Last year, when I told my wife that the fellow who sold us the ’best’ possible insurance scheme has just given us the ’best’ deal not from our perspective, but from his, she did not believe me. I stand vindicated after reading ’Freakonomics’ - which reaffirms my beliief in the obvious - that agents want to sell those things which give them the highest benefits (which are usually going from our pockets).
I know this isn’t a great discovery... but in spite of this very simple logic, we often fall into these traps.As the author says in the beginning, there really is no central theme of this book. The common thread I found throught however, is the fact that ’things may not be as they look’. I won’t discuss what all this book talks about - you can read it yourself to find out. I’ll just say that it puts our conventional wisdom on its head and talks about how data can reveal much more than we can ever imagine.A specifically important point talked about in the book is the difference between ’corelation’ and ’causality’. Quite often we mistake a causality for a corelation.
I like to give the example of the corelation of the performance of cricketers on field with their advertisements. We hear people saying that cricketers are not able to perform well because of advertisements - so doing commerials causes bad performances for cricketers. However, cricketers usually get more ads when they are performing well. So when they are doing several commercials, it is only more likely that we expect more out of their performances. When they can’t perform (due to various reasons other than doing commercials), we tend to think that commercials cause poor performance.
The logic could be the other way round. If cricketers do not perform well, they may well end up losing their advertising contracts! So if anything, more commercail contracts should mean more pressure to perform! In this case, while there is a corelation between performance of cricketers and commercials, the causality we perceive may not be there.The last part of the book which focussed on parenting and trends related to people’s names seemed a bit boring to me. Though the point the authors make is absolutely valid, I feel it could have been done without so many details.
Also, though all the points have been presented with good backing of data, after reading, you may feel "I’m not sure if I was not already aware of these things". However, this book brings to the top, that implicit wisdom usually sits at the bottom of our minds and eventually does not come handy in times of need. All-in-all, good entertainment plus a different perspective of the world we live in.