Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I was #47 on the reservation list and I picked it up only...erh, 3 weeks ago? Now the book is due tomorrow and I can't renew it because other people have reserved the same and I am barely through with it. Not that it isn't as great a read as Freakonomics which I reviewed here but because I have been, to use then law-firm parlance "swarmed". With work of course but also with all the fishing and travelling - and it's going to be this way till October.

The Slog Reviews: 10/10 for this book's contents and also for the writing which engages the reader with its light, friendly and informative style. In its explanatory note, the authors said that their previous book had a unifying theme afterall - "People respond to incentives". In this book, using statistics/accumulated data, the authors present theories/conclusions which may change or at least challenge the beliefs and norms that we hold dear.

For eg, from this book we learn that

1. Drink driving is safer than drunk walking in USA (except that a drunk walker isn't likely to hurt or kill anyone other than himself cf drunk drivers)

2. There is good reason to be skeptical of data from personal surveys. There is often a vast gulf between how pp say they behave and how they actually behave (declared preferences and revealed preferences).

3. When the solution to a given problem doesn't lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.

4. Women earn lesser than men. Even Harvard women. Further, a considerable amount of research has shown that overweight women suffer a greater wage penalty than overweight men. The same is true for women with bad teeth. However, there is one labor market which women have always dominated: prostitution. Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. Wages are determined in large part by the laws of supply and demand which are often more powerful than laws made by legislators. The greatest competition to a prostitute is a woman willing to have sex with a man for free and sex outside of marriage was much harder to come by and carried significantly higher penalities than it does today. However, the prostitution market still thrives because men hire prostitutes do do things a girlfriend of wife would never be willing to do.

5. In the business world, to price discriminate, some customers must have clearly identifiable traits that place them in the willing to pay more category and the seller must be able to prevent resale of the product, thereby destroying any arbitrage opportunities.

6. A realtor and a pimp perform the same primary service: marketing your product to potential customers. The Internet is proving to be a pretty powerful substitute for the Realtor.

7. While gender discrimination may be a minor contributor to the male-female wage differential, it is desire - or the lack thereof - that accoutns for most of the wage gap. 3 main factors: Women take fewer finance cources. All else being equal, there is a strong correlation between a finance background and career earnings. Women work fewer hours than men. Women take more career interruptions than men. Female MBS with no children work 3% fewer hours than the average male MBA but female MBS with children work 24% lesser.

8. It is no exaggeration to say that a person's entire life can be greatly influenced by the fluke of his or her birth, whether the fluke is one of time, place or circumstances.

9. Mastery arrives through deliberate practice. Deliberate practice has 3 key components: setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. When it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love because if you don't love what you're doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.

10. What are the characteristics of the best doctors? An excellent doctor is disproportionately likely to have attended a top-ranked medical school and served a residency at a prestigious hospital. More experience is also valuable and oh yes, you also want your ER doctor to be a woman.

11. Human behaviour is influenced by a dazzlingly complex set of incentives, social norms, framing references, and the lessons gleaned from past experience - in a word, context. We act as we do because given the choices and incentives at play in a particular circumstance, it seems most productive to act that way. This is also known as rational behaviour which is what economics is all about.

12. Most giving is impure altruism or wam glow altruism. U give not only because u want to help but because it makes u look good or feel good or perhaps feel less bad.