Cult bestseller, new buzz word...  Freakonomics is at the heart of everything we see and do and the subjects that bedevil us daily: from parenting to crime, sport to politics, fat to cheating, fear to traffic jams.

Asking provocative and profound questions about human motivation and contemporary living and reaching some astonishing conclusions, Freakonomics will make you see the familiar world through a completely original lens.

Keep up-to-date with the Freakonomists by reading their regular blog: www.freakonomics.com/blog.

‘a racy piece of detective work…entertaining and provocative’
Sunday Times

‘[Levitt] is one of those mavericks who appears once in a generation to stand conventional wisdom on its head’
Mail on Sunday

‘Levitt’s approach is inspiring’
Observer

‘each chapter functions as a bit like a puzzle or a detective story’
Independent on Sunday

‘whether the book will change the way we look at the world, of course we can’t be sure. But it will change it for a while’
Guardian - Nicholas Lezard’s Paperback Choice

‘there is a reason for the book’s buzz - it is very intriguing… Freakonomics gives you a new set of tools for looking at the world’
Telegraph

‘Far more fun than a statistical trudge ought to be, the book will help fill any dinner party silences for the rest of the year’
Word Magazine

Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.

The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so.

The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos.

In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. ‘The next crime wave will get so bad,’ he said, ‘that it will make 1995 look like the good old days.’

Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. ‘We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,’ Clinton said, ‘or our country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities.’ The smart money was plainly on the criminals.
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated—especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.

The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.

Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop— which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions—they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003.

These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad.

These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to journalists' ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom.

There was only one problem: they weren't true.

There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey.

Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey’s name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion and become a pro-life activist.)

So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?

As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.

It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk.

Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?

Zero.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are the double act behind the bestselling Freakonomics, which stormed the into the Top Ten book charts in 2005. As the paperback is launched, we caught up with the duo and quizzed them to see if their compatibly extends beyond writing…..

Which of the following do you prefer?

Hardbacks or paperbacks?
Steven Levitt: Paperbacks
Stephen Dubner: Hardbacks, in a jam, they make good weapons

Numbers or words?
L: Numbers, of course
D: Words,  though I am fond of the numbers 7, 23, and 32.

Condoleezza Rice or Hillary Clinton?
L: Both
D: To watch a football game, Rice (she's a big fan); to have dinner with, Clinton.

Theatre or cinema?
L: Cinema
D: My biggest worry about the theater is that, if I'm bored or displeased, the actors will see my face and be discouraged, which is a completely unrealistic and narcissistic fear, I know, but one which leads me to give cinema the slight edge.

Newspapers or online
L: Online
D: N.Y. Times on paper (I like the ads); everything else online.

Tony Blair or Gordon Brown?
L.: Tony Blair
D: Brown was the keynote speaker at the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award -- which, although "Freakonomics" lost out, was well worth attending since I got to hear Brown speak. I'd like to take oratory lessons from him.

TV or radio?
L: TV, especially reality TV
D: I love both, but there is more TV that I love than radio.

Summer or winter?
L: Summer
D: Fall

Pound or Euro?
L: Pound
D: Dollar.

Red wine or white wine?
L: Beer
D: Never, ever, ever, ever white.

Steven or Stephen?
L: Steven, obviously!
D: Stephen, obviously!