Reddit reviews SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
We found 5 Reddit comments about SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Harper Perennial
Sudhir Venkatesh, perhaps?
His book is very interesting--he's mentioned repeatedly in both "Freakonomics" books as well. Suhir, as well as Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (authors of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics) are the reasons Behavioral Economics is kind of a "hobby" of mine.
Superfreakonomics!
Link goes to Amazon
Well there's the sequel of course: Superfreakonomics. And everything by Malcom Gladwell kind of falls into the same genre: The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink... Then there's The Long Tail by Chris Anderson of Wired and Bad Science by The Guardian's Ben Goldacre....
A Short History of Nearly Everything is also absolutely brilliant 'popular science' but not as 'generation now' as the ones above.
That's just top of my head. All of these books are a few years old but still a great read. I'd say they're all typical Redditor reading if that makes sense.
> Right, because there is just one police over stolen cars
Start with one and expand. The point is to get something going so you don't have to wait until everyone signs off.
> How much do you think it costs just to securely store and realtime process and archive 880 video feeds originating in a remote location?
I'm not suggesting that. All you need is a single picture (to prove you saw it), the lat/lon of the occurrence, the text of the license plate and the time the picture was taken. It's not a lot of data.
> probably only costs a couple million dollars and probably covers hundreds of deliverables MORE than just 'scans license plates'
Potentially, but who's to say that extra stuff is legal or even useful? This solution is all about transparency while still solving the stated problem: car theft.
The problem with government is that they try to do too much when a much simpler solution would work just as well, if not better. The process should be:
The problem should be posted publicly so lots of individuals (universities, private companies, etc) have a chance to pitch an idea.
> > we should be reevaluating the requirements of the project
>
> No one here has those.
And that's really the problem here.
I work as at a private company that sells products to the government, and a lot of the time, we make our own requirements and our government customer uses those when evaluating competitors. Since we can set the requirements, it's very difficult for other companies to compete (though, to be fair, our product is pretty niche and there aren't many direct competitors).
My uneducated guess is that's what happened here. I'm guessing some company proposed a huge solution, lobbied it through government and got the contract without the government getting additional bids (or they set the requirements such that nobody else wanted to bother).
This is all speculation though, but I think the OP has a point. We should re-evaluate how government chooses solutions to its problems to see if there is a chance that a less custom, cheaper solution would work.
> If those solutions were effective and easy to implement someone would have monetized them already like they have in other sectors
That's just not true. I'm reading Superfreakonomics right now (highly recommend, it's also a pretty short read), which goes through lots of surprising sides of a variety of issues. In it, it lists typical government (read: political) solutions to problems (read: expensive) as compared to the much cheaper solution from the private sector. For example, they mentioned that the current solution to hurricanes is billions of aid to affected areas, whereas a few individuals have proposed stopping hurricanes in the first place by cooling the oceans (would cost far less than even a single year's expenses). Here's an article summarizing those types of solutions.
My point here is that anytime there's a large projected expense (such as the one the OP mentioned), it should be put to the public (e.g. universities, the private sector, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman, etc) to propose solutions, and in many cases, that just doesn't happen, so we get really expensive solutions when a simpler, cheaper solution may exist. Many of the problems government has are very unique, so there isn't a prebuilt solution already (though, in this case it sounds like at least part of the problem has a solution already).
So I’m not sure if asking questions to a current economics student will be the best way to find out if you’re interested in the subject. Especially if you’re not very familiar with the subject. Instead. I’ll give you some resources that might give you a better understanding of the subject.
This link from the American Economic Association gives you an overview of the subject. Click all around the website because there is a plethora of information. As well, here’s a link from the AEA about careers for those with an economics degree (both undergrad and grad).
Next, I would read Freakonomics and it’s sequel, Superfreakonomics. They are much closer to the “pop-Economics” than “academic economics,” but the books give a very good intro into the “non-standard” topics that still fall under the domain of economics. And it would be true that many current graduate students and young professors’ interest in the subject was peeked by those books (myself included).
After that, I would read maybe an intro textbook. My recommendations on this depends on how comfortable you are with calculus.