Since debate is not only a tournament sport for me, I try to read different books, related to debate, to get ideas how to debate from them. Of course, all the books, that I read are not associated with debate directly, but most of them give me an extra added value to my debating skills. I’m just finishing a great book, that I have been hearing about for a longer time from different debaters. The book was written by Stephen J. Dubner and is called Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything .
It is one of the books, that is not really related to debate, and probably does not even mention debate as we know it. But the idea in the book is to post questions, that already have an answer, but the answer is wrong. Thinking the different was is the main idea, and the author presents a coupe of questions, that we believe, that we know about, but he presents us new answers, that were gained by new studies. Not really new sudies, but a new usage of information.
One of the examples is the question, why do crack dealers still live at home? Assuming, that selling crack should be a great business, what we see are a lot of dealers that are not really rich, and still live at home. The answer in the book tells us all about the organizing structure of the dealers where the street dealers get only a small amount of the money, often even less than the minimum wage. So probably this is not the profitable future for you.
There are a couple of other answers in the book, just read it, and if you had, what is your opinion on it?
Hey, my name is Peter and I’m the author of this website and all the content on this page. I have been a debater, a debate trainer, debate tournament organizer and everything else with a debate prefix for more than 10 years and I’ve seen it all. I want to help everyone to be a better debater and if you want to help too, please let me know. Keep on debating!