Book Review Freakonomics Essay -- Steven Levitt

Anybody living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a day by day paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin... The culprit was crime. It had been rising unrelentingly - a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski hawk in profile... Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace, So in like manner had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery, and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome and unalterable companion...The culprit was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was anywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. strut his mood through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his tit but ruthlessness. There were super Cs out there just like him we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos...Criminologist James Al an Fox predicted deuce outcomes. The optimistic that the rate of teen homicides would rise another fifteen check over the next decade. The pessimistic that it would more than double...Then all of a sudden, instead of going up and up and up, the crime rate began to set. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated, especially because the public had been anticipating the opposite... even so though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop, which was in fact well below way even as they made their horrifying predictions, they now zip to... ...age. Levitt explores this passage with the same approach that he uses to explore the hidden spot of many other such examples in society that have been unnoted and accepted as conventional wisdom for far too long. lo ck the parents who feel confident that they have made the right decision to interdict their child to play at a ace?s hearthstone whose family owns a gun, but allows their child to play at a friend?s house that has a mob. Levitt shows that the child is about ten thousand times more likely to drown in the swimming pool than in a gun accident, but that the violent conventional mentality associated with guns wrongly portrays their potential of causing death. Through these examples, Levitt establishes Freakonomics as a way by which the reader should live their life, never totally accepting something until every stone has been upturned, eventually exposing its hidden