Intriguing research under silly cover

Freakonomics - I must have walked past this title dozens of times on my way to the science section of the Dublin Hodges & Figgis bookstore - but the silly title and trashy cover design apparently sent the wrong message and I never picked it up, until yesterday. I started reading, and after a few pages decided to buy and read the whole thing at home. Notwithstanding claims of extravagance to be found on the cover and in the introduction, it is pretty much good old social science. What's refreshing about it is that the author doesn't seem to have an ideological agenda driving his research. He just does his thing, i.e. study patterns in the data, without advocating any particular policy. You can occasionally find this type of social science research in the Scientific American but my impression is that it's rarer than it should be. The issues the book touches upon are mix of the trivial and the serious, most with a connection to economics, the study of incentives, and finding patterns in statistical data. There are also topics only loosely related to what is normally understood as economics, such as the link between legalized abortion and the drop in the crime rate in the US in the 1990's. This only makes an economist's take on them more interesting though. Some other highlights include detection of teachers cheating on their students' standardized tests, sumo wrestlest rigging competitions and the study of salary structure of crack-cocaine-dealing gangs. For obsessive parents there is a chapter where they can find out how little impact their efforts are likely to have on their kids future prospect. Plus a history of Ku Klux Klan and a study of discrimination in a TV show. Overall, a nice read for a quiet Sunday afternoon.