What I’m Reading

Because it was recommended to me for the past few years as the world’s best economics book, I read and finished Freakonomics yesterday.

Freakonomics takes an unconventional approach at economics and is heavily focused on the fact that one of (if not the) most important components of economics is incentive. You need to have an incentive to do something, and that essentially drives anything related to our economy.

Levitt and Dubner answer some interesting questions by bringing in information from original research. For example, how can a computer find out which teachers are cheating when submitting their students’ national standardized exams? How did a bunch of kids humiliate and damage the Ku Klux Klan? Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers if drug selling yields such great profits? How did the legalization of abortion lower the crime rate? Which is safer for your child, sending him to a house with a concealed gun or a house with a swimming pool? And will naming your child “Winner” really make him a winner?

Although portions of this book went into extremely specific detail that progressed relatively slowly, I was interested in all of the general topics and learned a lot of things that most people would not have expected to be true. Although there is no obvious way the content of this book can be applied to everyday life, I would still recommend this book just for the knowledge it provides.

Click here to purchase Freakonomics on Amazon.com.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #164: What war is worth fighting?

The answer to this seems like common sense, but I think a war over a valued belief or possession in which we have a proportionately high chance of victory is worth fighting.

More specifically, the amount we value this belief or possession has to be far greater than the lives of the equipment and individuals we will lose during the process of the war. As for the chances of victory, if we know that we are going to lose (or we know that the chances of losing are drastically greater than the chances of winning), then it’s probably better not to attempt to fight, lose equipment and soldiers, and end up losing the war overall as well.

This seems like a blatantly obvious answer that shouldn’t even be a prompt to a blog post. I can’t even begin to imagine what these blog prompts are going to look like in December after they’ve done this for 11 months.