READING EXPERIENCE OF THE BOOK FREAKONOMICS

  

READING EXPERIENCE OF THE BOOK FREAKONOMICS

                        -           Stephen J Dubner & Steven D, Levitt

 

    Freakonomics is the combined effort of the authors Stephen J Dubner (author and journalist from New York Times) and Steven D Leviit, a young promising Economist from the University of Chicago.  This book explains how the world really works and focusses on incidents from everyday economics. Freakonomics not deals with any technical jargons or mathematical derivations for explaining the complexity of the economic system and surroundings. They take the readers along the lines through sharing experiences and compiling various data they have gathered from newspapers, journals reports and empirical evidences.

    In my opinion, Freaknomics deals more on the behavioural side of the individual and how decisions are taken by different people in different situations. The many ideas put forward by them in the book have been described using adequate and supportive evidence and data.

    In the first chapter, they explain the paradoxes of behaviour when a fine was levied for the late comers in a day care centre. The result was strange that everybody started coming late every day and were ready to pay fine. This indicates pricing / fining shall not lead to the desired results. People revolve more on excuses and seek comfort by accepting the fine. These paradoxes reflect a reverse result on what they are really expected to do.

   As the book progresses, Levitt and Dubner try to explain about the real estate agents and how real estate agents’ goals aren’t aligned with the goals of the sellers. They observe real estate agents use certain code words for communicating and this is exclusively for passing signals between each other. They listed out very common usages in these regards as fantastic, Granite, maple etc.

   Following this chapter, an observation was made on Drug dealers and why a certain stratum of them continues living with their mothers. This is a note that we conventionally believe that drug dealing is a profitable and one and all drug dealers are rich. But the observation was lopsided and there exist a hierarchy. The elite group earns 3% of the profit and the percentage wanes as it moves to the lower layers of dealers, so minimal that they hardly earn to meet ends.  At the same time, they stay in the loop with the expectation that they will move to the top level one day. That’s why the poor drug dealers still live with their moms, they added.

Levitt and Dubner observed the increase in crime rate associated with legalizing abortions to reduce the crime rate. The criminologist and policy makers have the observation that involvement of bastards in criminal activities is frequent and legalizing abortion will result in reducing the crime rate. But this is not true in the sense where both the writers prove through the data as against the conclusion derived by other researchers.

 Levitt and Dubner also state the parameters on what makes a perfect parent, in the sense that they do not support bringing the kids to various tourist spots to make them happier, instead giving them more choices to the child and support his deeds. They observed parents are in the cultural and religious whirlpool and are forced to impose restriction on their child. They also observed the funny moments involved while naming of a child and their representation of identity exhibiting through their names.

        In a nutshell, we could conclude Freaknomics provides an insight into the different perspectives of observation and working practices in an economy. The book deals with plethora of issues on the perspective of social economic as well as political kaleidoscope.

Muhammed Noufal M

Asst. Professor of Economics

Dept. of Economics

Al Shifa College of Arts and Science

Perinthalmanna.