Time prevents me from being able to do a more detailed post on Freakonomics today, so lemme give you a brief one.

One of the things that you can do with economic analyses is figure out which terms in advertisements result in better sales. F’rinstance: Here are five words commonly used in advertising homes for sale that correlate with higher priced sales of the homes:

• Granite
• State-of-the-Art
• Corian
• Maple
• Gourmet

How all those get worked into ad for houses, I’m not sure. (I don’t know anybody who has a "gourmet house," though I suppose people might advertise that the home comes with "gourmet kitchen equipment" of some kind.)

You can similar track what advertising elements are correlated with lower sale prices on houses–i.e., things you don’t want in your ad. Here are five such terms:

• Fantastic
• Spacious
• ! (an exclamation point)
• Charming
• Great Neighborhood

Why do these correlate negatively? And what do the positive terms have in common? For those answers you can

READ THIS EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK.

Freakonomics also contains info on what elements are most (and least) successful in personal ads on Internet dating sites, though if you want to know what they have to say about that subject then you’ll need to

GET THE BOOK.