Freakonomics Chapter 1 Summary

Naturally parents will want to see their children do well. Sometimes though in an effort to keep their children safe parents inadvertently hold their children back from exploring the world around them, lessening their chances to learn and progress. While it is understandable to want to shelter

In what way are schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers similar? At first, this question might be puzzling, but the answer is provided in the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Freakonomics is the result of a partnership between an award winning economist, Steven D. Levitt, and a journalist, Stephen J. Dubner. The duo decided upon making a book after Dubner was given an assignment to profile Levitt. Dubner realized that Levitt took a different approach to economics than other economists and he saw that Levitt had an interesting and effective way to explain statistics. This pushed the two to release the 315 page book to the public in 2005 in New York, New York. Since then, the book has flourished and has been republished numerous times. In Freakonomics, Dubner and Levitt reveal that fundamental ideas of economics can be used to interpret just about everything in modern society. The book focuses on a few key points including; incentives are the driving force behind everything, conventional wisdom is often wrong, small causes can often have dramatic effects, and the advantages of having information. The authors use many interesting stories and statistics to demonstrate these economic themes in the modern world. Stories include how some school teachers in the Chicago school system cheat, the influence that the legalization of abortions had on crime rates, and how real estate agents tend to sell their own homes for higher prices than if they

In chapter 3 in Freakonomics by Stevin Levitt and Stephen Dubner, it concentrates on conventional wisdom. The chapter begins by discussing about conventional wisdom, and how conventional can be wrong. Conventional wisdom was invented by John Kenneth Galbraith to explain generally acceptance by the public. It is furthered explained that conventional wisdom is associated with convenience. That many experts used it for their own agenda. But then explained how asking pointed questions can often overturn conventional wisdom. The authors provide some examples of when people have done some creative lying to draw attention. One of the examples was about getting people’s attention on how rape is a serious problem, it’s much more attention grabbing to tell people that it occurs in every one in three women, rather than the

Chapter three of Freakonomics by Steven Levitt lays out an argument against the population’s capacity to hastily believe conventional wisdom. Commencing the chapter with anecdotes about faulty statistics and facts provided by so called “experts,” Levitt sews a seed of suspicion in the reader’s mind. Citing anyone from homelessness experts, to women's rights activists, to police departments, Levitt walks the reader through erroneous proclamations by individuals who drive the common knowledge of everyday people. After introducing each fabricated fact, Levitt not only invalidates each one respectively, but also goes on to explain why each expert provided such bogus information. To summarize Levitt’s commentary, each expert holds different motivations

Freakonomics, published in 2005, is a book centered around the belief that traditional intelligence is not the key to economics. It focuses on the correlations between a person’s morals, wisdom, and social life and economics. In the movie The Distinguished Gentleman, a con man uses the death of a Congressman to boost his own campaign using the same name. As the movie progresses, the former con man begins to see the true corruption of politics. One of the major key concepts discussed in Freakonomics is about conventional wisdom.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dunbar is a book that takes economics into a whole other level by exploring different aspects of society and analyzing them in new and unique ways. It shows how everyday decisions, purchases, and situations affect the economy as well as decisions, purchases, and situations that don’t occur every day, such as gangs, cheating, and parenting. Conclusions derived from different investigations about such controversial topics throughout the book will often shock you; some even have the possibility of offending you. However Levitt and Dunbar make you feel quite the opposite feelings while reading the book.

Lastly, they explain the fundamental ideas of the book. Incentives are “means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.”; according to the authors, they “are the cornerstone of modern life”. Levitt and Dubner also focus the book on the following concepts:

The authors raise the importance of using scientific methods of inquiry in non-scientific fields in drawing valid conclusions. This is exemplified by the negligible influence that actions taken by parents have on children's' academic outcomes. Utilizing data from the U.S. Department of Education, the authors examined the correlative relationship between a child's academic success and a plethora of variables related to the child's life; race and economic status of the parents, birth weight, and hours of television watched, to name a few. The authors concluded that the variables most directly correlated with academic success were what the parents were, such as how intelligent they were, and less what the parents did, like reading to children. This conflicts with what normative reasoning would argue: of course parenting should affect a child's outcome. However, the authors used regression analysis, which artificially holds constant every variable except the two they wished to focus on, and it displayed a different story. This illustrates the difference between the analyzing the world as it is and analyzing it with previously held notions of how it should

