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

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt
Follow up to Freakonomics… and here go my notes:
– Drunk walker is 8 times likely to be killed than drunk driver.

– India is the worst place to be born especially for women. Bride burning. Condoms too big so more STDs and abortions. Solution was getting TV to rural areas so women got to see and that they shouldn’t be treated like that (bride burning, beatings, etc). Or men just cared to watch cricket.

– Horse transport was a major issue… air, sound pollution. Health issues. Cars were solution… Or were they?

– Shark attack headlines make it sound scary but elephants kill 200 per year. You just don’t get headlines and sharks are scarier truer villain.

– Prostitutes make money by boosting (stealing), roosting (gang lookout), hair cuts and turning tricks.

– Overweight women or bad teeth get paid less. High school sports women meant better jobs and pay. But men take over women’s jobs and earn more.

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– Guy who wrote gang leader studied prostitutes. Blacks pay average 9 dollars less. Condoms not used much and 2 dollar discount for using one. But good news is HIV not spread as much as with male prostitutes. Pimps are better, more advantage for everyone and used to be mostly women and then men took over and made more money. She’s more likely to have sex with cop instead of getting arrested by him.

– Wage difference between men and women because of 3 things. Lower GPA and fewer interested in finances. Fewer hours spent at work. More career interruptions. Mostly because they love babies as much as men love money. They’d rather meet a husband that earns enough for her to be a bum ;o)

– Transgender study. Men are more competent in science and finance. FTMs made a third less money.

– Chances of Islamic babies being born messed up because of mom fasting during Ramadan.

– Deliberate practice makes perfect.
1 Setting specific goals.
2 Getting immediate feedback.
3 Concentrating on technique as much as outcome.

– Hospitals recirculate air so SARS in one room broken ankle in another. Sloppy handwriting wrong diagnosis or medications. female doctors better than males at keeping people alive. Poor more likely to die. Better to stay at home. Where doctors go on strike more people stayed alive. Annuity and religion incentive to live longer. Chemotherapy profit for docs but not worth it not only money wise. No efficacy.

– Practising to fight a war is just as dangerous as war.

– Humans are hard wired for altruism.

– Inventing hurricane cooler/killer

– Buying local ruminant meat causes more greenhouse gasses. Better to change diet to say kangaroo meat. So Oz scientists are trying to transplant roo tummies into cows.

– Definition of externality. Things like buying lojack for the car. Bees and fruit farmers setting up shop next to each other. Volcano in Philippines cooled the earth because the ash did not allow the sun radiation to come through enough.

– Labs where Mosquitoes are bred and put in a fish tank and assassinated at a distance by a laser to help combat malaria.

– Al Gore over exaggerates some of the global warming scares in An Inconvenient Truth.

– Dumping 100,000 tons of sulphur dioxide in the right place will reverse global warming. This much is already emitted everywhere else. Project is called ‘a garden hose to the sky’.

– Circumcision reduced HIV infections by 60%.

Table of Contents
An Explanatory Note – In which we admit to lying in our previous book.

Introduction: Putting the Freak in Economics
In which the global financial meltdown is entirely ignored in favor of more engaging topics.
The perils of walking drunk…
The unlikely saviour of Indian women…
Drowning in horse manure…
What is “freakonomics,” anyway?…
Toothless sharks and bloodthirsty elephants…
Things you always thought you knew but didn’t.

Chapter 1 – How is a Street Prostitute Like a Department-Store Santa?
In which we explore the various costs of being a woman.
Meet LaSheena, a part-time prostitute…
One million dead “witches”…
The many ways in which females are punished for being born female…
Even Radcliffe women pay the price…
Title IX creates jobs for women; men take them…
1 of every 50 women a prostitute…
The booming sex trade in old-time Chicago…
A survey like no other…
The erosion of prostitute pay…
Why did oral sex get so cheap?…
Pimps versus Realtors…
Why cops love prostitutes…
Where did all the schoolteachers go?…
What really accounts for the male-female wage gap?…
Do men love money the way women love kids?…
Can a sex change boost your salary?…
Meet Allie, the happy prostitute; why aren’t there more women like her?

Chapter 2 – Why Should Suicide Bombers Buy Life Insurance?
In which we discuss compelling aspects of birth and death, though primarily death.
The worst month to have a baby…
The natal roulette affects horses too…
Why Albert Aab will outshine Albert Zyzmor…
The birthdate bulge…
Where does talent come from?…
Some families produce baseball players; others produce terrorists…
Why terrorism is so cheap and easy…
The trickle-down effects of September 11…
The man who fixes hospitals…
Why the newest ERs are already obsolete…
How can you tell a good doctor from a bad one?…
“Bitten by a client at work”…
Why you want your ER doc to be a woman…
A variety of ways to postpone death…
Why is chemotherapy so widely used when it so rarely works?…
“We’re still getting our butts kicked by cancer”…
War: not as dangerous as you think?…
How to catch a terrorist.

Chapter 3 – Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism
In which people are revealed to be less good than previously thought, but also less bad.
Why did 38 people watch Kitty Genovese be murdered?…
With neighbors like these…
What caused the 1960s crime explosion?…
How the ACLU encourages crime…
Leave It to Beaver: not as innocent as you think…
The roots of altruism, pure and impure…
Who visits retirement homes?…
Natural disasters and slow news days…
Economists make like Galileo and hit the lab…
The brilliant simplicity of the Dictator game…
People are so generous!…
Thank goodness for “donorcycles”…
The great Iranian kidney experiment…
From driving a truck to the ivory tower…
Why don’t real people behave like people in the lab?…
The dirty rotten truth about altruism…
Scarecrows work on people too…
Kitty Genovese revisited.

Chapter 4 – The Fix is in—and it’s Cheap and Simple
In which big, seemingly intractable problems are solved in surprising ways.
The dangers of childbirth…
Ignatz Semmelweis to the rescue…
How the Endangered Species Act endangered species…
Creative ways to keep from paying for your trash…
Forceps hoarding…
The famine that wasn’t…
Three hundred thousand dead whales…
The mysteries of polio…
What really prevented your heart attack?…
The killer car…
The strange story of Robert McNamara…
Let’s drop some skulls down the stairwell!…
Hurray for seat belts…
What’s wrong with riding shotgun?…
How much good do car seats do?…
Crash-test dummies tell no lies…
Why hurricanes kill, and what can be done about it.

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Chapter 5 – What Do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo Have in Common?
In which we take a cool, hard look at global warming.
Let’s melt the ice cap!…
What’s worse: car exhaust or cow farts?…
If you love the earth, eat more kangaroo…
It all comes down to negative externalities…
The Club versus LoJack…
Mount Pinatubo teaches a lesson…
The obscenely smart, somewhat twisted gentlemen of Intellectual Ventures…
Assassinating mosquitoes…
“Sir, I am every kind of scientist!”…
An inconvenient truthiness …
What climate models miss…
Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain?…
“Big-ass volcanoes” and climate change…
How to cool the earth…
The “garden hose to the sky”…
Reasons to hate geoengineering…
Jumping the repugnance barrier…
“Soggy mirrors” and the puffy-cloud solution…
Why behavior change is so hard…
Dirty hands and deadly doctors…
Foreskins are falling.

Epilogue
Monkeys are People Too. In which it is revealed that—aw, hell, you have to read it to believe it.

Acknowledgments

Notes

Searchable Terms

About the Authors

Other Books by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher