowing to tell at (dinner)parties.