Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitts search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isnt really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when its wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006073132X/qid=1125513008/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-3809526-9000844?v=glance&s=books
Popular Posts
-
...These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individu...
-
The concept of dragons was probably brought to Japan around 2,000 years ago, along with the technology for paddy agriculture. Their images h...
-
Finally went out and picked up a Nintendo Wii. My god the thing is fun. Ridiculously, ludicrously fun. Hiyat and I had to tear ourselves...
-
His system, he said, starts with a laser that sends part of its beam into photo detectors which produce electrical signal that feed back to ...
-
...why was this given the file name of skyfall?... Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to beli...
-
The challenge of having the United States as a neighbour was one of the topics discussed Tuesday during a meeting with Mexican President Vic...
-
When it comes to buying equipment, think g, not b. New 802.11g hardware is nearly five times faster than 802.11b gear, and it will interoper...
-
Here's my (edited) journal entry for this event dated 12/01/98: Wow. I just sessioned and started reading "The Tao of Physics"...
-
Someone that gets it. Service-oriented software, when done correctly in a platform-agnostic way can be flexible, cheap, and can motivate m...
-
This edition provides a prose rendering of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the cycle of poems preserved on clay tablets surviving from ancient Mesopo...
