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Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary? And what's the smartest way to think about global warming? Published in 2009,SuperFreakonomics was an instant world-wide best-seller, debuting at No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list.

"We all witness acts of altruism, large and small, just about every day. We may even commit some ourselves. But economists don't know anything about such behavior, do they? Sure, liquidity crunches and oil prices and even collateralized debt obligations -- but social behaviors like altruism? Is that really what economists do?
For hundreds of years, the answer was no. But in the early 1960s, a few renegade economists had begun to care deeply about such things. Chief among them was Gary Becker, the longtime University of Chicago economist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992. Not satisfied with just measuring the economic choices people make, Becker tried to incorporate the sentiments they attached to such choices.
Some of Becker's most compelling early research concerned altruism. He argued, for instance, that the same person who might be purely selfish in business could be exceedingly altruistic among people he knew -- although, importantly (Becker is an economist, after all), he predicted that altruism even within a family would have a strategic element. Years later, the economists Doug Bernheim, Andrei Shleifer, and Larry
Summers empirically demonstrated Becker's point. Using data from a U.S. government longitudinal study, they showed that an elderly parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance.
But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents?
A reasonable conjecture -- in which case you'd expect an only child of wealthy parents to be especially dutiful. But the data show no increase in retirement- home visits if a wealthy family has only one grown child; there need to be at least two. This suggests that the visits increase because of competition between siblings for the parent's estate.

Steven D. Levitt

Steve Levitt is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory.

Levitt received his BA from Harvard University in 1989 and his PhD from MIT in 1994. He has taught at Chicago since 1997.

In 2004, Levitt was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most influential economist under the age of 40. In 2006, he was named one of Time magazine's “100 People Who Shape Our World.”

Steve co-authored Freakonomics, which spent over 2 years on the New York Times Best Seller list and has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. SuperFreakonomics, available this October, includes brand new research on topics from terrorism to prostitution to global warming. Steve is also the co-author of the popular New York Times Freakonomics Blog.

Личен сайт: http://freakonomicsbook.com/

Stephen J. Dubner

Stephen J. Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and TV and radio personality. In addition to the Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, his books include Turbulent Souls (Choosing My Religion), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, and the children’s book The Boy With Two Belly Buttons. His journalism has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time, and has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, and elsewhere. He has taught English at Columbia University (while receiving an M.F.A. there), played in a rock band (which started at Appalachian State University, where he was an undergrad, and was later signed to Arista Records), and, as a writer, was first published at the age of 11, in Highlights for Children. 

Личен сайт: http://www.stephenjdubner.com/index.html; http://freakonomicsbook.com/