Economic books have the true advantage of being backed up by numbers. And numbers don't lie. Freakonomics is about digging in unusual questions of daily life and society, using the power of numbers in order to unmask curious conclusions.
Conventional wisdom is definitely defied. Questions such as: Why experts are in the perfect position to exploit you? Which is most dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? How the legalization of abortion impacted so much criminality? How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the invention of nylon stocking? And so on.
My favorite: How much do parents really matter?
The incentive behind this book is the fact that morality represents the way that people would like the world to work. Whereas economics represents how it actually does work. And people crave for that information. A very entertaining reading.