Great book, well written, humorous author, and good explanations of some familiar econ 101 concepts. Well worth the read.

The author’s explicit purpose is to make the economic sciences interesting to the masses, because most people take Econ101 and their eyes glaze over at all the charts and then they think econ isn’t interesting, but really it is. And he goes through how governments can use economics to incentivise (or disincentivise, as the case may be) certain behaviors to try to overcome macro obstacles like global warming. Of course, he also covers the basics of money handling from the perspective of the Fed, all the normal 101 stuff too, but he skips the math and keeps things light. There’s a nice pitch in there supporting globalization too, for anyone that might still be against it, I recommend you pick this up for that alone.

An introduction to statistics for the layman.

The book begins with some fun statistical findings, which I enjoy. It was reminiscent of Freakonomics (which Levitt co-authored) in that sense. The only thing it adds to it is a verbose explanation of how “super crunching,” a.k.a. statistical analysis, is changing the world by making better predictions than a human expert would. About 10% better, actually.

The book was way less entertaining than Freakonomics because it actually tried to explain regressions and confidence intervals. Those are like the first things they teach you in an introductory stats class. I believe that most people don’t take statistics classes, but anyone remotely interested in this book would’ve taken one. I think this book pretty much missed its mark here. By the end, I was getting a little annoyed at being treated like a dolt.