This book is economics made interesting and shows how to dig beneath the statistics to show something both revealing and fascinating.

Levitt (the economist) and Dubner (the journalist) combine to ask bewildering questions such as ‘what do estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan have in common?’ and ‘why do drug dealers live with their mothers?’

The chapters don’t particularly link with one another and there is no big picture to the book but that doesn’t stop each chapter being interesting and compelling. It is a collection of economic short stories where you don’t need to be an economist to follow what’s going on.

It’s humorous, intelligent and thought provoking and makes for great travel reading which probably explains why it’s sold in its millions.

The weakest chapter was on names of children although it was fascinating to see how names travel downwards in society and get corrupted along the way mostly through the inability to spell. Also fascinating was how different names for black children are from white children.

The most provocative question was no doubt Levitt’s answer to why the crime rate in America dropped at the beginning of the 1990s. His answer: abortion. The group most likely to breed young men and women who were most likely to commit crimes (the young, poor, uneducated) were also the most likely to have an abortion. Therefore in the 1970s when abortion was legalised in America effectively a whole generation of would be criminals was taken out of the equation.

Now Levitt isn’t arguing for abortion nor against it but simply observing what the consequences of abortion was 17-20 years later and then demonstrating it from the use of statistics. I think his argument is compelling. What that should show is that the best way (in the US at least) to both bring down crime and reduce abortion is to tackle poverty, education and relationship advice AND to continue to campaign for law revisions. It’s not an either/or or at least needn’t be. But the statistics, it seems, weigh heavily on one side.

All in all this is a well written book (if occasionally sounding a little smug with their own cleverness) and I’d enjoy discovering and reading about other oddball questions which reveal the hidden secrets of how our societies often function.