Finally, I finished Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (London: Penguin, 2005). I often came late with this trend of behavioral economics. This is indeed a bestseller with brilliant research backup, put it more specific, a popularized academic work, which makes it even more attractive to me than their creative and daring questioning and reasoning. How to popularize scholarly research among the mass with attractive and bold ideas, and more importantly, to relate to their lives have always been a challenge.
Quote: "Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists. Every day there are newspaper pages and television newscasts to be filled, and an expert who can deliver a jarring piece of wisdom is always welcome. Working together, journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom." (p. 91)
it brought class to the masses (p. 109)
argument is predicated upon an artificial distinction between “The Humanities” on the one hand and “The Sciences” on the other. One is useless, the other is useful. One acts only upon itself, the other acts upon the world.
These sorts of distinctions may exist on college websites and in faculty phone books, but a single moment of honest reflection will show just how baseless they are in the real world.
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