I’ve just finished reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt (with a little help from friend and New Yorker scribbler Stephen J Dubner) and I really enjoyed it. The book starts with a warning that it doesn’t have a central theme (read: rambles a bit) and that was certainly true. However, the central premise – that using economists’ tools to analyse all sorts of data yields interesting and sometimes surprising results – holds water. It’s a very good read and I can highly recommend it even if it does lose a bit of steam towards the end.