Think Like A Freak

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner “Think Like A Freak”   Harper Collins, 2014, 211 pp.

I previously read two other books by these authors: “Freaknomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”  & Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”.   This current book “Think Like A Freak” essentially goes over the same topics covered in my prior reading.  The first two books, previously read, basically dealt with the following concepts:  Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life; Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so; The conventional wisdom is often wrong; and, Correlation does not equal causality.  This book continues that discussion.  We pursue a Japanese hot-dog-eating champion, an Australian doctor, Barry Marshall, who swallows a batch of dangerous bacteria (and discovers cause of ulcers), and an explanation why Nigerian e-mail scammers make a point of saying they’re from Nigeria.

Steps needed to think more productively:

*put away your moral compass—because it’s hard to see a problem clearly if you’ve already decided what to do about it.

*Learn to say “I don’t know”—for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

*Think like a child—because you’ll come up with better ideas and ask better questions.

*Find the root cause of a problem—because attacking the symptoms, as often happens, rarely fixes the underlying issue.

*Take a master class in incentives—because for better or worse, incentives rule our world.

*Learn to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded—because being right is rarely enough to carry the day.

*Learn to appreciate the upside of quitting—because you can’t solve tomorrow’s problem if you aren’t willing to abandon today’s dud.

My Notes:

Pg. 22:  According to news reports, groups of Arabs carried out the attacks against the USA on September 11.  Do you believe this to be true or not?  When this question was asked in predominantly Muslim countries, only 20 percent of Indonesians believed that Arabs carried out the attacks, along with 11 percent of Kuwaitis and 4 percent of Pakistanis.  (When asked who was responsible, respondents typically blamed the Israeli or U.S. government or ‘non-Muslim terrorists.’)

Pg. 32:  There are about 38,000 suicides a year in the U.S., more than twice the number of homicides.  Suicide is one of the top ten causes of death for nearly every age group.  Yet, this fact is little known because of the strong moral taboo about talking about suicide. 

In 2014 the U.S. homicide rate is lower than it’s been for fifty years.  The rate of traffic fatalities is at a historic low, having fallen by two-thirds since the 1970s.  The overall suicide rate, meanwhile, has barely budged—and worse yet, suicide among 15- to 24-year-olds has tripled over the past several decades.  Also, suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. 

Pg. 51:  When serious people talk about education reform, they rarely talk about the family’s role in preparing children to succeed.  That is in part because the very words ‘education reform’ indicate that the question is ‘What’s wrong with our schools?’ when in reality, the question might be better phrased as ‘Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?’  When you ask the question differently, yon look for answers in different places. 

Pg. 66:  What causes poverty and famine: What causes them?  A glib answer is the lack of money and food.  So theoretically you can fight poverty and famine by airlifting vast amounts of money and food into poor and hungry places.

That is pretty much what governments and aid groups have been doing.  So why do the same problems persist in the same places”

Poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.  It’s hard to fix that even with planeloads of cash.  Similarly, the lack of food is usually not the root cause of famine.  In countries whose political and economic institutions are built to serve the appetites of a corrupt few rather than the multitudes, food is routinely withheld from the people who need it most. 

Pg. 67:  In Freakonomics the authors examined the causes of the rise and fall in violent crime in the U.S.  In 1960, crime began a sudden climb.  By 1980, the homicide rate had doubled, reaching a historic peak.  But in the early 1990s it began to fall and kept falling.  The data identified the factor as the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s.  As the first post-abortion generation came of age, it included fewer children (1.6 million a year vs 4 million births) who’d been raised in bad environments that led to crime.  It is a lot easier to argue about cops and prisons and gun laws than the thorny question of what makes a parent fit to raise a child. 

Pg. 125:  Whenever you interact with another entity, whether it’s your best friend or some faceless bureaucracy, the interaction falls into one of a handful of frameworks.  There’s the financial framework that governs everything we buy, sell, and trade.  There’s an ‘us-versus-them’ framework that defines war, sports, and unfortunately, most political activity.  The ‘loved-one’ framework covers friends and family.  There’s a collaborative framework that shapes how you behave with a work colleague or in your amateur orchestra or pickup soccer team.  And then there’s the ‘authority-figure’ framework, in which someone gives instructions and someone else is expected to follow them.  Most of us breeze in and out of these different frameworks every day; it’s important not to ignore the obvious rules of the framework you’re in.