interviews with Brian Mullaney of Smile Train; see also Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Bottom-Line Philanthropy,” The New York Times Magazine, March 9, 2008. / 4 For more on the “missing women” of India, see Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” The New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990; Stephan Klasen and Claudia Wink, published in K. Basu and R. Kanbur (eds.), Social Welfare, Moral Philosophy and Development: Essays in Honour of Amartya Sen’s Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Oxford University Press, 2008); and Swami Agnivesh, Rama Mani, and Angelika Koster-Lossack, “Missing: 50 Million Indian Girls,” The New York Times, November 25, 2005. See also Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “The Search for 100 Million Missing Women,” Slate, May 24, 2005, which reported on Emily Oster’s finding of a connection between missing women and hepatitis B; but see also Steven D. Levitt, “An Academic Does the Right Thing,” Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, May 22, 2008, in which the hepatitis conclusion was found to be faulty. / 5 Son worship in China: see Therese Hesketh and Zhu Wei Xing, “Abnormal Sex Ratios in Human Populations: Causes and Consequences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 5, 2006; and Sharon LaFraniere, “Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million,” The New York Times, April 10, 2009. / 5 Information about bride burning, wife beating, and other domestic atrocities can be found in Virendra Kumar, Sarita Kanth, “Bride Burning,” The Lancet 364, supp. 1 (December 18, 2004); B. R. Sharma, “Social Etiology of Violence Against Women in India,” Social Science Journal 42, no. 3 (2005); “India HIV and AIDS Statistics,” AVERT, available at www.avert.org/indiaaids.htm; and Kounteya Sinha, “Many Women Justify Wife Beating,” The Times of India, October 12, 2007. / 5 “The condom is not optimized for India”: see Rohit Sharma, “Project Launched in India to Measure Size of Men’s Penises,” British Medical Journal, October 13, 2001; Damian Grammaticus, “Condoms ‘Too Big’ for Indian Men,” BBC News, December 8, 2006; and Madhavi Rajadhyaksha, “Indian Men Don’t Measure Up,” The Times of India, December 8, 2006. / 5 Apni Beti, Apna Dhan is described in Fahmida Jabeen and Ravi Karkara, “Government Support to Parenting in Bangladesh and India,” Save the Children, December 2005.
DROWNING IN HORSE MANURE: See Joel Tarr and Clay McShane, “The Centrality of the Horse to the Nineteenth-Century American City,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond Mohl (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Eric Morris, “From Horse Power to Horsepower,” Access, no. 30, Spring 2007; Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Harvard University Press, 2008). Also based on author interviews with Morris, McShane, and David Rosner, Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. / 11 Climate change will “destroy planet Earth as we know it”: see Martin Weitzman, “On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 91, no. 1 (February 2009). / 12 The case of the stolen horse manure is recounted in two Boston Globe articles by Kay Lazar: “It’s Not a Dung Deal,” June 26, 2005; and “Economics Professor Set to Pay for Manure,” August 2, 2005.
WHAT IS “FREAKONOMICS,” ANYWAY? Gary Becker, the original freakonomist, has written many books, papers, and articles that should be widely read, including The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, A Treatise on the Human Family, and Human Capital. See also his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “The Economic Way of Looking at Life,” Nobel Lecture, University of Chicago, December 9, 1992; and The Nobel Prizes/Les Prix Nobel 1992: Nobel Prizes, Presentations, Biographies, and Lectures, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (The Nobel Foundation, 1993). / 13 “Our job in this book is to come up with such questions”: as the renowned statistician John Tukey once reportedly said, “An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer