| An Explanatory Note | | xiii | |
| Introduction: Putting the Freak in Economics | | 1 | |
| The perils of walking drunk |
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| The unlikely savior of Indian women |
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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? |
| | 19 | |
| 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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| I of every 50 women a prostitute |
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| The booming sex trade in old-time Chicago |
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| The erosion of prostitute pay |
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| Why did oral sex get so cheap? |
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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? |
| | 57 | |
| 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 Zysmor |
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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 is 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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| Unselievable Stories about Apathy and Altruism |
| | 97 | |
| 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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| Thank goodness for ``donorcycles'' |
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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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| The Fix is in---and It's Cheap and Simple |
| | 133 | |
| 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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| Three hundred thousand dead whales |
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| What really prevented your heart attack? |
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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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| 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? |
| | 165 | |
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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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| Mount Pinatubo teaches a lesson |
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| The obscenely smart, some what twisted gentlemen of Intellectual Ventures |
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| ``Sir, I am every kind of scientist!'' |
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| An inconvenient truthiness |
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| Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain? |
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| ``Big-ass volcanoes'' and climate change |
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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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| Epilogue Monkeys are People Too | | 211 | |
| Acknowledgments | | 217 | |
| Notes | | 221 | |
| Index | | 257 | |
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