Let's get freaky!


Is a provocative novel looking past the morals and opinion of people, media, and stereotypes,
and bringing it back to cold hard fact based on research and data. I felt Freakonomics is a miss leading title. It made me think it was going to be about strange things that have occurred in history. But it is actually the opposite of that. Diving deeper into the story slicing each layer down like an onion searching for clues as to why everything is as it is. And why things happened the way they did. As well as why certain outcomes came out to be that way. Freakonomics enlightened me to the fact that so much of the information we get for our daily life is very much so altered by personal opinion. Such as our parents the news our teacher even our president is considered “fact" but it truly swayed greatly by the opinion and morals of a group of people. Take for example the very first chapter of Freakonomics. The authors talk about the early 1990's and the unusual amount of teenage violence. Our own president predicted a dramatic spike in the teenage crime rate. Unfortunately the percentage of teenage violence dropped significantly by almost 50%. The government told people the reason for the dramatic drop in teen violence was to be credited to the outstanding works of government programs teaching kids to behave as regular productive citizens. The truth was abortion was preventing under privileged children from even being born to be a menace to society. Reading farther into the book I started to realize trends made in the book such as a cause and effect plot in which one outcome occurred because of the effect of a previous occurrence. Frakonomics doesn't follow a specific story line; it more is a bunch of short stories compiled into a novel. Most stories are somehow connected in some way such as money, government, or some kind of economic statistics. In short Freakonomics questions all that we know to be fact in our society. Freakonomics has many fallacies as well as pointing many fallacies made in society. And even the world. For example Dubner the author talks about how many people think crack dealers are gross homeless men or pimps. This is a hasty generalization because a lot of crack dealers actually live with their mothers and makes on average 100,000 dollars a year. Freakonomics was a great book, slow at times and a little difficult to follow but overall it was a great book!