Think like a freak: the authors of Freakonomics offer to retrain your brain

What does it mean to think like a freak?: An endless supply of fascinating questions ; The pros and cons of breast-feeding, fracking, and virtual currencies ; There is no magic Freakonomics tool ; Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger ; How to win the World Cup ; Private benefits vs. the greater good ; Thinking with a different set of muscles ; Are married people happy or do happy people marry? ; Get famous by thinking just once or twice a week ; Our disastrous meeting with the future prime minister The three hardest words in the English language: Why is "I don't know" so hard to say? ; Sure, kids make up answers but why do we? ; Who believes in the devil? ; And who believes 9/11 was an inside job? ; "Entrepreneurs of error" ; Why measuring cause-and-effect is so hard ; The folly of prediction ; Are your predictions better than a dart-throwing chimp? ; The Internet's economic impact will be "no greater than the fax machine's" ; "Ultracrepidarianism" ; The cost of pretending to know more than you do ; How should bad predictions be punished? ; The Romanian witch hunt ; The first step in solving problems: put away your moral compass ; Why suicide rises with quality of life, and how little we know about suicide ; Feedback is the key to all learning ; How bad were the first loaves of bread? ; Don't leave experimentation to the scientists ; Does more expensive wine taste better? What's your problem?: If you ask the wrong question, you'll surely get the wrong answer ; What does "school reform" really mean? ; Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia? ; Maybe it's the parents' fault! ; The amazing true story of Takeru Kobayashi, hot-dog-eating champion ; Fifty hot dogs in twelve minutes! ; So how did he do it? ; And why was he so much better than everyone else? ; "To eat quickly is not very good manners" ; The Solomon Method ; Endless experimentation in pursuit of excellence ; Arrested! ; How to redefine the problem you are trying to solve ; The brain is the critical organ ; How to ignore artificial barriers ; Can you do 20 push-ups?

Like a bad dye job, the truth is in the roots: A bucket of cash will not cure poverty and a planeload of food will not cure famine ; How to find the root cause of a problem ; Revisiting the abortion-crime link ; What does Martin Luther have to do with the German economy? ; How the "Scramble for Africa" created lasting strife ; Why did slave traders lick the skin of the slaves they bought? ; Medicine vs. folklore ; Consider the ulcer ; The first blockbuster drugs ; Why did the young doctor swallow a batch of dangerous bacteria? ; Talk about gastric upset! ; The universe that lives in our gut ; The power of poop Think like a child: How to have good ideas ; The power of thinking small ; Smarter kids at $15 a pop ; Don't be afraid of the obvious ; 1.6 million of anything is a lot ; Don't be seduced by complexity ; What to look for in a junkyard ; The human body is just a machine ; Freaks just want to have fun ; Is a "no-lose lottery" the answer to our low savings rate? ; Gambling meets charity ; Why kids figure out magic tricks better than adults ; "You'd think scientists would be hard to dupe" ; How to smuggle childlike instincts across the adult border Like giving candy to a baby: It's the incentives, stupid! ; A girl, a bag of candy, and a toilet ; What financial incentives can and can't do ; The giant milk necklace ; Cash for grades ; With financial incentives, size matters ; How to determine someone's true incentives ; Riding the herd mentality ; Why are moral incentives so weak? ; Let's steal some petrified wood! ; One of the most radical ideas in the history of philanthropy ; "The most dysfunctional $300 billion industry in the world" ; A one-night stand for charitable donors ; How to change the frame of a relationship ; Ping-Pong diplomacy and selling shoes ; "You guys are just the best!" ; The customer is a human wallet ; When incentives backfire ; The "cobra effect" ; Why treating people with decency is a good idea

What do King Solomon and David Lee Roth have in common?: A pair of nice, Jewish, game-theory-loving boys ; "Fetch me a sword!" ; What the brown M&M's were really about ; Teach your garden to weed itself ; Did medieval "ordeals" of boiling water really work? ; You too can play God once in a while ; Why are college applications so much longer than job applications? ; Zappos and "The Offer" ; The secret bullet factory's warm-beer alarm ; Why do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria? ; The cost of false alarms and other false positives ; Will all the gullible people please come forward? ; How to trick a terrorist into letting you know he's a terrorist

How to persuade people who don't want to be persuaded : First, understand how hard this will be ; Why are better-educated people more extremist? ; Logic and fact are no match for ideology ; The consumer has the only vote that counts ; Don't pretend your argument is perfect ; How many lives would a driverless car save? ; Keep the insults to yourself ; Why you should tell stories ; Is eating fat really so bad? ; The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure ; What is the Bible "about"? ; The Ten Commandments versus The Brady Bunch

The upside of quitting: Winston Churchill was right, and wrong ; The sunk-cost fallacy and opportunity cost ; You can't solve tomorrow's problem if you won't abandon today's dud ; Celebrating failure with a party and cake ; Why the flagship Chinese store did not open on time ; Were the Challenger's O-rings bound to fail? ; Learn how you might fail without going to the trouble of failing ; The $1 million question: "when to struggle and when to quit" ; Would you let a coin toss decide your future? ; "Should I quit the Mormon faith?" ; Growing a beard will not make you happy ; But ditching your girlfriend might ; Why Dubner and Levitt are so fond of quitting ; This whole book was about "letting go" ; And now it's your turn.