Hong’s Cave

It was an interesting and easy read: Not really academic and not too technical. I think I can understand why some of the Amazon.com readers’ reviews were critical of the book’s non-technical contents. But this is really a lighter reading than anything else.

Although the writers seem to say the book does not have any unifying theme, in short, the book is about incentives and using economic tools to analyze social and cultural data. Steven D. Levitt is the economist who did (and probably still does) this type of studies. Stephen J. Dubner wrote for The New York Times Magazines where he wrote articles featuring Levitt’s studies. I believe the idea for the book came out of those articles. It also seems two of them are currently writing articles for the paper.

The book contains some very interesting examples, but the writing is very easy to digest. It also gives something to think about your everyday life although not for too long since we normally lack the data and the analysis to gain any real insights (I mean, without proper data analysis, your hypothesis is just that, an interesting story and nothing more). Anyway, I’d like to see more analysis on other social/cultural data.