Only before yesterday, Economics to me was a subject that I felt I couldn't get close to, or enjoy studying. Like all the college students in China, I was required to study Marxist political economics; for a change, I took a selective in Keynesian economics. Neither course interested me much. To me, Economics dealt with people, and people are irrational, thus Economics couldn't be as rational as natural sciences. So I stuck to my dear natural sciences, and had not looked at Economics other than a simple demand and supply curve.
Freakonomics grabbed my attention from the very beginning. The provocative idea that Roe v. Wade actually contributed to the decrease in crime in the 1990s really intrigued me. I won't give away what the book talks about so that you can enjoy reading it, too. The book made me realize that economists study their subjects just like scientists do: with careful controls. Only by doing so can one arrive at a valid conclusion and understand how things work this way but not that. I am glad to find that the book totally changed my attitude towards Economics. Now I believe that Economics is really science, a social science, the only difference from natural science being that it deals with people and people's incentives. How correct I have been, that people are irrational, and people's incentives can be very strange!
Now some random thoughts:
1. The first time I spent time to learn what was Roe v. Wade was when I saw the debut performance of Joe Wong, a Chinese immigrant comedian, on the David Letterman Show. Answering the question "what is Roe v. Wade?" he looked around, and said, "two ways of coming to the US?" I had to check it out in order to understand his joke! So, Troubadour, I still need a lot of enlightenment about the US law!
2. Speaking about cheating teachers (yes, teachers cheat, too!), I now believe that Sword Angel's Chinese Revolution History teacher was one. Remember that your class got a list of important stuff to study? Our teacher gave us nothing. So I was a little nervous to just study based on the list, worrying that it might be misleading. Oh boy, wasn't I surprised to see the exam which was literally every second point on the list! So the question was, what was the incentive for the teacher to do so? Was he simply very sympathetic to us poor students who had to put up so much effort on recent history on top of our work load in our major?
3. What a surprise to learn that the economics of drug dealing is so similar to that of any big company, in that lower rank employees strive to become the top executive so that they'd be paid better!
4. The chapter on good parenting makes me feel disheartened. The authors seem to believe that how a child turns out depends on whom his/her parents are, not what they do. So should I feel lucky that I have parents who were well educated, thus I myself became well educated? Does gene determine it all?
5. While I was starting to write this entry, a high school classmate came online on MSN (I seldom sign on MSN) so we chatted. He then said, "as an economist in Shanghai, I'd like to hear your opinion on the next economic drive, seeing that we've had a sustained development driven by the revolution in the IT industry for the past 20 years." Me, a biologist? I then told him that I had only been enlightened by Freakonomics only yesterday, and I really enjoy it and now I like to study people, too!
6. The last time I read a book as exciting as this was David Pollan's The Botany of Desire. I would love to have more suggestions for exciting books!
7. I am going to work on Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking next. Thank you, Troubadour! Hopefully I can at least show you some photos, if not my cooking itself!
1 comment:
I read this book a couple of years ago. Specila view angle on the economics.
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