I mulled over how to review this book for about a week, but finally I decided just to write what came to mind.

Overall, I enjoyed the unorthodox way of viewing the world that Freakonomics provides. It's refreshing to try and view the world through a less conventional lens and see what new insights I could gain from it. I remember in high school how one of my teachers introduced us to a selection of the last chapter on white names and black names, and the Winner/Loser dichotomy left such an impression on me that I decided to perform a little experiment on my cat by calling it unpleasant names in a pleasant voice. The goal was to determine if it was the word that mattered or whether it was the way it was said that would change my cat's behavior. Naturally, not being a very rigorously designed experiment, I didn't learn very much.

With that said, this book does seem a little overly impressed with itself. Each chapter starts with a third-person perspective on Levitt that tries to paint him as an objective, nerdy oddball with the Harvard world both against him and simultaneously in deep admiration of him. It's a nerd fantasy, and an inconsistent one at that. In the early chapters he doesn't fit in with the elite economists, but in another chapter his dress code is described as "high nerd," as if he is one of their model representatives. It would be one thing if these discrepancies were used to show his personal growth from how Freakonomics has changed his own world perspective, but they are simply left unexplained.

More importantly though, I'm not sure how true these claims are. I was so fascinated by the chapter on how a whistleblower used information to trivialize the KKK that I Googled it to learn more... only to discover that Levitt and Dubner's claims have been widely criticized by both academics and the people they interviewed. When I considered how this book is written--as if each of their claims is a fact rather than disputed (which is what real scientific research is more like) and with little attention given to the source of their statistics--I decided to side with the critics. When the book's selling point is that Levitt stands on some convenient fantasy middleground which somehow offends both "liberals" and "conservatives" (neither of which Dubner bothers to really define) so that he emerges as a shining beacon of apolitical truth, then it's probably too good to be true. Sorry, but from my experience, just about everything can become political.

My final verdict is that I'd say it is entertaining reading, but its value is questionable beyond that.