May 23, 2005
Steven D. Levitt
This book is about 75% solid thinking and 25% hyped up marketing and clever packaging. I certainly do not begrudge the award winning authors their success, but I was truly expecting something a little deeper and more broad-reaching. One sixth of the book is about children's names correlating with success and scores–I was reading about that in the 1970's, when folks were proving that the same paper by a David would get a half point better score than one attributed to Moonbeam.
Bottom line: an excellent airplane book, by all means worth the time it takes to read (lots of white space), but over-sold.
Better books include:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
Information Payoff
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
