Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything," dig their claws into some of the meatiest issues in contemporary society: drugs, crime, abortion, parenting and education. Levitt is an eccentric economics professor at the University of Chicago, and Dubner is a writer who covered Levitt a few years ago for The New York Times Magazine. The arrangement makes sense: economists can't put words together to save their lives and journalists still fumble with five-times-nine. Together, they have tapped into their own creative pools and given us this enticing title.

Large amounts of complex numbers representing abstract ideas scare the hell out of a lot of people. Asking questions, on the other hand, and arriving at creative answers to complex social phenomena is a bit more palatable for most of us. That's just what Levitt and Dubner do throughout "Freakonomics."

The book sets forth two rules: one, that economics is the science of incentives, because humans respond to incentives. Nothing really new there, especially for those who remember a guy named Pavlov and his salivating canine friend. The second rule, that economics boiled down is really just a set of tools, is just as obvious, even for non-economists.

Where the two rules juxtapose is where the book really gets going, treading uncharted waters of social experimentation.

It's hard to argue with data. Levitt has such a clever way of sifting through and parsing information that his conclusions have the effect of scratching a mental itch. But the problem with "Freakonomics," especially when it deals with real people doing real things, like teachers cheating to boost test scores, is the data are nameless and faceless. Levitt's great statistical sweeps, like scoring the total number of Chicago public schoolteachers who cheated on test results at 5 percent, shows us that cheating does, in fact, exist — it just doesn't signify who is doing the cheating or offer any real solution.

Contrast that with his sumo wrestler example, which unmistakably shows certain matches to be rigged. Because there are only two wrestlers per match, it's pretty clear whom the culprits are and how to handle the problem. And for all of Levitt and Dubner's complex data analysis, their conclusions still feel somewhat hasty.

The net effect of "Freakonomics," however, can't get lost in the details (or the data). If all goes well, you'll finish the book with at least the inclination to see things differently. Not such a freaky proposition after all.