Steven D. Levitt, economist and co-author of Freakomonics, will demonstrate how the rigor of classical economics, combined with an astute understanding of human behavior, can make sense of the complexities of everyday life when he addresses The Center's annual International Corporate Citizenship Conference, to be held March 26-28, 2006 in Orlando, Florida.
 
Levitt is a much-heralded young scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life - from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing - and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: Freakonomics.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: if morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt shows 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 Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of just about everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and - if the right questions are asked - is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt shows how to see through all the clutter.

"If Indiana Jones were an economist, he’d be Steven Levitt,” writes the Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Levitt is famous not as a master of dry technical arcana but as a maverick treasure hunter who relies for success on his wit, pluck and disregard for conventional wisdom."
 
A recent recipient of the John Bates Clark medal, awarded every two years to America's best economist under the age of 40, Levitt received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and a B.A. from Harvard University.