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Introduction to Freakonomics

“This book, then, has been written from a very specific worldview, based on a few fundamental ideas:

“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life...

“The conventional wisdom is often wrong…

“Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes…

“‘Experts’–from criminologists to real-estate agents–use their information advantage to serve their own agenda…

“Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so….” (p. 13-14)

Why New Cars Lose Much Value When Driven Off Lot

“The day that a car is driven off the lot is the worst day in its life, for it instantly loses as much as a quarter of its value. This might seem absurd, but we know it to be true. A new car that was bought for $20,000 cannot be resold for more than perhaps $15,000. Why? Because the only person who might logically want to resell a brand-new car is someone who found the car to be a lemon. So even if the car isn’t a lemon, a potential buyer assumes that it is. He assumes that the seller has some information about the car that he, the buyer, does not have–and the sell is punished for this assumed information.”(p. 67)

Cancer-Causing Mutations Can Occur By Chance as Millions of Cells Divide

“When the DNA double helix was first revealed by Watson and Crick in 1953, its structure seemed perfect and robust, well-designed to resist most of the disruptive influences that might be present inside living cells. For example, the bases in the double helix are turned inward and thus are not very susceptible to direct attack by chemical mutagens. Moreover, the linkages between adjacent bases were found to be resistant to cleavage by alkaline ions that arise continually in the cell.

“But while the double helix itself is relatively resistant to chemical attack, the process of maintaining a cell’s genetic integrity has a weak link. The vulnerability derives from the need to replicate the cell’s genome each time the cell goes through the process of growth and division. The resulting duplicate copies of the genome enable the mother cell to endow each of its daughters with a genome precisely equivalent to the one that it carries itself.

“This process of DNA replication has flaws. On occasion, a cell will miscopy a sequence of its DNA prior to cell division, and as a consequence, one of its daughters will receive a slightly miscopied genome, in effect a mutated one. Even the best-functioning cells will occasionally miscopy one in a million (or ten million) bases during each cycle of DNA replication. Hence, cell growth and division create vulnerability mutation.

“This imperfection suggested another way cancer formation might be accelerated. Agents that promote cell growth will indirectly create mutations simply because they force cells to replicate their DNA. More DNA copying means more inadvertent copying mistakes, hence more mistakes.”

Testing DNA Function Through Gene Transfer

“By 1979, another strategy for searching for elusive tumor oncogenes came online. This new approach did not depend on the knowledge gained about retroviruses. It was an independent strategy made possible by the experimental technique of gene transfer. Simply put, gene transfer made it possible to extract DNA (and thus genes) from one cell and introduce these genes into a second cell. The genes introduced into the recipient cell might cause it to take on new traits or behaviors. Such a response would indicate that the information specifying the newly displayed trait was present in the donor cell (from which the DNA had been prepared) and that this information could be conveyed to a recipient cell by the transfer of DNA molecules.” (p. 38)