Levitt, Steven D. and Dubner, Stephen J. Freakonomics. New York: William Morrow, 2005.

Pop nonfiction! I've got Salt on my bedside table to read next. This is that book that uses principles of economics to show why crack dealers live with their mothers and how having books in one's house correlates to a child's high performance in school. The difference between correlation and causality is what this book, necessarily, harps on, and it's good to learn that just because two things are related doesn't mean that one causes the other. As the authors put it, if you see Y every time you see X, it doesn't necessarily mean that X causes Y or Y causes X. It's just as likely that X and Y are both some factors of Z.

A gripe: this book has rough-cut pages, or whatever the publishing term is for when the pages of the book are cut so as to replicate the 19th-century practice of selling books with the pages still together. Like, they'd be folded and then bound, so that when you got a book, you'd have to slip, like, a letter opener between two pages and slice them apart to the read quarto and folios that were hidden. Anyway, so the edges of the page, the part opposite the spine, are rough and textured as opposed to the smooth edge you get on most paperbacks and any book cut with precision by a machine. I guess publishers replicate the "hand cut" look to make a book more distinguished? This is a piss-poor choice for a book filled with facts and data. This book is easily read in a day, and then kept around to dip back into in order to win arguments. But flipping through the thing to find, say, the exact passage that explains correlation, is just impossibly tough. You have to swipe page by page. Irritating. (Okay, there is an index, but still.)

Best part of the book was the story about Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the KKK back in the 30s and exposed its secrets by leaking them to the producers of the Superman radio show. Soon kids across the country were using Klan jargon, which basically made the Klan less foreign, and therefore less scary, and therefore less powerful. Also, he came to see that the whole thing was just a moneymaking scheme. Here's the Klan's recruitment slogan: "Do you hate niggers? Do you hate jews? Do you have ten dollars?"

Also, recruits had to buy their own robes from special manufacturers. These cost $15.

Worst part of the book was how weirdly forthright the authors were about the process of its becoming. Dubner writes for the Times and did a story in 2003 on Levitt. The story was enough of a hit that he was encouraged to make a book out of it. We get all this in "An Explanatory Note" which opens with a lengthy quotation from the Times story, which quotation starts "The most brilliant young economist in America." Then the Note quotes the story again. Then the story is quoted in between every chapter, epigraph-like, as if the passages in the Times story are the words of wisdom we should mull over as we read a chapter explicating some new theory. This is all Dubner quoting himself. It's weird, isn't it?

Oh, most scandalous part of the book: his showing that Roe v. Wade resulted in a decrease in crime around 1990, just when all those aborted fetuses would be reaching their late teens. I guess in the end what makes this book so readable is the originality of its approaches to everyday problems. It's neat being persuaded to believe such things, just because such things are refreshing in the ways they diverge from conventional wisdom.