Interesting material, well researched , but very shallow.

The second edition of this book contains the original article from the New Yorker by Dubner about Levitt. Save your time: read the article online instead of this book. It's 5% the size, yet contains 80% of the same material.

There is a bit more info about Sumo wrestlers throwing games... and a good overview of cheating teachers. The book also contains info -- of questionable validity -- about Stetson Kennedy and the KKK.

However, what's missing is a good grounding of regression analysis, or an in-depth analysis of any of the subjects. Cheating, crime, incentives, information asymmetry, any of these would make a great book on their own... but the ADD-style of this book always left me feeling that something big was missing, and thus I couldn't trust that all arguments were presented.

The section on information asymmetry was so shallow, thet they didn't even mention The Market for Lemons by Akerlof. The coverage of cheating real-estate agents was so shallow, they didn't even cover that their book may create a self-defeating prophesy. Many sellers I know use the threat of firing the agent, and thus create the negative incentive of zero payment to a lazy realtor.

I was also shocked that nowhere in the book did he cover statistical significance or margin of error... He runs a few numbers, spits out a percentage, and we're expected to swoon. So what if his data says that realtors sell their own homes for 2% more than their client's homes? What's the frigging margin of error?

Throughout the book the authors joke about there not being an overriding theme to the book. Quite true: it did ramble on about disjointed things and left out a great deal of detail... perhaps that's a bad thing, and not something to laugh about.

This could have been a much better book... but it wasn't.