"SuperFreakonomics" will be released November 1st.

by Gordon Clark | October 20, 2009 at 10:34 am

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"SuperFreakonomics," by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner is the 'Frequel' to the remarkable "Freakonomics" and will be released on November 1st. The books are provoking questions to societal norms and function logic. The writing combination of pop culture writer Stephen Dubner and the economic analysis of Levitt create some very interesting arguments. In there first book there were comparisons of teachers and sumo wrestlers to understand cheating, ku klux klan and real-estate agents to examine information control, and many others.
"SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Like Insurance" is bound to be atleast as provcative as the first book.
He is a short excerpt from "SuperFreakonomics"

as the global population hurtles toward 7 billion, all those externalities add up. So who should be paying for them?

In principle, this shouldn't be such a hard problem. If we knew how much it cost humankind every time someone used a tank of gas, we could simply levy a tax of that magnitude on the driver. The tax wouldn't necessarily convince him to cancel his trip, nor should it. The point of the tax is to make sure the driver faces the full costs of his actions (or, in economist- speak, to internalize the externality).

The revenues raised from these taxes could then be spread out across the folks who suffer the effects of a changing climate -- people living in Bangladeshi lowlands, for instance, who will be flooded if the oceans rise precipitously. If we chose exactly the right tax, the revenues could properly compensate the victims of climate change.