This is the followup to Freakonomics and like the previous book, it explores from an economic viewpoint various human activities.
The first activity is prostitution. The average prostitute in Chicago's south side works, on the average, 13 hours at about $27 per hour. Because it is a part time job, your typical prostitute also works a variety of other jobs, some of them on the books. Contrary to Hollywood pop culture and MSNBC exposes, pimps actually perform a useful service. A prostitute working with a pimp makes more money despite the 25% commission taken by the pimp. Pimps hustle up additional customers and make sure the police do not hassle their girls. In the south side of Chicago many prostitutes only work part time for pimps and often operate independent of them. The relationship between pimps and prostitutes seem to be purely professional.
The next activity is why doctors kill so many of their patients. This is very interesting. Actually the subject is why terrorists should buy life insurance but most of the chapter is about why doctors cannot effectively treat patients and often kill them instead. There are more and more information being put out to allow consumers to judge the quality of the doctors and hospitals. However this chapter spends a great deal of time looking at how this data can be misleading. For example, the best doctors often have the highest mortality rates for their patients. The reason is the worst cases tend to go to the best doctors. So no matter how good a doctor is, the mortality rate is going to be high. For most people this chapter is worth the price of the book.
The next activity is altruism and apathy. It has long been the belief among economists that people are basically altruistic and they have conducted laboratory experiments that show this. However one economist, Dr. John List, saw too many examples of greedy behavior in real life. So he conducted some variations of the altruism experiments and found that under the right rules, people were not as altruistic as the original experiments indicated. This leads to an exploration of apathy and the Kitty Genovese murder. It turns out that the common known "facts" were wrong. There were only about half a dozen witnesses instead of the 38 commonly cited. There were only two attacks and they took place far enough apart in space that witnesses to the first could not have seen the second and vice versa. Finally this was before 911 so when someone called the police they did not response quickly. It appears that people did response appropriately to the attacks but the circumstances of the attacks meant that it was not clear whether she was being attacked or having a drunken brawl with a boyfriend.
The final subject is global warming and how the current solutions such as cap and trade will not work. Instead the book explores how past environmental crisis were solved by simple technical solutions rather then complex economic solutions. Then the books explores some of the possible technical solutions being developed now. This chapter is probably the most interested for SF fans as most of the solutions are very science fictional except that there are real scientists and companies developing and testing the solutions today. It is very factual but quite fantastic.
Danny
...It has long been the belief among economists that people are basically altruistic and they have conducted laboratory experiments that show this...
Does the book give any citations for this alleged long-held belief?
Read the book. Until you have done so, your disagreements are meaningless as they are based on your prejudices rather than any actual facts that you know.
My major objection was to one factually-incorrect sentence in your post, just as I earlier attempted to correct one of your misstatements about "October Surprise" (about which you continually attempted to change the subject rather than admit that you were wrong).
Referencing an old posting is a nothing but a thinly disguise personal attack. And saying that someone changes the subject rather that admit they are wrong is another personal attack that is as old as Usenet. In neither of these cases have you provided the actual postings so others can judge for themselves whether you are right. This means you only made an unsubstantiated claim about my integrity. That is a pure personal attack. Since this is what I have come to expect from you from yours past posting as proven by this posting, I will put you in my ignore file.
Referencing an old posting is a nothing but a thinly disguise personal attack.
And saying that someone changes the subject rather that admit they are wrong is another personal attack that is as old as Usenet.
In neither of these cases have you provided the actual postings so others can judge for themselves whether you are right. This means you only made an unsubstantiated claim about my integrity.
Since this is what I have come to expect from you from yours past posting as proven by this posting...
...I will put you in my ignore file.
Howard --
There is something hinky about that Bloomberg link, but I'm not sure what.
Best regards, 4merCL
>> Not exactly sure what "hinky" means in this context, but many thanks for pointing out that it doesn't work. <<
Even I could not give you a precise definition, but you obviously understood the essential point being made.
BTW, I had tried myself to eliminate some spaces that I suspected did not belong. However, my effort was ineffectual, but I suppose there might have been an extra space or another invisible character associated with the line wrap.
