Freakonomics explores quirky consequences of economic realities. If you ever wondered how realtor’s commission structure is impacting your house sale price or if crack dealing is a steady source of income – this book will be of interest to you.
Presented is the most practical version of the economy – one that works, shapes the world around us but is full of twist, turns and messiness of real life.
My Kindle Highlights
- Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.
- Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
- For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it.
- The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones.
- And an exclamation point in a real-estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.
- The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast.
- So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true.
- Working together, journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom.
- The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession: a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes.
- when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.
- An editorial assistant earning $22,000 at a Manhattan publishing house, an unpaid high-school quarterback, and a teenage crack dealer earning $3.30 an hour are all playing the same game, a game that is best viewed as a tournament.
- That’s because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention. An
- “The basic reality,” Sandman told the New York Times, “is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.”
- Risk = hazard + outrage.