For my 3rd Round pick, in the Scientific category, I choose Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
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Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask--but Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing--and his conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. The authors show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives--how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In this book, they set out to explore the hidden side of everything. If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.
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Being an Economics graduate, this is exactly the type of stuff that interests me. Economics is a social science. It tries to figure out why we do what we do, and many times that means trying to figure out why what happened happened when it did.
This book is something anyone can read, and has proven to generate more than a little bit of controversy, especially with the results of the Guns vs Swimming pools and Violent crime vs Roe v Wade. It isn't the final answer in these topics, but does give some interesting relationships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/
http://www.amazon.ca/Freakonomics-St...8255501&sr=8-1