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Good but didn't capture my attention like the first book.
I liked this well enough, but not nearly as much as I liked the first Freakonomics book. I guess the topics covered in this one just weren't as interesting to me. I appreciate the way they blend economics with behavior and the writing/research is good and easy to understand. I wish I had this guy for an Econ professor when I was in college - he would be entertaining!
Funny and counter-intuitive facts and trivia. I wonder if I should believe some of the facts as presented, or whether the authors card-stack and cherry-pick and generally distort facts for the desired effect (hmmm...much like Fox News). Frothy fun, not to be taken seriously or remembered except for witty tidbits in a casual lunch conversation.
I liked the first one better. But the part at the end about monkey prostitution was pretty damn funny.
This is probably my favorite vein of non fiction and I loved their first book. This one was also highly enjoyable, but I didn't feel like the chapters were quite as tight. They meandered a bit and were more losely organized. Which I guess is not really bad, but it just didn't leave me with as strong of an impression. But behavioral economics is just incredibly fascinating to me.
I loved Freakonomics and this is more of the same, but I didn't find it as enjoyable or compelling as the first book. Great stuff though!!
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
More of the same but not as exciting as the original.
As you would expect from reading the first book, the things discussed in this sequel are really interesting and often not something you would have guessed. There are still a lot of assumptions made despite their efforts to go beyond normal economic assumptions, so you should take their conclusions with a grain of salt, though the basic idea of most of them is likely true. Some of the chapters seemed more rich than others, and on the whole it came across as a sort of hodgepodge of cool facts. That isn't totally bad, but it did seem like they may have rushed a bit to get out their cool facts before someone else did. It's a quick read, and definitely worth going through.
I really wanted to enjoy this book, but it felt like a non-fiction version of a romance historical novel or an 'issue' summer reading book: fluff hiding behind a few artfully crafted albeit shallow ideas.