This book was amazing. I just finished it and got a friend hooked. He has already asked to read it. Now...onto what I learned. I learned many things from this book. Remember the question I brought up last time? "Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?" Well, turns out a pool is more dangerous to a kid. It also asked questions like what a teacher and sumo wrestler have in common, how Ku Klux Klan is like real estate agents, and what makes a parent "perfect". The book asked these and many other intriguing questions and answered them with statistics (I wont tell you the answer...read the book yourself!).
Today I want to talk about the reason the author wrote the book. In the introduction of the book, the author talks about how there is no actual connecting, overall theme. There is a relationship though. That relationship is that there is a "hidden side" to everything. For example; In the book, it mentions the crime boom in the 1900's. Then, it talks about the sudden decrease in crime in the late 1990's. It went through and described what people thought was the cause of the drop in crime (better police force, weapon control laws, etc.). But, Steven D. Levitt looked at it from a different perspective. He finds the "hidden side" and links the drop in crime rate to a case that legalized abortion. How might that be? Well, like I said read it yourself and find out...
