I picked up Freakonomics at Prague Airport - a book filled up with statistics and attempts to use (micro) economics to explain why things happen the way they do. The authors take a rather broad view of economics and define it as "how people get what they want". Don't expect any "real" economic theories in this book though, but rather be prepared to get overwelmed by data, statistics and correlation/ causality analysis on everything from the KKK to abortion. If you like playing around with numbers and have some time to spend, then you might be interested -just don't expect too much. The one good point that this book does get across is on the difference between correlation and causality.This book reminded me of my first year at university and the first class on statistics... our prof started out with a little story, well rather he shared the results of recent study. It seemed that students who drank a lot of coffee got higher average grades on their exams, than the ones who didn't. The question raised was whether drinking coffee helped stimulate the intellect or perhaps aided concentration. The answer was neither; it turned out that students who got higher grades were also the ones that, on average, studied longer. They simply drank more coffee to keep themselves awake during the evenings studying.
