Rough Draft

Recent Reading

I just finished reading a couple books I got for my birthday. First was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. After finally reading all of the Harry Potter books last summer and enjoying them, I was definitely looking forward to this one. The Half Blood Prince was certainly an enjoyable read and I'm anxious to see how the story all wraps up. I still say that my favorite of the Harry Potter books is number 4, The Goblet of Fire. So, needless to say I'll be seeing the movie when it comes out this fall.

The other book I got was Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (economist) and Stephen J. Dubner (New York Times journalist). I absolutely loved it and recommend it to everyone. The book covers a wide variety of topics from the similarities between teachers and sumo wrestlers to the real cause of the nationwide crime drop of the 90s. Though the authors say right from the beginning that it has "no unifying theme", I would argue that the theme is looking at conventional wisdom, and finding out where it's conventional simply because it's "simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting, though not necessarily true".

Perhaps the best part of the book is that is simply looks at hard data and lets the numbers do the talking. It eschews trying to force the data to be politically correct or fit into some moral standard and instead looks at what the data is telling us (though you aren't going to be learning the ins and outs of regression analysis from this book). They say it best in the epilogue when describing what you might get out of this style of thinking:

Will the ability to think such thoughts improve your life materially? Probably not.
...
You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren't quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular. To claim that legalized abortion resulted in a massive drop in crime will inevitably lead to explosive moral reactions. But the fact of the matter is that Freakonomics-style thinking simply doesn't traffic in morality. As we suggested in the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

I definitely intend to read some of Levitt's papers and other material referenced in the book. And as I said, I highly recommend this book to everyone, so if you want to borrow it from me, just let me know.