In the novel Freakonomics, the authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner use statistics to explain bizarre theories about sumo wrestlers, the KKK, and Chicago Public School teachers. But the purpose of the book is not to simply inform readers on seemingly unrelated subjects, it is much bigger than that. The true purposes of this book are to expose readers to what no one else wants them to know, to find correlations between otherwise unrelated themes or events, and most importantly, to provoke thought. The authors mention the term conventional wisdom very frequently throughout the book. To them, conventional wisdom is not wise at all, which is why many pieces of conventional wisdom in the book are disproven with the use of statistics. Conventional wisdom is just what people want or are expected to believe, but it is not…show more content… Every correlation, every statistic, every fact, it was all to get the audience asking questions. The introduction of the book states “So the aim of this book is to explore the hidden side of … everything.” (Levitt and Dubner, page 13) The authors begin the book with stating that the readers are supposed to explore with them. The actual content of the book exposes the readers to previously unknown information and finds similarities between random themes, and both of which provide the reader with new ideas to think about. In the epilogue, Freakonomics concludes with “The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. Many of them will lead to nothing. But some will produce answers that are interesting, even surprising.” (Levitt and Dubner, page 210) From start to end, the authors imply and even state that their goal is to make the audience think, think about new ideas and concepts, correlations they might find themselves, and about intriguing questions that lead them to surprising
