Two passages have stayed with me longer than most from Freakonomics.  The first is from page 96, in the chapter on drug dealers living with their Mums.  The best picture for a drug gang is as a tournament:

The rules of a tournament are straightforward.  You must start at the bottom to have a shot at the top.  (just as Major League short-stop probably played Little League and just as a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan probably started out as a lowly spear-carrier, a drug lord typically began by selling drugs on a street corner.)  You must be willing to work long and hard at substandard wages.  In order to advance in the tournament, you must prove yourself not merely above average but spectacular.  (The way to distinguish yourself differs from profession to profession, of course; while J.T. certainly monitored his soldiers’ sales performance, it was their force of personality that really counted – more than it would for, say a , a shortstop) And finally once you come to the sad realisation that you will never make it to the top, you will quit the tournament. (Some people hang on longer than others – witness the greying ‘actors’ who wait tables in New York – but people generally get the message quite early.)

As Bonhoeffer noted, when disciples come together it is not long until there “arises a reckoning amongst them” as to who is the greatest.  We find it very hard indeed not to turn our Church into a tournament, and what makes our Church headquarters so dangerous is that it you get a stronger sniff of that than you do in the parish.  Tournaments are deadly to the Christian, not when you fail to win, but the minute you enter one.  “You must not become as the Gentiles” said Jesus.  Tournaments are banned.

The other passage that is struck is not from the original version of the book.  It’s from a visit that Levitt and Dubner made to Google after the first edition had been published.  Google asked the authors (in telling invitation in itself) to give their impression of the visit – this is how they ended:

The biggest laugh came when Levitt mentioned that we spoke at Yahoo! A day earlier, and got a much smaller crowed.  The funny things is, that was really true.  Your turnout was about double Yahoo!’s.  On the other hand, that means Google may have lost twice the productivity – unless you think that our Freakonomics talk may have somehow increased productivity, in which case you thought a lot more of it than we did…

After our talk, we had a few minutes to hang around and talk with miscellaneous Googlers.  This was the most impressive slice of the day.  Not only were you all smart and inquisitive and friendly, but you were so damn happy.  First of all, there is surely not company in the world where so many employees wear T-shirts with their  company logo which we took to be a sign of true pride (or perhaps a deep, deep, discount).  But the happiness shone through in a dozen other ways.  It seems this is the by-product of doing interesting work with smart colleagues in beautiful environs, all with a profound send of mission. (page 250-251)

So a Tournament or Google – which most resembles the Church?