From the ‘Wishing It Were True’ Dept.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that some of the best posts are written by readers, not by us. For instance, we recently received the following e-mail from Steven Goldstein of New York City:

I read your book when it came out. My 12-year-old son saw it lying around last spring and asked what it was about. I explained it to him and he decided to read it. He enjoyed it.

Yesterday he came home from school and he said the students, prior to taking some standardized test, were given a survey asking for all sorts of demographic and socioeconomic information.

I asked, “What are they going to do with that?” He said, “I guess they’re going to round them up and give them to the Freakonomics people.”

If only!

In case you were wondering, yes, Joel Goldstein seems a bit more observant than the typical 12-year-old. Here’s a video of him when he was 11.