Well, we’ve been staring at the Freakonomics manuscript so much that it now looks beautiful to us — warts, clotted food, and all. So we started to think that maybe some people would actually want to read it, and after reading it, might even want to express their opinions about it. Thus, the birth of this website. We hope it’s a happy (or at least happily contentious) home for some time to come.
– SDL & SJD
and 
. You can also watch it on 
When I was at my Harvard 25 th reunion the dogmatic approach to life of the young in the sixties bothered me because of the certainty in their rightousness. I proposed that we should invite all the professors we had 25 years before and ask them to discuss what went wrong with the conventional wisdom they taught us
I think particularly of:
(1) the $ gap would never be closed
(2) ther was no other way to look at the economic world except thru Keynesian eyes
You have shown us in your book the fallacies of conventional wisdom and I hope made all os us more skeptical of what is presented to us as the “gospel truth”
I’m not quite as educamated as the rest of the people posting here, but I wanted to state for the record that I really do have the most beautiful baby in the world. Everyone else is wrong about their own kid.
Oh, and the book is great. However, it fails to account for the fact that 78% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Dear Dr. Levitt and Dr. Dubner
I think your book is amazing. I am an undergraduate economics major and I have always loved looking at the world through the lens of rational actor theory. I am sure I will re-read your book again very soon — until I do, please keep posting, I am sure your worldview will be a great addition to the blogosphere.
Sarah
Anonymous, you said:
“I think economists, who desperately want to believe that people and markets are “rational” are not in a good position to describe the world how it really is, given how badly you want vN&M’s expected utility theory, Becker’s rational choice theory, etc. to be true.”
I’m not saying I agree that economists in general desperately want to believe particular things, but regardless, I reiterate that if you read this book and you think that Dubner and I fall prey to that trap, I’ll gladly refund you the price of the book. This is a book about data and ideas, not dogma.
Steve Levitt
Anonymous…we’re not speaking
for a discipline, we are
speaking for ourselves. Our
point is that often people
are blind to the way things
really work because they so
badly want the world to work
in some other way. If you read
the book and think we’re not
shedding light on the world
around us, I’ll send you a
check for the price of the book.
Steve Levitt
SL: Our point is that often people
are blind to the way things
really work because they so
badly want the world to work
in some other way.
I agree with this statement in general. I think economists, who desperately want to believe that people and markets are “rational” are not in a good position to describe the world how it really is, given how badly you want vN&M’s expected utility theory, Becker’s rational choice theory, etc. to be true.
Hmm, whenever I finish writing something, I never want to see it again!
“Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: if morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.”
Kind of arrogant for a discipline that is still in the process of evolving from a faith-based social science (blind faith in empirical validity of von Neumman & Morgenstern axioms) to an empirical social science (integration of insights from behavioral economists such as Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler, Loewenstein), don’t you think?