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Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask--but Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and child...

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the landmark book Freakonomics comes this curated collection from the most readable economics blog in the universe. When Freakonomics was first published, the authors started a blog and they've kept it up. The writing is more casual, more personal, even more outlandish than in their books. Now they've gone through and picked the best of the best. Here, they ask a host of typically off-center questions: Why...

Every day we make decisions, and we don't always choose well. The authors of this book believe that the reason for this is that we are all susceptible to cognitive biases and blunders that make us prone to error. But they demonstrate how we can use our human fallability and the way we think to our advantage

Examines how "price consultants" and retailers convince consumers to pay more for less, and how negotiation coaches offer similar advice for businesspeople cutting deals. Prices are a collective hallucination. Here, author William Poundstone reveals the hidden psychology of value. In psychological experiments, people are unable to estimate "fair" prices accurately and are strongly influenced by the unconscious, irrational, and politically incorrect....

Whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically, Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling to show how people respond to incentives.

Can economics be passionate? Can it center on people and what really matters to them day-in and day-out. And help us understand their hidden motives for why they do what they do in everyday life? Uri Gneezy and John List are revolutionaries. Their ideas and methods for revealing what really works in addressing big social, business, and economic problems gives us new understanding of the motives underlying human behavior. We can then structure incentives...

Marriage is a mysterious, often irrational business. Making it work till death do you part--or just till the end of the week--isn't always easy. And no one ever handed you a user's manual. Until now. Here, Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson offer something new: a clear-eyed, rational route to demystifying your disagreements and improving your relationship. The key, they propose, is to think like an economist. Economics is the study of resource allocation,...

Presents an analysis of such issues as income distribution, saving, taxation, spending, health care, employment, and financial investment, and explains why they have become problematic under current American economic policies.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com The upside of the current Great Recession is that it could drive a stake through the heart of the academic nostrum known as the efficient-market hypothesis. This theory holds that stock and bond markets are nearly perfect -- even during such crazes as the dot-com mania -- and that prices on the exchanges instantly and accurately reflect the available information about publicly traded securities....