Crease’s Reviews > Think like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain > Status Update

If your three-year-old child is wailing and your five-year-old is standing nearby with a devilish grin and a plastic hammer, it’s a good bet the hammer had something to do with the wailing. But the big problems that society cares about—crime and disease and political dysfunction, for instance—are more complicated than that. Their root causes are often not so nearby, or obvious, or palatable.