Freakonomics

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Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

How much do parents really matter?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head.

Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

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Liberty Portal is your gateway for free markets and free thinking. We aggregate open-sourced content to promote and popularize important people and lessons within the liberty movement.

Time to Smash the Neocons Once and For All

History and economics they didn't teach you

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Could it really be okay to let kids eat whatever they want? Sleep whenever they want? Watch whatever they want? If kids are completely free to make their own choices, they’ll develop damaging habits that will haunt them into adulthood. Surely parents have a duty to set a few limits.

But what if this conventional wisdom is wrong? What if our deepest ideas of how learning works, how knowledge grows, and the nature of personhood all point to the brute fact that parenting philosophies have missed a critical detail?

In The Sovereign Child, Aaron Stupple explains Taking Children Seriously, the only parenting philosophy that accounts for the fact that children are people—their reasons, desires, emotions, and creativity all work precisely the same way that those of adults do. Because of this, much of the conventional wisdom simply cannot work as intended.

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