“Crazy-interesting. By plying assumptions to modern, real-world problems, and turning the mathematical "crank," the author is able to highlight common misconceptions in certain industries.
From my perspective, the most interesting example is of the drug trade. We commonly see references in popular culture to über-rich druglords. So why is is that most drug dealers are poor? A PhD student at UChicago convinced a crack-ring to allow him to collect information about the types of transactions between distributor, and street runner. The answer is, in hindsight, pretty obvious.
There are a few topics that I think a bit too speculative; they draw correlations where there should be none. There's a bit about race and academic performance that still sits badly with me. But I guess it's polarizing issues like this that make economics interesting. ”
wjrobbins2 wrote this review Saturday, May 23, 2009.
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