In chapter 2 of Freakonomics the main argument is that the absence of information can be used for personal gain. The main example used to display this tactic is when the KKK is compared to real estate agents. Although the crafty practice of real estate agents is in no way similar to the horrors of the KKK, they have a distinct similarity when it comes to the hoarding of information. The majority of the chapter focuses on the history of the KKK and Stetson Kennedy’s effort to stop it through the infiltration and exposure via radio of the Klan. Since the Klan was dependant on their violent—despite not being extremely violent—reputation, the disclosure of the information they had withheld from the public rendered them powerless. The narrators

In his 2013 book, Naked Statistics, Charles Wheelan explains a field that is commonly seen, commonly applied, and commonly misinterpreted: statistics. Though statistical data is ubiquitous in daily life, valid statistical conclusions are not. Wheelan reveals that when data analysis is flawed or incomplete, faulty conclusions abound. Wheelan’s work uncovers statistics’ unscrupulous potential, but also makes a key distinction between deliberate misuse and careless misreading. However, his analysis is less successful in distinguishing common sense from poor judgement, a gap that enables the very statistical issues he describes to perpetuate themselves.

Levitt next examines the incentives that cause people to cheat. The first example of cheating is a story of teachers cheating in Chicago public schools. To avoid the risk of getting fired or getting penalty by the government for low test scores, many teachers chose to cheat and inflate their students ' scores. They cheated by allowing the students to have more time during test, giving away answers, and even by changing students’ answers by themselves. In this case, we can see that the schoolteachers are driven by economic incentives. For them, moral and social incentives are not as strong as economic incentives. Similar cheating can be seen in sumo wrestling. In Japan, sumo wrestling is a very popular sports and the high-ranked wrestlers get great honor. Also, among sumo wrestlers, their rank determines their salary, reputation, how they are treated, and even how much he gets to eat and sleep. Because they are so desperate for higher rank, the incentive for cheating is very powerful. In the crucial matches that determines sumo wrestler’s ranking, they cheat by

“The lack of attachment with their parents or caregivers at the beginning of their life to some of the school shooters. Sueng-Hui Cho, who was the shooter of the Virginia Tech Massacre on April 16, 2007 suffered from this kind of risk factor. Cho did not communicate with his parents or those around him” (Ibid,

The anxiety, stress, fear, and worry may be overwhelming for parents who now fear sending their children to school. Parents may no longer want their children to stand outside at the bus stop each morning, or faculty members may not feel safe walking from the parking lot to the school all because of one incident. Even though the article mentions that there was an “enhanced police presence,” some individuals may remain in a constant state of fear and often times, it is hard to cope with these feelings (Novak, 2016). A shooting that takes place in the middle of town instantly makes people question personal safety. Behaviors and actions of individuals drastically

In the book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner note “An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often-tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation” (16). This is to showcase the amount of power an incentive can have over a person or a situation; either good or bad. Humans are found to use incentives when it comes to making daily decisions. Often, people need motives to proceed with their plans. Some tend to make either moral, social, or economic incentive. The moral incentive is about self-respect; keeping in check with what was taught to believe is right and wrong. The social incentive is how the public views the person; wanting to look good in front others. Economic incentive, however, would relate to monetary benefit. While all three incentives can affect people’s decisions, economic

Imagine this scenario: a lecture hall is filled to the brim with college students, more than half of the students are either daydreaming about the upcoming weekend or texting on their phones. Their professor stands in the front of the hall trying to give his prepared lecture, but the majority of his students are not paying attention. What shall the professor do to motivate his students to pay attention in class? He announces to them that if they can fully engage themselves in his lecture for the rest of the class time, he will give them each five dollars. The students are suddenly all ears, pens ready to take notes, eyes glued to the front of the room, in hopes of receiving the professor’s incentive. Does this seem like a harmless scenario for a desperate professor to motivate his students? While there are possibly individuals who would agree that the scenario is not invoking any harm on the students, there are others who would argue that paying students to try in school takes away their motivation to actually learn. Among the latter stands Alfie Kohn, author or Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, who would be appalled by the professor’s actions. Kohn’s book challenges the common phenomenon of using rewards in everyday life in dealing with others. With examples pulled from schools, the workplace, and even households, he demonstrates to his audience that rewards have become means of controlling one another than as