The first book by economist Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics was co-authored with Stephen J. Dubner and published in 2005. It features numerous stories and anecdotes that apply economic theory to a diverse array of subjects often ignored by traditional economists. The book encourages people to ask more questions, to be more skeptical, and to think more sensibly about how people behave in the real world.
Freakonomics describes how incentives can explain behavior, the pitfalls of conventional wisdom, the dramatic effects that distant causes can have, how experts use their advantage to serve their own agenda, and the power of data to reveal what is really happening beneath the surface of...