Bill Bennett

[Alex]

I didn't get very far into Freakonomics before their softness of reasoning irritated me beyond reading farther. Frequently they seemed to be picking some correlation and implying causations not necessarily shown in the information they provide.

Look at the real estate case they provide showing that agents underprice their clients homes in order to get an easier commission. As evidence of this they point out that real estate agents sell their own homes at higher prices and leave them on the market longer.

They just leave it as assumed that this means that the agents are underselling the client homes while putting in the extra work on their own homes without sufficient examination of any other factors that might produce this difference (for example, perhaps the sell motiviations are different between the normal client and a real estate agent).

I'll probably try to slog through the rest at some point because so many people keep referencing it. But just as I tend to discount the pop psych books this seems a bit like a pop economics book. Though it does raise interesting questions I didn't see them really answering any (at least not in the first 50 pages or so).