Books: Freakonomics

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In Freakonomics, an economist asks questions you might not think to ask, and gets many surprising answers. It is billed as the “hidden side of everything,” and while it doesn’t exactly cover “everything” (a point they will make in the introduction to the sequel) it gets as much of it as it can. Economics, according to the authors, is all about incentives: what people are willing to do to get what they want, whether that means cheating, controlling the flow of information, or breaking the law to make a living.
Sometimes the sheer audacity of the questions is shocking (does giving a child a super-black sounding name give him/her a great disadvantage in life?) Sometimes, just the answers are shocking. (Q: why did the crime rate go down so much in the 1990’s, in spite of all the predictions to the contrary? A: in a word, abortion.) According to the authors, the legalization of abortion did more to affect the crime rate than any policing or law-making or gun owning ever could have. Sound crazy? Just read it!
These are the sort of questions probed and answered, or at least an interesting suggestion is offered. Every question challenges our assumptions (for example: children are 100 times more likely to die in a house with a swimming pool than in a house with a gun) and every question causes the reader to look at interesting correlations (how the KKK and realtors are both affected by the control of information, for one).

At first I thought this would just be a disjointed collection of anecdotes, but in spite of what the authors state in the intro about there being a lack of unifying theme, there does seem to be a contrarian and counter-intuitive theme building throughout the book. Once you get the hang of it, you start to understand how the conclusions will be reached.
This book is so much fun, I burned right through it. I would recommend it to anyone who is not down with the party line and is willing to embrace unconventional thinking.

View all my reviews >>

Books: A Working Stiff's Manifesto

A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember by Iain Levison


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the story of how Levison, armed with a nearly-useless degree in English, worked 42 jobs in 10 years, quit 30, was fired by 9, and can’t remember the other 3. Throughout this endless journey (one that hits very close to home for many) he works as a cook, a fish cutter, a crab fisherman, and a truck driver, to name just a few. In every case he finds the absurdity of the job, and in a larger sense, he spots the absurdity of what passes for “work” in this country. He comes to notice that applying for jobs he’s not capable of doing is not his worst problem. Much worse is the way in which most employers are very much out for themselves, stepping on whomever doesn’t fit in with their plan. In every case he moves toward the inevitable conclusion that working for a living is nothing more than a way to keep a lot of people busy while making a very few at the top very rich.
Other than a bit of a downer ending and some less than stellar behavior in the middle, and a few dated observations of the internet (understandable as many of these events happened before things like e-mail became somewhat universal) this book is a hoot. I enjoyed every page. It’s like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed meets Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, only for me this book was much more relatable and funnier than either of those two.
I can see where Levison’s fiction comes from, with all his characters who are trying to break free from monotonous and unbearable existences, albeit in a hilarious way. It was hard to find much about this book I didn’t like. I would highly recommend anyone interested in Levison’s work to start with this one before getting into the fiction. It is all pretty great and I count myself a fan.

View all my reviews >>

Books: Bait and Switch

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For fans of Barbara Ehrenreich, this book is essentially a continuation of what she did in Nickel and Dimed. This time, instead of investigating the lower rungs of the minimum wage worker, she explores the world of the middle-class white- collar unemployed. As it turns out, the educated middle-class is increasingly being pushed downward to “survival jobs,” as outlined in Nickel and Dimed. People were “baited” into the idea that if you went to college you’d get a good job: you’re “set.” The “switch” comes into play when you are downsized and you realize that it was all for naught.
Ehrenreich takes the same tactic she took in that earlier book--developing an alter-ego of sorts, and she attempts to get a job in Corporate America, where she soon finds the difficulty in getting a job when there are “gaps” in your resume, creating the catch-22 of how do you get a job when the fact that you don’t already have a job works against you? She employs all the weapons in the arsenal for the middle aged middle class job-seeker: seminars, job boards, career coaches, positive thinking, a “winning attitude,” and finds them all quite lacking in their ability to help her (or anyone else, for that matter) land a job.
Corporate America is a beast. It demands an adherence to the bottom line which often means laying off employees to increase that bottom line. This is not news. But the shocking part of this investigation is the apparent reliance it has on unscientific and irrational notions of “likability” and “positivity” in hiring decisions, often without regard for actual skills.
No question, this is a depressing topic. People who are driven to tears by their feelings of uselessness after a layoff are the casualties in an increasingly cold-blooded and cold-hearted economy. It is also short-sighted to adhere so strictly to the profit-based bottom line, effectively making it so that no one can afford to buy or use whatever service the company may be offering. Henry Ford knew that he had to pay his people a good wage or else they wouldn’t be able to buy his product. It’s a lesson that would seem to have been forgotten amongst the culture of layoffs.
This is a well-done book about a topic that deserves to be addressed, and like Ehrenreich’s other books, it is funny.
I had more to say about my general antipathy toward capitalism, but I’m going to leave it at that. Read Nickel and Dimed, and then read Bait and Switch as both can say more than I ever could about it.

View all my reviews >>