Risky word choices

I was listening to the last ATP episode (originally had that as 'ATP podcast', similar to an 'ATM Machine'), and found it generally interesting.  But when it got to talking about sexism (and I must admit to having no expectation of that part being interesting when it was starting), it actually got better.

Starting when Marco mentioned his review of Vesper talking about having 'balls', and really going through the rest of the show, it had me thinking about the Freakanomics gender differences episode.  That one wasn't talking about sexism, per se, but talked a lot about how men and women are different.  What was particularly interesting was when they talked about risk-taking behavior in societies with (extremely) different gender norms.  In the Maori (whose men basically treat women like chattel) society, men and women had pretty similar levels of comfort with risk as we see in first world, western societies.  But a matrilineal society in India (I've already forgotten the name) had risk-taking levels that were reversed (in fact, the women there were even more likely to take risk than the Maori men).  Neat stuff.

I need to do some thinking about whether my own word choices are sexist.  I tend to mostly think not, but I'll need to keep my eyes open about it.

Economy in our Lives

I do computer programming for a living. But for some reason, I recently bought several economics books. No, not like economics textbooks; all three look to apply the lessons of economics to everyday life.

The books are Predictably Irrational, The Logic of Life, and Freakanomics. I suppose I should, perhaps, add The Undercover Economist to complete the collection.

I've read a bit less than half of Irrational, but did finish Freakanomics last night. They're the sort of books that appeal to me, perhaps on an irrational basis. I love reading them for the ideas they throw out, but they're hard to read for any length of time, because I get preoccupied with those ideas and want to delve into one of the ideas without moving on to others.

Economics, to me, is a pretty weird discipline. There aren't many other fields (actually, I don't know of any) where two completely incompatible theories can both have wide acceptance. Part of that is that much of economics, when applied to things more complex than "simple" supply and demand, deals with issues that can't be studied in isolation, and for which there just isn't enough data to conclusively prove one theory to be correct.

But it does encourage a scientific approach to inquiry of all sorts, and Freakanomics shows some of the diverse issues into which that can give some insight.

I'm really not sure how useful having read the book will turn out to be, but the issues that it looked into (the KKK, drug dealers, abortion, child naming, parental influence in education, etc) were all fascinating to me. Some of them I knew a little bit about, some I didn't, but I learned quite a bit about all of them. And most of them I learned to look at a bit differently than I had before.

I'll have to write some more about this when I finish one of the other books, but this is a fantastic book, easily worthy of the plaudits I'd heard before I bought it.