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An Explanatory Note | |
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In which we admit to lying in our previous book. | |
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Introduction: Putting The Freak in Economics | |
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In which the global financial meltdown is entirely ignored in favor of more engaging topics. | |
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The perils of walking drunk | |
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The unlikely savior of Indian women | |
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Drowning in horse manure | |
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What is �freakonomics,� anyway? | |
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Toothless sharks and bloodthirsty elephants | |
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Things you always thought you knew but didn't. | |
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How is a Street Prostitute Like a Department-Store Santa? | |
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In which we explore the various costs of being a woman. | |
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Meet LaSheena, a part-time prostitute | |
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One million dead �witches� | |
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The many ways in which females are punished for being born female | |
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Even Radcliffe women pay the price | |
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Title IX creates jobs for women; men take them | |
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1 of every 50 women a prostitute | |
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The booming sex trade in old-time Chicago | |
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A survey like no other | |
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The erosion of prostitute pay | |
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Why did oral sex get so cheap? | |
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Pimps versus Realtors | |
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Why cops love prostitutes | |
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Where did all the schoolteachers go? | |
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What really accounts for the male-female wage gap? | |
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Do men love money the way women love kids? | |
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Can a sex change boost your salary? | |
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Meet Allie, the happy prostitute; why aren't there more women like her? | |
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Why Should Suicide Bombers Buy Life Insurance? | |
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In which we discuss compelling aspects of birth and death, though primarily death. | |
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The worst month to have a baby | |
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The natal roulette affects horses too | |
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Why Albert Aab will outshine Albert Zyzmor | |
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The birthdate bulge | |
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Where does talent come from? | |
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Some families produce baseball players; others produce terrorists | |
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Why terrorism is so cheap and easy | |
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The trickle-down effects of September 11 | |
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The man who fixes hospitals | |
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Why the newest ERs are already obsolete | |
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How can you tell a good doctor from a bad one? | |
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�Bitten by a client at work� | |
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Why you want your ER doc to be a woman | |
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A variety of ways to postpone death | |
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Why is chemotherapy so widely used when it so rarely works? | |
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�We're still getting our butts kicked by cancer� | |
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War: not as dangerous as you think? | |
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How to catch a terrorist. | |
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Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism | |
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In which people are revealed to be less good than previously thought, but also less bad. | |
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Why did 38 people watch Kitty Genovese be murdered? | |
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With neighbors like these | |
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What caused the 1960s crime explosion? | |
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How the ACLU encourages crime | |
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Leave it to Beaver: not as innocent as you think | |
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The roots of altruism, pure and impure | |
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Who visits retirement homes? | |
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Natural disasters and slow news days | |
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Economists make like Galileo and hit the lab | |
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The brilliant simplicity of the Dictator game | |
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People are so generous! | |
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Thank goodness for �donorcyeles� | |
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The great Iranian kidney experiment | |
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From driving a truck to the ivory tower | |
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Why don't real people behave like people in the lab? | |
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The dirty rotten truth about altruism | |
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Scarecrows work on people too | |
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Kitty Genovese revisited. | |
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The Fix is in-and It's Cheap and Simple | |
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In which big, seemingly intractable problems are solved in surprising ways. | |
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The dangers of childbirth | |
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Ignatz Semmelweis to the rescue | |
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How the Endangered Species Act endangered species | |
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Creative ways to keep from, paying for your trash | |
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Forceps hoarding | |
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The famine that wasn't | |
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Three hundred thousand dead whales | |
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The mysteries of polio | |
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What really prevented your heart attack? | |
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The killer car | |
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The strange story of Robert McNamara | |
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Let's drop some skulls down the stairwell! | |
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Hurray for seat belts | |
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What's wrong with riding shotgun? | |
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How much good do car seats do? | |
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Crash-test dummies tell no lies | |
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Why hurricanes kill, and what can be done about it. | |
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What Do Al Gore And Mount Pinatubo Have In Common? | |
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In which we take a cool, hard look at global warming. | |
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Let's melt the ice cap! | |
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What's worse: car exhaust or cow farts? | |
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If you love the earth, eat more kangaroo | |
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It all comes down to negative externalities | |
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The Club versus LoJack | |
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Mount Pinatubo teaches a lesson | |
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The obscenely smart, somewhat twisted gentlemen of Intellectual Ventures | |
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Assassinating mosquitoes | |
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�Sir, I am every kind of scientist!� | |
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An inconvenient truthiness | |
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What climate models miss | |
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Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain? | |
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�Big-ass volcanoes� and climate change | |
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How to cool the earth | |
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The �garden hose to the sky� | |
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Reasons to hate geoengineering | |
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Jumping the repugnance barrier | |
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�Soggy mirrors� and the puffy-cloud solution | |
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Why behavior change is so hard | |
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Dirty hands and deadly doctors | |
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Foreskins are falling. | |
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Epilogue | |
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Monkeys Are People Too | |
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In which it is revealed that-aw, hell, you have to read it to believe it. | |
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Bonus Matter | |
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Q & A With the Authors | |
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The Things Our Fathers Gave Us | |
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Transcript From the First Freakonomics Radio Podcast | |
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Acknowledgments | |
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Notes | |
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Index | |