| AN EXPLANATORY NOTE |
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In which the origins of this book are clarified. |
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| INTRODUCTION: The Hidden Side of Everything |
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3 | (16) |
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In which the book's central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. |
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Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong |
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How 'experts'-from criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists-bend the facts |
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Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life |
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What is freakonomics, "anyway? |
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| 1. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? |
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19 | (36) |
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In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side-cheating. |
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Who cheats? Just about everyone |
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How cheaters cheat, and how to catch them |
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Stories from an Israeli day-care center |
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The sudden disappearance of seven million American children |
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Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago |
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Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win |
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Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt? |
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What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think. |
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| 2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents? |
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55 | (34) |
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In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially when its power is abused. |
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Going undercover in the Ku Klux Klan |
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Why experts of every kind are in the perfect position to exploit you |
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The antidote to information abuse: the Internet |
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Why a new car is suddenly worth so much less the moment it leaves the lot |
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Breaking the real-estate agent code: what "well maintained" really means |
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Is Trent Lott more racist than the average Weakest Link contestant? |
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What do online daters lie about? |
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| 3. Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms? |
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89 | (28) |
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In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-interest, and convenience. |
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Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic halitosis |
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How to ask a good question |
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Sudhir Venkatesh's long, strange trip into the crack den |
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Why prostitutes earn more than architects |
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What a drug dealer, a high-school quarterback, and an editorial assistant have in common |
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How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the invention of nylon stockings |
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Was crack the worst thing to hit black Americans since Jim Crow? |
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| 4. Where Have All the Criminals Gone? |
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117 | (30) |
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In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions. |
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What Nicolae Ceausescu learned-the hard way-about abortion |
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Why the 1960's were a great time to be a criminal |
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Think the roaring 1990's economy put a crimp on crime? Think again |
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Why capital punishment doesn't deter criminals |
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Do police actually lower crime rates? |
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Prisons, prisons everywhere |
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Seeing through the New York City police "miracle" |
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Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later crack dealers were like Pets.com |
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The superpredator versus the senior citizen |
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Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed everything. |
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| 5. What Makes a Perfect Parent? |
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147 | (32) |
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In which we ask, from a variety of angles, a pressing question: do parents really matter? |
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The conversion of parenting from an art to a science |
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Why parenting experts like to scare parents to death |
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Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? |
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Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture quagmire |
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Why a good school isn't as good as you might think |
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The black-white test gap and "acting white" |
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Eight things that make a child do better in school and eight that don't. |
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| 6. Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet? |
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179 | (26) |
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In which we weigh the importance of a parent's first official act-naming the baby. |
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A boy named Winner and his brother, Loser |
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The blackest names and the whitest names |
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The segregation of culture: why Seinfeld never made the top fifty among black viewers |
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If you have a really bad name, should you just change it? |
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High-end names and low-end names (and how one becomes the other) |
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Britney Spears: a symptom, not a cause |
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Is Aviva the next Madison? |
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What your parents were telling the world when they gave you your name. |
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| EPILOGUE: Two Paths to Harvard |
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205 | (4) |
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In which the dependability of data meets the randomness of life. |
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| Notes |
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209 | (22) |
| Acknowledgments |
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231 | (2) |
| Index |
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233 | |
