This is billed as the “explosive” follow-up to Freakonomics “and is subtitled: Global Cooldown, Patriotic Hookers, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.

Apparently the world can’t get enough of this team that keeps questioning our assumptions about how the world works and how we should evaluate the statistics that the media bombard us with.

They start with something that is not intuitively obvious: based on statistics (and if you accept their assumption that people walk as much drunk as they drive), it is much safer for the drunk person to drive drunk than to walk drunk.

It is much safer for other drivers for drunks to walk, but for drunks, it is safer to drive, so that they do not lie in the middle of the street and pass out, fall in front of a car, cross a street without looking. , or the other dangerous things drunk pedestrians do. They did not even include the real possibility (in some neighborhoods) of being mugged.

It ends with descriptions of how a research scientist taught monkeys to value coins; they even discovered prostitution.

Along the way, they take a closer look at the economics of the (human) prostitute, comparing what it was many years ago to today.

Even more potentially controversial is the chapter on global warming, which highlights a company headed by a former Microsoft employee that is leading other geniuses to find profitable ways to make money solving the world’s problems.

These scientists seem to generally believe that the world is gradually warming up, but are well aware that current models are not sophisticated enough, which puts them outside the rabid environmental field.

The authors mention how the current environmental movement looks a lot like a religion trying to limit carbon dioxide not just as a method to reduce global warming, but to deliberately destroy the civilization we know. They allude to this and seem aware of the threat, but they do not delve into the motivations of the fanatical environmentalists or explore what their true goals are.

Rather, they target “reducing global warming” and then leave it to scientists to discuss how it could be achieved cheaply.

As someone who doesn’t pretend to be a climate scientist, I am a global warming agnostic.

But as someone who views the proposed “solutions” to the alleged threat of global warming as a threat to human freedom and economic development, I wish they would have gone further by exposing radical environmentalists who are using climate change as a medium, not as a medium. final.

They even reopened the infamous Kitty Genovese case, although they apparently haven’t read Robert Cialdini’s explanation that neighbors who witnessed the attack or murder believed someone else had called the police. They discovered that someone did call the police, who apparently were slow to react, as no one knew the severity of the injury.

Personally, I enjoy this way of using facts to debunk myths. God knows we need a lot more facts and context and a lot less lies and distortions in the media.