Authors: Steven B Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
Publisher: William Morrow (HarperCollins)
Pages: 270
Price: Rs 299
Eisha Sarkar
Posted on Mumbai Mirror on Monday, March 22, 2010 at 04:30:56 PM
The freaks are back! And this time they're talking about 'global cooling, patriotic prostitutes and why suicide bombers should by life insurance'. A glance at Superfreakonomics on the shelf at a bookstore will make you stop in your tracks. And if you've actually read and loved Steven B Levitt and Stephen J Dubner's Freakonomics, chances are that you'll be taking this book home with you. People respond to incentives and undoubtedly, so do you.
You take the bait that the economist-journalist author duo have cunningly thrown at you. You lap up the statistics they throw at you: 307 million miles are walked drunk in America every year, Chicago prostitutes working in brothels in 1920 took as much as $76,000 annually and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 discharged more than 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere resulting in the earth cooling off by 0.5 degrees Celsius over the next two years. You balk at some of the bizarre suggestions they offer such as eating kangaroos to save the planet, a well-regulated market in human organs like that for kidneys in Iran, creating a ground-to-stratosphere pipeline that will dissipate sulphur in the atmosphere and make the earth cooler. And you wonder at the minds that can link Santas to prostitutes, terrorists to insurance, the Islamic month of fasting, Ramadan, to infant deformities and computers to better patient outcomes in emergency rooms of hospitals.
If you've read Freakonomics you may have varied views about this one - ranging from "it's a bit of the old stuff again" to "this one’s much better". The book makes for a good read, with its well-told stories and anecdotes. It scores well in the chapters on Dictator and Ultimatum games that allow you to study altruism and apathy. And this time, the authors have even pulled out more examples from different parts of the world, including India (on how rural women in the country have benefited from cable TV) to illustrate their points of view) and China.
Where the book loses out is in the chapter on global warming where the authors seem to be trying to hard to prove their point - that Al Gore's doomsday scenarios "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame." It is this claim by the authors that have brought them some heat from the environmental activists. Their stress on geo-engineering makes you doubt their objectivity regarding the solutions provided by Intellectual Ventures.
If you're an economist, you're sure to pick this book to see how far beyond the conventional the science can take you. If you're a layman, you'll love the write-ups on sex, doctors, terrorists and underground scientists. Sample this buffet of delightful anecdotes spiced with hard data and you're sure to come back for more.
No comments:
Post a Comment