oh word???????? i was low-key planning on giving this book 5 stars but then I read some reviews and they all made some good points lol. i actually started reading this book last year after I told my dad that I was enjoying my economics classes at uni, I had to stop about a quarter of the way in though because reading was meant to be my chill time and then I was spending my chill study breaks reading more about my course material😭😭 I'm so glad I picked it up again cause this was extremely extremely interesting and I highly encourage you to pick this up particularly if you don't usually read nonfiction but you enjoy niche informative podcasts. i agree with what a lot of reviews said in that this book wasn't really about economics and that it was about applying statistical analysis creatively to situations that seem straight forward. this gave me such a different perspective of correlation vs causation (a deeper look) and low-key the main theme of this book was: literally nothing effects your life other than your social class/family wealth growing up, everything else is just chance which is so slay🤪🤪 i think the authors did an excellent job of making interesting claims and connections and then breaking them down and explaining them in a really accessible way and really encourages out of the box and critical thinking. this was published quite a while ago and it's really interesting to see some of his predictions play out (eg. some of the most popular future baby names actually kind of fit! and it will be very interesting with the overturning of roe v wade on the crime rate in the US in 15 years, quite upsetting, however.) this was a very enjoyable read and these authors worked very well together (despite them putting each other on pedestals and there was never a single bit of criticism on the theories that wasn't added in as a like "look at the haters💅💅" type of way) and this is definitely going to be a book that sticks with me for a while!