Когда грабить банк и другие лайфхаки
Цитата:
«Некоторые из лучших идей — да и почти все лучшие идеи — поначалу казались безумными. Но безумными подчас выглядят идеи, которые и впрямь безумны. Как отличить одно от другого?»
Стивен Левитт
О чем книга:
Экономисты Левитт и Дабнер прославились на весь мир, с хулиганской легкостью изложив сложные экономические законы в бестселлере «Фрикономика». В своей новой книге они разбирают проблемы мировой экономики на самых неожиданных и смешных примерах. Отчего потребление креветок постоянно растет? Почему женщины чувствуют себя несчастнее мужчин? Как ради финансовой выгоды увязать экологию и бордели? Какая на самом деле польза от импортозамещения? Почему мы поддаемся стадному чувству? Обо всем этом авторы пишут кратко и подкупающе по-дружески.
Отличная книга для любителей смотреть на проблемы с необычной точки зрения!
Почему книга достойна прочтения:
— Это новый бестселлер от авторов всемирно известной «Фрикономики», а также «Суперфрикономики» и «Фрикомыслия». У Левитта и Дабнера нет ни одной скучной или неинтересной книги.
— В книге изложены взгляды авторов на самые различные темы — от терроризма до покера. Способность взглянуть на проблему с иной точки зрения зачастую помогает увидеть все в ином свете и найти лучшее решение, которое и в голову не пришло бы при стандартном подходе. Этому авторы и учат читателей, делясь собственным опытом.
Для кого эта книга
Для широкого круга читателей, но в особенности для поклонников творчества Стивена Левитта, Стивена Дабнера, Эдварда де Боно и Малкольма Гладуэлла.
Авторы
Стивен Левитт — профессор экономики Университета Чикаго и руководитель Центра чикагской теории цен имени Г.Беккера. Отмечен медалью Джона Бейтса Кларка. Входит в список «Сто людей, которые формируют наш мир» (по версии Times).
Стивен Дабнер — известный писатель, журналист, частый гость радио- и телепередач. Автор шести книг, включая «фрикономическую» трилогию, и ведущий на радио «Фрикономика».
240 pages, Hardcover
First published May 5, 2015
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About the author
Steven D. Levitt
32 books 3,808 followers
Steven David «Steve» Levitt is a prominent American economist best known for his work on crime, in particular on the link between legalized abortion and crime rates. Winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal, he is currently the Alvin H. Baum Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, director of the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press. He is one of the most well known economists amongst laymen, having co-authored the best-selling book Freakonomics (2005). Levitt was chosen as one of Time Magazine’s «100 People Who Shape Our World» in 2006.
-Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 — 30 of 1,267 reviews
2,457 reviews 35.1k followers
DNF’d. This book is really patchy. The blogs — for that’s what they were — go from really bad, almost facetious and ill-researched topics to some interesting ideas. The percentage of interesting to blah is only about 10% so rather than waste 90% of my time, I will spend it reading something more rewarding. As economists, I’m sure the authors will appreciate my reasoning.
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Put your coffee down before you snork it reading this. Raising politicians salaries much higher in order to attract a better quality of politician who will then be totally honest and not look for any other way of increasing their income. Pigs in a trough full of apples will still not ignore the barrel of swill behind them. The authors use the example of the Prime Minister of the tiny nation of Singapore who increased his own salary to $3.2M and other government members to other outrageously high levels, and the authors say proved their thesis.
Everyone except the very brave in Singapore agree with absolutely everything the Government does. It is an authoritatian democracy, nominally, and guarantees free speech for all except those that breach just about any number of laws that are there to ensure «responsible journalism». Anything that might damage the reputation of any member of the government, or how it governs the country, or. or. or. and this includes all media including documentary films and bloggers.
No one actually approved, which the book doesn’t mention, and eventually the Prime Minister was forced to take a pay cut to $1.7 million. Obama earns $400K I think.
Also, the essay on the NHS betrays the authors’ ignorance. They presume that the NHS is used in the same way by people as American private health care. Comparing apples and oranges and coming up with theories because they are both fruit doesn’t cut it.
I’m not getting on with this book quite as well as I hoped.
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This is a collection of blog posts and it reads like it too. Is that a good or bad thing? Bad because I wanted to read a book of economic/sociological issues treated in depth, but good because it is interesting hearing thoughts on a range of subjects.
I’m reading about a book a day. That is the advantage of recovering from surgery. Not much else to do (other than eating, I do a lot of that too).
