Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780060731328-7: About five years after everyone else in the country, I decided to read to this book. It is clever, interesting, and pretty funny. The authors use their particular brand of economics to answer life's most baffling questions, such as: how much does parenting really matter? Why do most drug dealers live with their mothers? What actually caused the decline in crime in the 1990s? And most interesting to me: are teachers who give standardized tests to their students tempted to cheat? The data are fascinating, and Levitt and Dubner's conclusions anything but the conventional wisdom. I don't know anything about economics or statistics (in my case perhaps neither nature nor nuture mattered in that respect), so I'd like to hear the opinions of people who read this book and are in those fields. But, for a lay-person whose brain shuts off at the thought of determining whether something is causal, or merely correlative, I loved this book.