FREAKONOMICS, Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Steven D. Levitt (...

FREAKONOMICS, Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Steven D. Levitt (epub)(Nonfiction)
Author: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner​
Edition: Freakonomics, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Release date: November 11, 2025​
Length: 304 pages
Genre: Nonfiction; Economics; Behavioral economics; Popular science; Sociology

What’s new in the anniversary edition
New foreword by Stephen J. Dubner reflecting on the book’s cultural impact over two decades and the origins of the collaboration with Levitt, sparked by Dubner’s New York Times Magazine profile that led to Freakonomics.

Freakonomics, Twentieth Anniversary Edition revisits the original’s data‑driven, counterintuitive investigations into everyday life, arguing that incentives are the hidden force shaping human behavior in domains from schools to sports to real estate markets. Through case studies on teacher and sumo wrestler cheating, the economics of drug gangs, and information asymmetries that advantage insiders (e.g., real estate agents, secret societies), the book shows how digging into data overturns conventional wisdom and reveals the logic behind seemingly illogical choices. It also tackles hot‑button topics like the 1990s crime decline and what actually matters in parenting, illustrating how to separate correlation from causation and why stories without evidence mislead us. This anniversary edition adds a new foreword reflecting on the book’s cultural impact and how its curiosity‑first method influenced subsequent work, including the Freakonomics podcast and broader discussions of evidence‑based decision‑making.