40 Fun Facts About Freakonomics

Which sport does Freakonomics mine for evidence that competitors with seven wins are gifted an eighth?

Sumo wrestling data showed 7–7 wrestlers beating 8–6 opponents about 80% of the time on the final day, far above the odds. Eight wins from fifteen bouts saves a wrestler from demotion.

Freakonomics argues that which backyard feature is far likelier than a gun to kill a young child?

A swimming pool is about 100 times likelier than any one gun to cause a child's death, Steven Levitt calculated. He noted that parents still fear the gun far more.

Freakonomics links the 1990s fall in American crime to which Supreme Court ruling of two decades earlier?

Roe v. Wade legalised abortion nationwide in 1973, and the book argues that fewer unwanted births meant fewer young offenders roughly eighteen years later.

Freakonomics reveals the surprisingly low pay of Chicago street dealers selling which drug for a gang?

Crack cocaine paid its street sellers so little that many still lived with their mothers, the puzzle that gives the chapter its title.

Paul Feldman, whose honor-system sales data fill a Freakonomics chapter on cheating, left economics to sell which food?

Bagels sold on an honor system let Feldman, a former economist, measure exactly how often customers paid when nobody was checking.

Which profession does Freakonomics compare to the Ku Klux Klan for profiting from information that outsiders lack?

Real-estate agents share chapter two with the Klan, both cast as groups whose power rested on controlling what outsiders were allowed to know.

In Freakonomics, Loser Lane grew up to hold which job while his brother Winner became a lifelong criminal?

Police detective Loser Lane served in the NYPD, which the authors offer as neat proof that a name does not decide a child's fate.

The SuperFreakonomics subtitle lists global cooling, patriotic prostitutes and why suicide bombers should buy what?

Life insurance points to the chapter on how a British bank's customer data helped track down terror suspects.

Freakonomics argues that economics is at root the study of what, defined as how people get what they want?

Incentives matter so much to the authors that the idea earns a full chapter of its own in their third book, Think Like a Freak.

Which superhero's 1946 radio serial pitted him against a thinly disguised Ku Klux Klan, a story retold in Freakonomics?

Superman battled the Clan of the Fiery Cross across 16 episodes. Activist Stetson Kennedy claimed he pitched the idea, a tale the book's revised edition had to tone down.

Which adjective describes the economist who explores the hidden side of everything in the subtitle of Freakonomics?

Rogue caught on as a label: a gang researcher featured in the book later subtitled his own account A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.

Freakonomics retells how which mouthwash became a household staple after a marketing push by Gerard Lambert?

Listerine was developed in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic and named after surgeon Joseph Lister, decades before marketing made it a bathroom fixture.

Freakonomics examines the 1966 abortion ban imposed by which Romanian dictator?

Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted a far bigger population, and births almost doubled within a year of his decree. The book argues the children it produced helped overthrow him in 1989.

Which sociologist, later author of Gang Leader for a Day, co-wrote the gang finances study used in Freakonomics?

Sudhir Venkatesh got hold of a gang's handwritten accounts while doing doctoral fieldwork in Chicago. He later hosted a podcast on the Freakonomics network.

Freakonomics tells how answer patterns exposed which Chicago school staff for changing responses on standardized tests?

Teachers amounting to about 5 percent of the Chicago total were cheating, Steven Levitt estimated, and the schools chief let him retest classrooms to prove it.

Which animals are taught to use money in the study by Keith Chen that closes SuperFreakonomics?

Capuchin monkeys star in the epilogue, a study Chen ran with Laurie Santos. The authors had first written about it in a 2005 column, four years before the book.

SuperFreakonomics revisits which 1964 New York murder, long blamed on neighbours who supposedly watched and did nothing?

Kitty Genovese was reported to have died in front of 38 passive witnesses, a figure that a 2007 study found no evidence for. The book uses her case to test ideas about altruism.

SuperFreakonomics praises which Hungarian doctor who cut maternity ward deaths by making colleagues wash their hands?

Ignaz Semmelweis proposed washing with chlorinated lime in Vienna in 1847, yet fellow doctors mocked him, offended at being told to clean their hands.

The stratoshield proposed in SuperFreakonomics would cool the planet by pumping which gas into the stratosphere?

Sulfur dioxide would mimic the cooling haze of a big volcanic eruption such as Mount Pinatubo. The plan came from the Seattle invention firm Intellectual Ventures.

SuperFreakonomics claims that doing what while drunk is deadlier per mile than driving a car drunk?

