monkey nonsense

tim and talida got me freakonomics for christmas this year. it had already started reading the book on some of my visits to barnes and nobles but had been too cheap to buy it myself.

i liked it. i liked the weird relationships that the author of freakonomics investigated. it almost made me want to be an economist. some of the stuff seem so far fetched at first i felt like he might have just been manipulating data to make up such relationships. but i also liked the way he was able to explain why it would seem likely. the explanations really make the book that much more interesting.

much more so than the tipping point (a book i got on sale at borders and am almost done with… but just can’t seem to make it past the last few pages). it’s interesting that both the tipping point and freakonomics bring up rudy giuliani and his policy for reducing crime in NYC (fixing up broken windows, going after the little stuff). but tipping point seemed more boring to me. perhaps i just don’t care about how “epidemics” and trends start.

one thing i didn’t really like about freakonomics was the “extras” it put in the latest edition. it included the original article written by stephen dubner about steven leavitt. that was pretty interesting. and then it included posts from the freakonomics blog. that part, i didn’t find as interesting and i felt like it was just eh… tacked onto the original book but not giving any more value. but then julie just sent me this link… and i found this freakonomics post at least interesting: http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2007/05/07/incentivized-potter-ing-amazon-runs-harry-potter-pre-order-contest/

overall, i thought freakonomics was really interesting. the tipping point, still a good point, but not as interesting as freakonomics. oo oo, maybe read the tipping point first, and then freakonomics. perhaps that was my problem.