A review by holgerhaase
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt

SUPERFREAKONOMICS is still a good read but far no longer the kind of revelation that its predecessor was for me. For starters some of the discoveries are of the negative kind (as in: it does NOT really matter what kind of doctor you pick in an emergency room.... which was never anything I ever really contemplated before and rightly so from the looks of it). The authors also seem to start believing their own hyperbole and totally exaggerate some of their headings: "Why suicide bombers should buy life insurance" should better have read "Why terrorists should buy life insurance". Remember: Not every terrorist is automatically a suicide bomber! Of course, then the heading would have lost its punch line.

Worst of all, however, where the authors previously primarily focused on current or historical topics and threw their unique way of analyses on previously unobserved developments, in the later volume they deal for a large part with unproven What Ifs (as opposed to What Is? or What Weres?) and suggest various ways to combat, let's say: Climate Change or Hurricanes. A good number of those suggestions may never see practical usage and even if they do it may take years or decades to see if they worked so, though thought provoking, those chapters lack the punch of the findings and discoveries in the first book.

Still, a good read but just not as good as the first book.