Walking drunk is eight times likelier to kill you per mile, Steven Levitt estimated, though the authors end the passage by telling readers to take a cab.

Steven Levitt won which honour two years before Freakonomics was published?

John Bates Clark Medal honours a leading American economist under 40, and Levitt took it in 2003 for his work on crime. Its first winner, Paul Samuelson, later won a Nobel.

Stephen Dubner first met Steven Levitt when an editor sent him to write a profile for which publication?

The New York Times Magazine piece was meant to need a two-hour interview, which Dubner stretched to three days. Levitt only agreed because his mother liked the magazine.

Stephen Dubner's first book, Turbulent Souls, recounts his return to which faith that his parents had left?

Judaism was the religion both his parents gave up before he was born. Dubner, the youngest of eight children in a devout Catholic home, converted back as an adult.

Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, had his first work published at age 11 in which children's magazine?

Highlights for Children printed his first piece long before his journalism reached The New Yorker and Time. He also played in a rock band that signed with Arista Records.

Which documentary maker directed A Roshanda by Any Other Name, the baby-names segment of Freakonomics: The Movie?

Morgan Spurlock was one of six directors who split the anthology film between them. Alex Gibney took the section on match fixing.

Selected preview screenings of Freakonomics: The Movie tested which unusual ticket pricing scheme in major cities?

Pay what you want pricing ran only at selected previews, before Magnolia Pictures gave the documentary its regular autumn release.

Which crime is named in the title of the Freakonomics authors' fourth book, a collection of their blog posts?

Robbing a bank heads the title of When to Rob a Bank, which gathers pieces from the website the authors launched alongside their first book.

Think Like a Freak studies which competitive eater who nearly doubled the hot dog record by rethinking the problem?

Takeru Kobayashi ate 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes at Coney Island in 2001, when the record stood at just over 25. He won the contest six years running.

Think Like a Freak praises which rock band's contract ban on brown M&M's as a clever test of concert promoters?

Van Halen buried the clause in a 53-page rider. Singer David Lee Roth said promoters who skipped it had often skipped the stage safety requirements too.

Which psychologist and author of Grit co-founded the Freakonomics podcast No Stupid Questions with Stephen Dubner?

Angela Duckworth launched the show with Dubner in 2020. He stepped away in 2023 and executive Mike Maughan took his chair.

Freakonomics Radio was produced at which public radio station before moving to Stitcher in 2018?

WNYC lost the show in July 2018, eight years after it began. The network behind it later struck a deal to bring its podcasts to YouTube.

Steven Levitt interviewed high achievers from athletes to Nobel laureates on which Freakonomics Radio Network podcast?

People I (Mostly) Admire ran from 2020 to 2025 and gave Levitt his own show, a decade after the main podcast launched with Stephen Dubner as host.

Which psychologist was a founding partner of the consulting firm Steven Levitt co-founded in 2009?

Daniel Kahneman joined fellow laureate Gary Becker among the founders of the firm, first called Freakonomics Consulting Group and later TGG Group.

Which Nobel-winning economist and newspaper columnist was among critics of the climate chapter in SuperFreakonomics?

Paul Krugman was joined by Brad DeLong and The Economist in attacking the chapter. The authors replied that they accept global warming is man-made and differ only on the fix.

Which author of More Guns, Less Crime sued Steven Levitt for defamation over a passage in Freakonomics?

John Lott lost on the book itself, since a judge ruled its line about failed replication was not defamatory. Levitt settled a second claim over an email.

The gang researcher whose data fed Freakonomics spent nearly a decade studying which Chicago public housing project?

Robert Taylor Homes became his field site when the gang leader he calls J.T., whom he first met elsewhere while carrying a questionnaire, was moved there.

Which Chicago schools chief, later US Education Secretary, let Steven Levitt retest classrooms to expose cheating?

Arne Duncan welcomed the findings instead of burying them, Levitt recalled, and years later the two ended up as next-door neighbours.

A Roshanda by Any Other Name, a segment of Freakonomics: The Movie, borrows its title from which Shakespeare play?

Romeo and Juliet supplies the line in which Juliet insists a name changes nothing about a person, the very claim the segment sets out to test.

Steven Levitt's Harvard senior thesis examined rational bubbles in the breeding of which animals?

Horses were an early sign of his taste for odd subjects. Levitt graduated summa cum laude in 1989 and earned his economics PhD at MIT five years later.

Who thought up the title Freakonomics, according to Steven Levitt, who calls her the most creative person he knows?

His sister Linda ran a yarn shop in Minnesota when she was not naming books. Levitt said he knew from the start that she would be the one to title it.