名人教你讲英文：非常经济学

名人教英文：非常经济学

2005年，芝加哥大学经济学家steven d levitt和记者stephen j dubner合着freakonomics。该书出版后，旋即成为畅销书，于是作者在2009年再推出superfreakonomics。

书的名字和内容一样有趣。freakonomics一字由作者自创，其实是freak和economics的合体。freak作为形容词，有“反常”、“奇特”等意思。freakonomics讲的不是高深理论，作者从经济学角度探究社会现象的真相，见解独特，跳出传统思维框框。

作者思想活泼，文笔也生动。书一开首谈到，上世纪90年代初，美国治安急剧恶化，人人自危：

anyone living in the united states in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.

the culprit was crime. it had been rising relentlessly - a graph plotting the crime rate in any american city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile - and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it.