by Steven D. Levitt with Stephen J. Dubner
I wasn’t terribly impressed with this book. But then, economics of any sort rarely impresses me; what’s the use of something with next-to-no predictive value? Economists are forever assuming away anything that doesn’t work with their theories. As a scientist I found the whole subject appalling when I took economics in grad school — and I was even MORE appalled when I did very very well in the course.
And so goes this book: near the beginning he talks briefly about correlation vs. causation, but he then pretty much ignores that extremely critical distinction for the rest of the book. Typical economist, despite his assertions otherwise.
In addition, it could’ve used more editing. I found it quite repetitive.
Read it for fun if you like. It’s good to see an economist at least attempting to think about things outside their usual range of topics. But please take it with a great huge grain of salt.
Hi, MCP –
BoingBoing linked to a site a while back which explains how to take the tags off Amazon book images – see . Or put them on – you can have ‘99% off!’ tags on all four corners if you want.
I’ve gone back to using Barnes and Noble images (but linked to Amazon) since Amazon started putting white space around their images.
Having said that, it’s objectively pretty funny applied to your book #6.
Ha! Yes, yes it is pretty funny.
I thought about stripping the Search Inside tags but frankly I’m much too lazy. And I don’t mind giving Amazon the exposure, since I’m rudely linking their images (although I very much doubt the extra couple of hits will matter to them).