Freakonomics

I read this over the weekend. A well-written book that explores how much truth "Convention Wisdom" holds. Or how economics describes the actual world. The book explores many diverse topics, including parenting, racial and cultural issues, crime, and other matters. The common point is the use of data and econometric methods to analyze the data to draw conclusions. Several commonly-held beliefs are shown to be unsupported by data, while several surprising ("freaky") results emerge from the analyses.

A nice collaboration between a smart economist, and a quality writer. Worth a read, just for fun and also to know a little bit more about the world.