2 books 6 followers
Full disclosure, I did not finish this book. I had to put it down after 50 pages or so because my blood pressure was through the roof and my eye was twitching.
The collection of blog posts in this book range from interesting to unreasonably insane. Unfortunately there were too many in the latter category for my liking. I consider myself a pretty open person, but when someone writes that America should adopt a system where people have to pay for voting in an election, and you can have unlimited votes as long as you pay for them, that goes past my ability to listen. That is absolutely irresponsible. That’s the kind of idea that may be interesting to think about, but you don’t then actually honestly suggest it because. it is absolutely terrible. Yet it was suggested. And then attempted to be reasoned past with the idea that «rich people already influence elections anyway.»
I know economists have a unique worldview, but these writers don’t seem to be aware of reality. Another post suggests shutting down LaGuardia airport as an air traffic solution because a random pilot he met while waiting for a flight said to. Another post suggested getting rid of tenure in schools (which I’m not against or anything) and said it would work because it would work for the author, so clearly everyone else shares that opinion. And the people who wouldn’t share that opinion are «bad teachers.» One post on UK Healthcare laid out a plan and then backed it up by saying «I asked cab drivers in London if they liked it and they mostly said yes.»
It boggles the mind.
I fear the number of people who will read these short snippets and believe the ideas are sound after zero research or actual information because «it sounds good.» Or maybe because the authors are famous. Yes, some of them do sound good. Some of them, however, sound as if the writer absolutely does not live on the planet Earth with other human beings. It feels like to them human lives are just a data stream and as long as the numbers line up then whatever-it-is is automatically a good idea.
Human beings are not just data and numbers. Thank goodness.
205 reviews 17 followers
This book is a blog highlight reel, and lacks all of the analytical depth that the earlier writings of these «rogue» economists drew me in with. The effect is one of having an intelligent friend mention stray thoughts he’d had earlier that afternoon, many of which could lead to great discussion, if only you weren’t in a loud bar and he too drunk to formulate any new ideas on the topics.
At least that covers some of them. Others simply don’t seem well thought out from the start. For instance, one of the authors makes an entire post out of not understanding why «anti-God» books make for best-sellers. He can reason why conservatives who hate liberals will put an anti-liberal book on the best-seller list, but can’t grasp why a non-believer would be so motivated about hating God that they’d pay $20 to read a book about it. He apparently doesn’t see that these anti-God types don’t hate a beneficent cloud man they believe fictional, they hate the effects of religious ideology on institutions, descrimination based on faith, and atrocities performed by individuals in the name of God. This isn’t a difficult realization to make. Another, totally inane post gives a Buzzfeed-esque 10-reason list of reasons to like the Steelers, the NFL’s Pittsburg franchise. (My one-reason list to dislike them goes unremarked upon: Quarterback Ben Roethelisberger’s having been accused of rape multiple times.)
Other posts are just stories that don’t present any new ideas or offer any theoretical insights whatsoever. One of the authors had a bunch of documents on terrorism in his bag, which was searched when he bought a last-minute, one-way domestic flight ticket. The TSA was suspicious and had their resident FBI representative clear the author before letting him on his flight. And that’s the whole post.
The guest posts do no better, and have even less to do with analyzing the world’s hard-to-explain phenomena with economic theory. Bringing back the prostitute from a previous book to answer reader questions was purely gratuitous, as was having the very much publicly doubted «rogue» [Man, is that word getting tired.] sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh relate his experience of watching The Wire’s season five debut with actual drug trade criminals from NYC.
In all this feels like a cash grab on the part of the publisher. I simply don’t know who this book is for. Dedicated blog readers will have already read these posts, and at least had the benefit of disagreeing with or expanding upon the topics in the comments section. Book-readers who hadn’t read the blog, like me, will be let down by this not being a real book and the rapid-fire topics having no depth or representing any but the most pedestrian theories. Basically, if they’ve come up with anything actually great in the past few years, they must be saving it for their next real book.
Oh, and to spoil the misleading title: their answer is «never,» which after not giving a reason for why a certain man robbed six banks, but always on Thursdays, felt a bit like a bait and switch. They did helpfully mention that the take is greater on average in the morning, however, and that despite this stick-up men do most of their robbing in the afternoons. Apparently those willing to risk imprisonment on a serious crime with one of the highest conviction rates, for the paltry average of $7,500, don’t have the means or inclination to access the data.
Источник https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34100873