Book Review Freakonomics Essay -- Steven Levitt

Anybody living in the United States in the advance(prenominal) 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the periodical news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been stimulate fall out of his skin... The culprit was discourtesy. It had been rising relentlessly - a graph plotting the plague rate in any American city over young decades looked like a ski slope in profile... Death by gasfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace, So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery, and rape. flushed crime was a grue approximately and constant companion...The culprit was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick regime reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenageager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him we were told, a generation of killers about to confound the country into de epest chaos...Criminologist James Alan Fox predicted two outcomes. The optimistic that the rate of teen homicides would rise another fifteen percent over the next decade. The bearish that it would more than double...Then all of a sudden, instead of going up and up and up, the crime rate began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every syndicate of crime in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated, especially because the public had been anticipating the opposite...Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop, which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions, they now hurried to... ...age. Levitt explores this passage with the same orgasm that he uses to explore the conceal side of many other much(prenominal) examples in society that experience been overlooked and accepted as naturalized wisdom for far too long. Take the parents who feel confident that they have made the right decision to forbid their barbarian to play at a friend?s house whose family owns a gun, but allows their child to play at a friend?s house that has a pool. Levitt shows that the child is about ten thousand times more credibly to drown in the swimming pool than in a gun accident, but that the violent conventional mindset associated with guns wrongly portrays their potential of causation death. Through these examples, Levitt establishes Freakonomics as a way by which the reader should operate their life, never totally accepting something until every stone has been upturned, eventually exposing its hidden