Not Very FreakyA very ordinary effort. Levitt & Dubner tells us the recipe to “Think Like a Freak”. Most of the ingredients are quite ordinary and almost all are trodden territory. A wholly unnecessary book.1. That all the Big Problems of the world are too tough to solve for ordinary people like us and that we should nibble at the edges. - A bit about game theory and about how most problems arise due to private vs public conflicts and how we need learn to realign incentives to solve small proble...

Q:… just because you’re at the office is no reason to stop thinking. (c) Amen!Q:Show us a “perfect” solution and we’ll show you our pet unicorn. (c) Love this one.Some rehashing of the prior ones but under some new angles! - TransPOOsition - Salts! - Kids vs abortions vs parents vs violent crime - Hot doggies - Right incentives (candy vs toilet) - Zappos - David Lee Roth's brown M&Ms - Teach Your Garden to Weed Itself - The Ayalon Institute - Insurance for suicide bombers trickety-trick - Go fev...

If I changed the title to “Think Outside the Box” you’d probably have a good idea of what to expect from this book - and you’d be right! Granted I’ve not read Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt’s other “Freak” books, Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, but I suspect they’re just more of what’s contained in Think Like a Freak. Hey, if it ain’t broke, right? Think Like a Freak essentially has one very broad thesis: to approach any difficult situation/problem from an unexpected angle to solve i...

Easy and fun to read. It basically discusses how one should approach problems (big or small) and provides general steps that would help if we follow them through, like admitting when one doesn't know something, figuring out the real problem and its roots, thinking like a child, looking for and providing incentives to get certain things done, and so on. It also has some really interesting ideas that I would like to try myself some time. I recommend it to everyone.

Levitt and Dubner’s earlier two books, Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics were smashing successes because they came up with innovative insights to make sense of phenomena that were rather mysterious, such as an explanation for the drop in the crime rate over the last decade. Hoping to find similar out-of-the-box proposals, I was eager to try their third book, Think Like A Freak. This book contains a few surprises, but overall it seems like a slap-dash production intended to cash in on the succe...

I feel that a lot of self-help or businesses type books now all follow the same formula and in the end talk about the same few ideas again and again. Like there really isn't a need for a whole book on some of these ideas like thinking outside the box or being comfortable making mistakes. I really only get something out of reading them if I'm feeling lost unsure about what I'm doing because they kind of help me ground myself or become motivated again. Otherwise though it feels like a waste of tim...

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner is a book I wish had been around (or I had thought like a freak) thirty years ago. We used to call it 'thinking outside the box ' but I like their phrase much better! Excellent book to try to retrain my brain, not that it is trained now. I think everyone should read this, especially young people.

I loved Freakonomics and its sequel, so was expecting more of the same here, but Think Like a Freak is a very different book and suffers by comparison. The thing that absolutely blew everyone away with the earlier books was the absolute string of superb eye-opening stories, taking a sideways look at a problem using statistics and psychology (it wasn’t really economics, but it worked as a title). Perhaps the definitive example was the idea that crime rates had fallen as a result of increased avai...

I got the audio version from the library and was delighted to find that Steven Dubner, famous for his Freakonomics Radio, was the narrator. In typical whimsical style, they extended their previous ideas into the realm of practical suggestions. While they aren't covering Friedman style weighty economic issues, this book is excellent for what it purports to be - a light-hearted treatment of thinking differently. While it isn't profound or weighty, it is just as useful for all that. In fact the acc...

Fun fun fun fun fun! This was my favorite of the franchise. Like its predecessors, it is filled with amusing stories which usually highlight some economic or behavioral principle (such as sunk cost, cobra effect, etc...). Unlike its predecessors, this book has an underlying structure of a "how to" book. I feel that this gives the book a more coherent flow. The writing is accessible to anyone, lighthearted in tone, entertaining, and it moves very fast. If you listen to the podcast, many of the st...

This book won't be 2.5/5 stars for everyone. If, like myself, you enjoyed Steven and Stephen's earlier volumes, Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics , then congratulations! — you've found a subject area that interests you (albeit a sometimes nebulous one that can show up under the guise of a variety of disciplines). If, for some reason, you only feel comfortable learning about the ways in which data and patterns can reveal the inner workings of our world with these two Freakonomi...

I prefer the audiobooks over the physical books. They’re great for listening while doing other things.This is the third book in the Freakonomics series. You don’t need to read them in order. I’ve enjoyed all three. They talk about a variety of subjects. One subject was intriguing and not answered. A multinational retail company bought tv ads 3 times a year. They had their highest sales at those three times. The authors asked the question did the ads cause the sales? Or did the sales cause the ad...

An entertaining read - or listen to be exact. Nothing stupendously ground-breaking to be honest but it's stuff that one doesn't really think about being too caught up in the rat race and what might be construed as conventional thinking. What I really like are the real world examples, while it might not be exactly relevant for my field of work in the financial sector, are more accessible and easy to connect to. The audiobook has added material which is a compilation of a few Freakonomic radio/pod...

I’m a big Freakonomics fan. I’ve read the two previous books, seen the movie, and I regularly listen to the podcasts. So for a fan like me, this book was slightly disappointing because I’d heard most of the material before on the podcasts. Still, since I love the lessons so much, I didn’t mind a review. I especially liked the lesson of embracing failure instead of fearing it. Temporarily putting away your moral compass before analyzing problems was a good one, too. As the authors say, you can’t