Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain

Having previously read Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics (and enjoyed both) I jumped at the change to buy Think Like a Freak when it was a BookBub daily special.

I like this book. I like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's style, and I find their ripped-from-the-headlines approach to thinking about economics-related matters engaging and fun. Eating contest? Check. School reform? Check. Nigerian email scams? Check, check, check. They provide new frameworks for thinking about old problems and breakdown concepts (such as incentives) in ways that make them accessible to the masses.

That said, likely the only true revelation for me in reading this book is that, when debating school reform, evidently most people never stop to consider the role that parents/caregivers play in a child's most formative years and, hence, the limits to said reform. For me the most surprising thing is that the vast majority of people don't account for this! Wherever one stands on education reform, it is hard to imagine many readers disagreeing with the description of the U.S. Congress behaving not as a serious legislative body, but as a "deranged flock of summer campers locked in an endless color war." This in the chapter on how to persuade those who don't want to be persuaded.

Ultimately, Levitt and Dubner write for a wide audience so that whether you're already well-versed in sunk costs vs. opportunity costs, the importance of effective incentives, and the costs of false positives or need a bit of a refresher on statistics and economics, Think Like a Freak is highly readable.