BGE rating:
This is another book review from the goat! I don’t think that my comments on how good a book is would really cause any ripples, or even get people reading it, but I’m going to give my 2-cents worth anyway.
I must say that I was a little “non-committal” when Freakonomics - A rogue economists explores the hidden side of everything was recommended to me by a dear friend, who despite our relationship only revealed to me lately that he actually majored in Economics (you would never pick it!) I have read my fair share of textbooks in Economics, in fact I find the subject very interesting but this is the only economics book I’d ever label a page-turner. An extraordinary work of social science explanation without oversimplification.
I can’t really pinpoint the key hook that finally got me, I finished the book when I was somewhere over the South China Sea on my way back to Melbourne from HK, so I had time to contemplate the reasons, I came up with 4 possibilities. 1 - Its wacky revisionist title. 2 - Its unsettling take on Roe v. Wade 3 - Its compulsively readable argument that economics does nothing more than study the incentives that drive us or 4 - Just the fact that one of the authors is a mad golf enthusiast like me. Probably all of the above. If you have some time and haven’t read it already then give it a go. On the author’s blog you will find the book has just won the BookSense Award for non-fiction of the year, so there are obviously some people out there who think it’s great. (more…)
