Freakonomics

If you haven't picked up this book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, please check it out. Levitt is an Economist at U of Chicago, but he is like no Economist you have ever encountered. A recurring theme of the book is that 'morality is what we ought to do, and economics is what we actually do.' He looks at situations as various as teachers cheating for their students on standardized tests and sumo wrestlers cheating to let each other win matches to how legalized abortion helped to reduce crime rates in the 1990s and real estate agents hold out for better offers when they sell their own properties than when they sell other peoples' properties.

The authors introduce diverse concepts that (although they claim to not have a theme) are all related by one unifying theme -- the power of mathematics and statistics, in the form of econometrics, to tease out patterns and commonalities among seemingly diverse topics.

Pick up this book or at least peruse the website linked into the title of this post.