At such a speed, he can ill afford to wait and see where you kick the ball he must take a guess and fling his body in that direction. Once the ball rockets off your boot, it will travel toward him at 80 miles per hour. The goal is a mere 12 yards away it is 8 yards across and 8 feet high. The crowd bellows as you place the ball on the chalked penalty mark. The odds are in your favor: roughly 75 percent of penalty kicks at the elite level are successful. All you must do now is make a single penalty kick. Imagine you are a soccer player, a very fine one, and you’ve led your nation to the brink of a World Cup championship. So rather than trying and probably failing to answer most of the questions sent our way, we wondered if it might be better to write a book that can teach anyone to think like a Freak.* Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to track down, organize, and analyze the data to answer even one small question well. Easy problems evaporate it is the hard ones that linger.

If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it. The fact is that solving problems is hard. It was as if we owned some proprietary tool- a Freakonomics forceps, one might imagine- that could be plunged into the body politic to extract some buried wisdom. Readers seemed to think no riddle was too tricky, no problem too hard, that it couldn’t be sorted out. One minute we’d get an e- mail asking us to “solve the obesity epidemic” and then, five minutes later, one urging us to “wipe out famine, right now!”

People wanted to know the pros and cons of: autonomous vehicles, breast- feeding, chemotherapy, estate taxes, fracking, lotteries, “medicinal prayer,” online dating, patent reform, rhino poaching, using an iron off the tee, and virtual currencies. Some questions were existential: What makes people truly happy? Is income inequality as dangerous as it seems? Would a diet high in omega- 3 lead to world peace? Is a college degree still “worth it”? (Short answer: yes long answer: also yes.) Is it a good idea to pass along a family business to the next generation? (Sure, if your goal is to kill off the business- for the data show it’s generally better to bring in an outside manager.* ) Whatever happened to the carpal tunnel syndrome epidemic? (Once journalists stopped getting it, they stopped writing about it- but the problem persists, especially among blue- collar workers.) After writing Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we started to hear from readers with all sorts of questions.

Head soccer championship games freak