When to Rob a Bank summary
Book Summary & Synopsis
What's it about?
When to Rob a Bank explores the hidden economic logic behind everyday behavior. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner examine surprising patterns in names, prices, risk, lying, environmental choices, crime, sex, education, and consumer behavior to show how incentives, psychology, information, social pressure, and hidden costs shape decisions.
Who is it for?
- Readers interested in behavioral economics and the unexpected forces behind ordinary choices.
- Anyone who wants to question intuitive explanations and look more carefully at incentives, evidence, risks, prices, and hidden costs.
Meet the authors
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner use economic reasoning to examine seemingly irrational behavior and reveal the incentives and forces operating beneath everyday outcomes.
From the Introduction & First Chapter
Introduction
When to Rob a Bank by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Economics reveals the hidden incentives, biases, and forces shaping our everyday choices and seemingly irrational behavior. Why do prices sometimes make no sense?
Why do people lie when honesty would serve them better? And why are we often afraid of the wrong things? Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J.
Dubner explore the strange economic logic hidden inside ordinary life. Their examples range from baby names and drug prices to crime, environmental choices, sex, and education. Together, they show that economics is not merely about money. It is also a way of questioning assumptions and discovering the incentives behind human behavior.
names can reveal surprising patterns
Names Can Reveal Surprising Patterns. Every year, millions of new parents worry about what to name their children. Personal preference matters, but names can also reveal some strange patterns. One Freakonomics reader, Mr.
Stuart, collected newspaper clippings about crimes. The perpetrators in his collection shared one unusual detail. Their middle name was Wayne. Author Stephen Dubner was surprised by the sheer number of examples.
He even joked that his daughters should never date a boy with the middle name Wayne. Names can also spread with astonishing speed. In 1999, only eight children in the United States were named Nevaeh. By 2005, that number had risen to 4,457.
The craze appears to have originated with one highly visible example. In 2000, Christian rock star Sonny Sandoval appeared on MTV with his daughter, Nevaeh. Her name is heaven spelled backward. Nevaeh eventually became more popular among baby girls than Sarah.
Sometimes names also seem uncannily suited to the people carrying them. Readers sent the authors several amusing examples. An Idaho man arrested for public masturbation had the surname Limberhand. Another reader remembered leaving behind a dentist named Dr.
Les Plack. These examples do not prove that names determine behavior, but they show how patterns can emerge in places we rarely think to examine.
Table of Contents
- 1 Introduction 0:53
- 2 names can reveal surprising patterns 1:42
- 3 prices often defy common sense 1:56
- 4 people are poor judges of risk 1:59
- 5 lying follows incentives and social pressures 2:04
- 6 environmental intuition can mislead us 1:54
- 7 crime also responds to psychology and incentives 2:03
- 8 sex has economic consequences too 2:03
- 9 economics is a way of seeing 4:07
