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| An Explanatory Note | |
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| In which the origins of this book are clarified. | |
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| Introduction: The Hidden Side of Everything | |
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| In which the book's central idea is set forth: namely, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. | |
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| Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong | |
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| How "experts"-from crimnologists to real-estate agents to political scientists-bend the facts | |
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| Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life | |
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| What is "freakonomics," anyway? | |
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| What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? | |
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| In which we explore the beauty of incentives, as well as their dark side-cheating. | |
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| Who cheats? Just about everyone | |
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| How cheaters, cheat, and how to catch them | |
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| Stories from an Israeli day-care center | |
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| The sudden disappearance of seven millon American childern | |
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| Cheating schoolteachers in Chicago | |
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| Why cheating to lose is worse than cheating to win | |
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| Could sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan, be corrupt? | |
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| What the Bagel Man saw: mankind may be more honest than we think | |
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| How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like A Group of Real-Estate Agents? | |
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| In which it is argued that nothing is more powerful than information, especially when its power is abused. | |
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| Spilling the Ku Klux Klan's secrets | |
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| Why experts of every kind are in the perfect position to exploit you | |
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| The antidote to information abuse: the Internet | |
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| Why a new car is suddenly sorth so much less the moment it leaves the lot | |
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| Breaking the real-estate agent code: what "well maintained" really means | |
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| Is Trent Lott more racist than the average Weakest Link contestant? | |
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| What do online daters lie about? | |
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| Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms? | |
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| In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-interest, and convenience. | |
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| Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic halitosis | |
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| How to ask a good question | |
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| Sudhir Venkatesh's long, strange trip into the crack den | |
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| Why prostitutes earn more than architects | |
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| What a drug dealer, a high-school quarterback, and an editorial assistant have in common | |
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| How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the invention of nylon stocking | |
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| Was crack the worst thing to bit black Americans since Jim Crow? | |
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| Where Have all the Criminals Gone? | |
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| In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions. | |
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| What Nicolae Ceauşescu learned-the hard way-about abortion | |
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| Why the 1960s was a great time to be a criminal | |
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| Think the roaring 1990s economy put a crimp on crime? think again | |
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| Why capital punishment doesn't deter criminals | |
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| Do police actually lower crime rates? | |
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| Prisons, prisons everywhere | |
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| Seeing through the New York City police "miracle" | |
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| What is a gun, really? | |
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| Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later crack dealers were like Pets.com | |
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| The superpredator versus the senior citizen | |
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| Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed every-thing. | |
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| What Makes A Perfect Parent? | |
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| In which we ask, from a variety of angels, a pressing question: do parents really matter? | |
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| The conversion of parenting from an art to a science | |
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| Why parenting experts like to scare parents to death | |
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| Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? | |
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| The economics of fear | |
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| Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture quagmire | |
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| Why a good school isn't as good as you might think | |
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| The black-white test gap and "acting white" | |
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| Eight things that make a child do better in school and eight that don't | |
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| Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet? | |
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| In which we weigh the importance of a parent's first official act-naming the baby. | |
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| A boy named Winner and his brother, Loser | |
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| The blackest names and the whitest names | |
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| The segregation of culture: why Seinfeld never made the top fifty among black viewers | |
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| If you have a really bad banem should you just change it? | |
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| High-end names and low-end names (and how one becomes the other) | |
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| Britney Spears: a symptom, not a cause | |
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| Is Aviva the next Madison? | |
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| What your parents were telling the world when they gave you your name. | |
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| Epilogue: Two Paths to Harvard | |
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| In which the dependability of data meets the randomness of life. | |
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| Bonus Matter | |
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| "The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You..." | |
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| Selected "Freakonomics" Columns From The New York Times Magazine | |
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| A Q&A with the Authors | |
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| Notes | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Index | |