Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

by Steven D. Levitt

Louis D. Brandeis once wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

In other words, a crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage.

In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.

Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.

We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes—the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.

On average, girls test higher than boys, and Asians test higher than whites—although blacks, as we have already established, test similarly to whites from comparable backgrounds and in comparable schools.

A book is in fact less a cause of intelligence than an indicator.