Stephen Dubner – Cannonball Read 17

Where are my footnotes?

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner

October 22, 2023 by CoffeeShopReader Leave a Comment

Bingo 25: On the air I first heard of Freakonomics as an NPR show; I think the radio (aka air-waves) form fits this concept better than the written. Firstly, every chapter in the book opens with some reference to the brilliance of the economist author (the other author is a journalist); granted Steven Levitt does seem pretty unconventional as an economist and I do think his novel approach leads to really interesting insights. However, the repeated reminders of his brilliance start to get irritating. The […]

Outdated, but easy to see why it’s popular.

February 12, 2018 by alwaysanswerb Leave a Comment

I’m afraid I don’t really have much interesting commentary to contribute to the discourse around Freakonomics. The first edition was published over 10 years ago, and I strongly suspect that the contents seemed much more “rogue” then, than they do now, in the thick of a Big Data revolution where these type of interdisciplinary data-mining projects to form sociological hypotheses have become altogether common and trendy. Clearly, Levitt and Dubner have a good sense for interesting topics and an accessible approach to exploring them, as […]

I wish more sites would do this

January 27, 2018 by octothorp Leave a Comment

This was purchased remaindered so I wasn’t upset when I found this was less a new freakonomics book and more a collection of their blog posts collected into book form. It wouldn’t have even been a disappointment new if I’d been aware that’s what I was buying. But it definitely feels like the collection of essays written for online readers that it is. Each piece is short and minimally explored, some being absolute puff and others leaving me feeling deprived that they weren’t expanded upon. […]

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