Other than the freaky, intriguing chapter titles, there is nothing much that is really freaky in the book to warrant the title. The book starts off with a lot of promise about Stephen Levitt’s ability to ask interesting questions. But fails miserably in adding anything to the reader’s knowledge.
The book would have been much much better if it had atleast attempted to let the readers peek into Levitt’s mind while forming his freaky questions to be asked of the available data - the way he challenges conventional wisdom.
The difference between correlation and causality forms the central theme of this book, though the authors claim at the outset that they have no unifying theme to this book. You do come across some nuggets of well-worded wisdom like this: if morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.
Early on, the chapters on Sumo wrestlers and Teachers, KuKlux Klan and crime do make some interesting reading. The fluid language and the authors’ ability to explain things in a simple way does help a lot in turning the pages. If you have already read Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, you would find similiar themes popping up but without the cohesive framework of ’’Social Epidemic’’ that Gladwell provided to judge such phenomena. The chapter on Popular rich kid and poor kid names towards the end of the book is too overdrawn and seems to have been added just to fatten the book.
Just as Levitt says, Economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. This book, a collection of seemingly interesting anecdotes, falls short of helping the reader to raise such questions. However I dont mean that it should have been a Economics Thinking for the Dummies either. But a small helping of information on Levitt’s thinking mechanism would have improved the usefulness of the book a lot.
It is often said we just see but not look (at things). Or rather the other way round. This book is about looking and not just seeing. But the pity is nobody can teach you where and how to look.