Review on Freakonomics and How it Makes Anyone Suddenly Interested in Economics!

By Alex Trem
So at my local library I saw a copy of Freakonomics in the "best seller" area. After a bit of a internal debate I decided to pick it up and boy was I surprised. This book was really good! While economics can often be told as a boring subject with graphs and numbers decorating a big board the book mainly emphasizes the motivation behind human action. Many people enjoy saying that humans are only motivated by greed and selfishness and Freakonomics does a good job of showing how this motivation might affect us in our day to day lives. Without spoiling some results the book describes and proves with a lot of detail certain interesting questions such as what do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

The presentation of the data and results is one of the major selling points of this book because it is laid out in an enjoyable way while constantly making you want to turn the page and see more mind blowing and humorous details. One of the most interesting topics in the book was how abortion might be a great tool to stop the growth of crime. Once again I don't want to spoil the reasons the author gives to defend his point but a lot of it is definitely based on solid fact. Another topic that many people will most likely deal in their lives presented in the book is how real estate agents might not necessarily be doing the best job possible selling your house even If they earn a % commission to do so. This topic can be applied to many other jobs where people earn commissions and it is quite interesting to see the author's opinion, accompanied by a lot of data, on how some things might not be as we believe they are.

As a final note, this is one of the first book that deals with economics that I completely enjoyed. Not only is it informative but it has great humor and subject matters that can be relevant to our lives instead of only the broad economy of x country. This is a must read, even if you think economy is boring you will probably find some of the subjects presented in the book to be of interest to you