Some of the best ideas in history - nearly all of them, in fact - sounded crazy at first

When to Rob a Bank...and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intentioned Rants. Collection of blog posts that haha, you could have just read for free. Sucker!

It was fine. It was entertaining, as Freakonomics tends to be. They were upfront about the fact that you totally could have just read the blog posts for free on their site, so at least I didn't feel blindsided by that. They felt a little bad for it but justified by it by comparing it to bottled water.

So in the tradition of Poland Spring, Evian, and other hydro-geniuses, we've decided to bottle something that was freely available and charge you money for it.

They do point out they curated which posts they included to pick the best ones, arranged them in an order that made sense and did some editing. So not exactly what's on the blog. And honestly, while I listen to the podcast, I don't really read the blog so a good amount of the stuff here was new to me.

Some of the ideas are clever or at least interesting. There's a post titled "Planned Parenthood Gets Freaky"talks about a Philly Planned Parenthood strategy called "Pledge-a-Picket". This PP got a lot of protesters so the idea was people would pledge a certain amount per protester (minimum ten cents) that showed up. The PP would count and record the number and place a sign in full view of the protesters that let them know exactly how them showing up is benefitting the Planned Parenthood.

There's another post about using a different bus stop than normal, which in and of itself doesn't sound that interesting, but it does have the line

Having just gotten off the subway, the Point A passengers are already broken in spirit and can't muster the energy to improve their commute

which quite accurately describes public transportation commuting. I understand why those people don't want to walk another block over.

Because these are just blog posts, each chapter is short (which is how they can shove 131 of them in here) which can be a good thing if you just want to jump in and read a couple quickly. But I also found myself wishing they'd take some of these blog posts and expand them into longer chapters. I would really want them to dig into a topic when all of a sudden, the post is done and we're onto a different topic.

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Title quote from page 5

Dubner, Stephen and Steven Levitt. When to Rob a Bank...and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intentioned Rants. William Morrow, 2015.

When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places

I am a fan of the Freakonomics offerings ever since my friend bought the first book for my other friend.* I've read that first book multiple times. I've read the follow up Superfreakonomics a few times. I regularly listen to the podcast. When I saw Think Like A Freak was on sale, I naturally snagged a copy. And in the end I was sort of...disappointed.

Think Like A Freak is sort of a guide for how they approach problems. It's interesting and it makes a lot of good points and I highlighted a lot of passages. But here's the thing. I've heard a lot of this already on the podcast. Which I suppose is understandable, cos they come out with a new podcast practically every week and that is a lot of material to have to come up with, so naturally there are repeats in the book. But a lot of it was repeats, so while I enjoyed reading it, I already knew a bunch of the (very good!) points they were going to make.

That and the book contains a lot of notes. Apparently. That in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. But, as I read it on my Kindle,  I have the little % completed bar running along the bottom. I was at 52% when I read "Let us tell you one more story..." and I thought "Shit, there is no way this last story takes up the other 48%." Surprise, it only took up another 5%. That is 43% notes, acknowledgement, and footnotes. So yeah. Made me happy I bought this on sale.

Let's focus on the good things. Because I did like the book and I did just pick up When to Rob a Bank by the duo (on sale, of course).

Unlike the previous two books, which focused on a number of relationships between seemingly unrelated topics (sumo wrestlers and Chicago school teachers, for example). This time around the book is more of a how-to guide, explaining how to approach problems "like a freak" to get to the bottom of these complicated questions. As with the other books, the main thesis is that you shouldn't trust conventional wisdom**, just because it's conventional and that everyone responds to incentives so figuring out those incentives can help solve (or at least identify) the problem. And they do still tie together seemingly unrelated people; one section is titled "What Do King Solomon and David Lee Roth Have in Common?"

One of the parts that stuck with me the most came from their chapter about quitting (and why it can be GREAT!) about performing premortems.

Many institutions already conduct a postmortem on failed projects, hoping to learn exactly what killed the patient. A premortem tries to find out what might go wrong before it's too late.

The idea of listing out all the ways a person (or a project or an idea) could fail sounds like a bad idea. You could talk yourself out of it and then what? Better to focus on what will go right. And while I agree you could talk yourself out of whatever it is, I still think the benefits could outweigh the costs because you plan for possible scenarios in which everything could go to shit. Because if you go through those, if anything bad does happen, you already know what to do. Or you can actually set up the systems in place so the bad stuff doesn't have a chance to happen. Yes this can take time and make people uncomfortable, but given the example they use, seems like it's more than a fair trade-off.

This section talks about the Challenger disaster. Essentially, a group of experts had already suggested that the O-rings would fail, which was exactly what caused the explosion. In this case, the decision was made to go forward, which ended up being a tragic decision, but that's what lead to this group decided to start planning these "premortems" and hopefully actually listening to the results.

Overall I recommend the book. Or the podcasts. Or both. Just know that you'll be hearing a lot of the same stuff. Good stuff, but the same regardless.

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*It was a going-away gift when my friend and I spent a semester in Italy. He got her Freakonomics cos she likes finance and economics and sociology and whatnot and he got me Will in the World because SHAAAAKESPEARE. He is an excellent gift-giver, to this day, as evidenced by my recent Night Vale Community Radio mug.
**If you're looking for other "Everything you know is wrong" type stuff, might I suggest Adam Ruins Everything, which is one of my new favorite things.

Title quote from page 51, location 797

Dubner, Stephen and Steven Levitt. Think Like A Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. HarperCollins, 2014. Kindle

People respond to incentives

I had been waiting for what felt like forever to start reading SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Not just because I wanted to read it but was in the middle of the China Rican reading challenge. I was/am a big fan of their first book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and was looking forward to a follow up as soon as I finished this one. But I wanted the book in paperback and I had to wait for it. I would read through a few pages whenever Boyfriend dragged me to the Apple store, so thank you Jobs for making SuperFreakonomics one of the example books in your book store.

SuperFreakonomics is a mix of economics and sociology, albeit a simplified version of both. Levitt's credentials, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, covers the economics details, while Dubner, a former writer and editor for The New York Times, takes on the writing duties. The title quote covers the basic theme to both books, and they elaborate on this further: "People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences." (xiv) They ask what seem like unusual or even pointless questions: what does a department store Santa and street prostitute have in common? or should a suicide bomber buy life insurance? and then use statistics to tease out an answer.

They examine problems but don't necessarily offer solutions. They're not really trying to persuade anyone that the results they provide mean we have to take any sort of action. Indeed, if there's anything one should take away from this it's the idea that things are related in crazy ways that may not seem obvious at first, second, third look and before dismissing something it's important to look at the problem from lots of different angles. They never claim their results are infallible and encourage people to challenge them on their blog. I've seen complaints about how the conclusions they come to are garbage and they're research methods are incomplete. That could certainly be the case, but you can't actually tell what their research methods are in this book because the book isn't made up of academic papers. If it was, I don't think it would be nearly as interesting because, let's face it, academic research papers aren't usually the most interesting thing to read and an NYT Bestseller they do not make.

If you liked Freakonomics, you'll probably like this one. It's really just more of the same, but that's not a bad thing. There are an unlimited amount of questions to be asked and this book just asks a few that didn't get asked with the first book. To be honest, if they end up writing another book, I'll probably read that one as well.

Title quote from page xiv

Dubner, Stephen and Steven Levitt. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Harper Perennial, 2009.