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This is billed as the “explosive” follow-up to Freakonomics and is subtitled: Global Cooling, Patriotic Hookers, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.
The world apparently can’t get enough of this team that keeps questioning our assumptions about how the world works and how we should evaluate the statistics we’re bombarded with by the media.
They start with something that is not intuitively obvious: Based on statistics (and if you accept their assumption that people walk as drunk as they drive), it is much safer for the drunk person to drive drunk than it is to walk drunk.
It is much safer for other drivers for drunks to walk, but for drunks it is safer to drive, so they don’t lie in the middle of the street and pass out, fall in front of a car, cross a street without looking, or the other dangerous things drunk pedestrians do. They did not even include the real possibility (in some neighborhoods) of being robbed.
It ends with descriptions of how a research scientist taught monkeys to value coins; they even discovered prostitution.
Along the way, they take a close look at the economics of (human) prostitution, comparing what it was many years ago with today.
Even more potentially controversial is the chapter on global warming, which spotlights a company headed by a former Microsoft employee who is leading other geniuses in finding profitable ways to make money solving the world’s problems.
These scientists seem to generally believe that the world is gradually warming, but they are well aware that current models are not sophisticated enough, putting them outside the rabid environmental field.
The authors address how today’s environmental movement sounds a lot like a religion trying to limit carbon dioxide not just as a method to reduce global warming, but to deliberately destroy civilization as we know it. They allude to this, and seem aware of the threat, but they don’t delve into the motivations of the environmental fanatics or explore what their true goals are.
Rather, they take “reducing global warming” as their goal and then leave it to scientists to discuss how this could be achieved at low cost.
As someone who does not claim to be a climate scientist, I am a global warming agnostic.
But as someone who sees the proposed “solutions” to the supposed threat of global warming as a threat to humanity’s freedom and economic development, I wish they would have gone further in exposing radical environmentalists who use climate change as a means, not as an end.
They even reopened the infamous Kitty Genovese case, although they apparently didn’t read Robert Cialdini’s explanation that the neighbors who witnessed the attack or her murder believed someone else had called the police. They found out that someone did call the police, who were apparently slow to react, as no one knew how badly she was injured.
I personally enjoy this way of using facts to debunk myths. God knows we need a lot more facts and context and a lot less media lies and distortions.