“If morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.”
Levitt’s methods of seeking out and solving the unusual questions in life as a tool to help determine answers for the common problems in society, provides him with ingenious solutions that would otherwise be overlooked. As Dubner points out, “he (Levitt) has merely distilled the so-called dismal science down to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want, or need.” These ‘think out side the box’ practices employed by economists such as Levitt, are exactly the type of strategies used by designers to create clever solutions/products/systems for their target markets.
I know absolutely nothing about the field of economics and found this book very accessible and relevant to my field of problem solving through design.
Kath in 2009 