Take a master class in incentives-because for better or worse, incentives rule our world.Think like a child-because you'll come up with better ideas and ask better questions.Learn to say 'I don't know'-for until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to.First, put away your moral compass-because it's hard to see a problem clearly if you've already decided what to do about it.Some of the steps toward thinking like a Freak: Along the way, you'll learn the secrets of a Japanese hot-dog-eating champion, the reason an Australian doctor swallowed a batch of dangerous bacteria, and why Nigerian e-mail scammers make a point of saying they're from Nigeria. They range from business to philanthropy to sports to politics, all with the goal of retraining your brain. Levitt and Dubner offer a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems, whether your interest lies in minor lifehacks or major global reforms. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally-to think, that is, like a Freak. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more. By addressing these questions, our study explores how economists used these introductory enterprises to disseminate a certain image of them and their discipline in comparison to other social scientists and non-specialists, and how these representations evolved in time.The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. We explore how the notion of relevance evolved in time and how both literatures attempted to respond to the criticisms of their time accordingly.

The second challenge came from the attacks on economics and its teaching for their lack of relevance. Both literatures did offer an interesting response to perceived shortcomings of introductory courses. The first one is the problem of economic illiteracy, a problem that has concerned teachers in economics since the early 1960s.

We show that both literatures, as introductory enterprises, were responses to similar challenges. We shed an historical light on such literature by showing that its main strategy for introducing economics to non-specialists had already been tried in the 1970s in what were described as “issues-oriented” textbooks. This paper aims to study the ‘economics made fun’ literature with regard to its main purpose: popularizing economics.

Think like a freak by steven d levitt