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...sumo wrestlers cheat, why drug dealers are poor, the socioeconomic patterns of naming children - the book Freakonomics brought economic analysis to bear on unexpected and quirky issues and came up with unexpected and quirky answers. It's little surprise, then, that the 2005 book - by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner - sold more than 3 million copies worldwide...
Numbers like that demand a sequel, and this month Levitt and Dubner delivered theirs: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. But while their first book focused mostly on smaller stuff, SuperFreakonomics takes on one very big subject - global warming - and it has got environmentalists and climate scientists across the blogosphere feeling dismayed by the Freaky Ones. (See the top 10 green ideas...
Levitt and Dubner included in their book input from Ken Caldeira, an ecologist at Stanford University who has made no secret of his research into the possible effectiveness of geoengineering schemes - even as many of his colleagues have shied away from the subject, partly out of concern that it would wrongly convince people that there is a cheaper way to counter global warming. Since SuperFreakonomics was published, however, Caldeira has claimed that Levitt and Dubner mischaracterized his views. He says he's in favor of researching geoengineering in order to gauge its effectiveness and its potential side effects...
...approach is to start from the list of things I thought it would be a big mistake to change," he says. He is, after all, a Benetton. As he says of his own ascent to prominence: "I love to describe this as a different chapter of the same book." One that, his shareholders and his cousins hope, will have a happier ending than many other family empires that ran into trouble when the new generation took over...
Four years ago, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner produced a sensation. Their book, Freakonomics, described how Levitt and a few other scholars used the techniques of economics to examine quirky topics and controversial ones. There was a chapter on cheating among sumo wrestlers, another on the profitability of drug-dealing, yet another on the possible link between liberalized abortion laws and falling crime rates - and much more (the subtitle was A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything...