Point of View

In "An Explanatory Note" at the beginning of Freakonomics, the authors explain how they end up collaborating to write the book. Stephen Dubner is an author and journalist for the New York Times Magazine. In the summer of 2003, Dubner is assigned to write a profile of Steven D. Levitt, a young economist at the University of Chicago. Dubner finds Levitt's particular slant on economics to be fascinating in that Levitt asks intriguing and unusual questions. The two men - one a journalist and the other an economist - collaborate to write this book with the "underlying belief . . . that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and - if the right questions are asked - is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking." The book is written, then...