SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

At least their first book was an easy read. This one is not only harder to read but is even less credible than the first. The "Freaks" might as well just try writing fiction that weaves myths like Dan Brown's books. What was really irritating to me about this book - while in all fairness they gave credit to other economists like Malcom Gladwell - is rehashing the story about why sports player and birthdays matter - not only has this been beaten down by everyone - but anyone knows that you either have a good cutoff (baseball and being born in August which allowed me to compete on All Star Teams and be the oldest), and bad cutoffs like my two July children (they not only got it bad in sports, but they were always the yougest in the classroom). You don't need an economist or in this case multiple economists telling you what 99% of the world understands. And no economist should want to put their name on this book - as I said it would have been better written as myths in fiction than pretending to give out facts.

I bet we are just at the beginning of a series of Freakonomics publications. It will end when the marginal cost of writing and printing still another sequel falls below the potential readers' marginal willingness to pay. Read one book by Levitt & Dubner and you know all of them. I'm pretty sure there will be a chapter in the their next book on what Dan Brown and Mount Pinatubo have in common.

This book is a far cry from teaching you how you alone can benefit from economics. On top of that, enough with the commentary already, where are the practical tools that can teach us effective economic thinking summarized in a one-to-ten bullet points list? The reason for it is that if you truly want to learn how to make money in this world or the stock-market you need to read the works of Toby Crabel, Linda Rasche or some other professional traders that make living trading the market daily. Their books are very expensive because they do not right for a living, but trade for a living. I had to go find them on Ebay or Amazon. However, their writing is more focused on the techniques and ways to profit and trade any security, any time. Being very successful in this space myself, it takes a real book from a real trader these days to impress me. Reading Super Freakonomics felt rather tired and there are at least 3 other books in the space already that have become best-sellers on the same pop-economics concept.

The authors were clearly over-leveraging the success of the first Freakanomics to sell this one. I found this one a bit empty-- taking their formula in a bit of a ridiculous direction...(walk drunk--drive drunk?)...is that normally the option?

It's random examples, comparisons and over-hyped stats rarely came full circle to some sort of point the average person could seriously consider....It seemed every time they started getting somewhere they contradicted themselves in the spirit of objectivity ruining the possibility of any valid perspective they could add to this hod-podge of information. Yes it makes you think...but doesn't supply a clear train of thought nor enough information to foster any type of conclusion. I can see where they were going they just never managed to get there.

I've just finished the book and the content is very good, in line with the 1st Freakonomics.

But I was quite disappointed with the quality of the pages as they are badly cut in the edge, showing different sizes -it seems they were cut "by hand". The problem did not prevent me from reading, but it made more difficult to "change pages".