Freakonomics is the "heat," Find the cause, not the symptom

I've read this book a number of times, and I often refer friends, colleagues, neighbors, family, students and anyone else in ear shot to read it. I only mention it here as a way of defining the background.

My dad and brother are both police officers. Those two, with my wife, like to gang up on me for a grand old argument. In this case, we were arguing about whether red cars get more tickets than other colored cars. On the one hand, they had their anecdotal evidence, and coming from two cops and a social worker, it did not look like I had much to stand on. Maybe 15 minutes in to it, I recalled one of the central lessons in the book, correlation is not necessarily causality.

In my argument, that even if red cars did get more tickets, it would not be due to the car's color. It was far more likely that the personality type that would choose a red car would also be the personality type to speed. Not sure how much proof there is to that theory, but Snopes.com had a nice feature about the concept.

In the mean time, pick up a copy of Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics, or just check out their blog page, here.