A book I just happened to run into last weekend at the bookstore, and what a great book it is!
Its all about answering questions like:
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?
The results of his finding are quite interesting, more about society than the regular boring economic stuff like stocks, inflation, etc... is quite entertaining.
And it does it in the right way, for example: at one point he says that schoolteachers cheat on national exams, but instead of just stating it, he actually proves it in a very data mining style, he goes into analyzing data of the exam results and looks up patterns of data that are clearly not normal and expected.
worth checking out.
official site: http://www.freakonomicsbook.com/
