The world is an increasingly tricky, sticky place. Mysteries present themselves every day; and in every way, people are puzzled and intrigued and on the hunt for answers. Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics with Stephen J. Dubner, is one such person. Devoting his professional life to cracking the mysteries of seemingly mundane, and sometimes trivial, economic in daily life, Levitt jumps from assumption to decision, connecting dots in sometimes genius, sometimes haphazard, ways, and forming conclusions that occasionally defy conventional thought. Freakanomics gifts readers with several ideas to chew on and challenges deeply rooted thoughts. And challenge my thinking, Levitt did. As Levitt states over and over again, everyone responds to incentives; or as Mr. Kilgo would say, “Everyone has an agenda.” Now this is true, everyone does have their own goals and wants that they strive for—they respond to incentives and have agendas. Between Freakonomics and Mr. Kilgo, that fact has thoroughly pounded itself in my head. Levitt, however, seems to constantly assume that everyone’s incentives are greedy and selfish. Real-estate agents, if not out to scam you, are simply lazy. Surgeons will usually recommend the more expensive procedure, even if a cheaper option is available. Experts will usually toss their hard-earned knowledge out the window for …show more content…
Even if a researcher has mountains of data, unless he carefully scrutinizes and questions all information, digging up potential lurking variables and possible bias, he can be confounded. If a reader can glean any lesson from Freakonomics, it is this—always look at every piece of evidence as closely as possible. Stare at it until eyes begin to bleed. Yank up confounders by their roots. Take the time necessary to make sure conclusions are draw correctly. Levitt spent hours researching his questions. Sometimes he failed, as with the abortions. Sometimes he triumphed, as with the
Summary In chapter one of Freakonomics, the beginning portion of the chapter discusses information and the connection it shares with the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents. The Ku Klux Klan was founded right after the Civil War, in order to persecute and subdue the slaves that were newly freed. The popularity of the Klan increased in the early 20th century, around the time of World War I. In the late 19th century, the Klan had only discriminated, persecuted, and subdued Blacks, but in the 20th century they did these things to Blacks, Jews, and Gypsies.
Written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics is built upon three major philosophies: incentives are the fundamentals of life, experts on a subject use their knowledge as an advantage to serve their own wellbeing, and orthodox wisdom is wrong most of the time. This book goes into detail to explain the mindsets of humans, from school teachers to sumo wrestlers, through statistics. Levitt and Dubner claim that when the data is closely examined it can relate to more concepts than originally hypothesized. The style of this informative piece is very precise yet, at the same time, very concise and to the point. The tone carried throughout the book is informative and knowledgeable. The authors use distinct tactics to get points across
On the front cover of Freakonomics, the subheading reads, “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” which is the purpose of the book. The economist Steven Levitt and the author Stephen Dubner wrote this book using several rhetorical devices to achieve that purpose. A few of those devices, style, ethos, pathos, and logos, were prominent within the book and helped to convey the message and purpose well.
Within this discussion it is explained that incentives sometimes lead to cheating, because "something worth having is something worth cheating for". I think the incentives placed in daily life those that we can control, let's say, in our business should be established wisely, in order ...
21st Century Economics (Vol. 1, pp. 58-59. 163-172. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Reference.
Levitt states that the root of Economics is the study of incentives (Levitt 20) since scarcity causes Social-Darwinism by competition for resources that people want and need. But rather than presenting cases of incentives that serve their intend purposes Levitt displays cases in which incentives have failed and backfired. One example of such a case is when day-care centers in Haifa, Israel enacted a fine on parents who picked up their children late. They hope was to decrease the numbers of late parents but average of late parents actually doubled (Levitt 19-20). The reason was plain to see, the incentive was not big enough. The fine was only three dollars, less than that of a morning cup of coffee.
Joel Best’s Damned Lies and Statistics is a book all about recognizing statistics that are legitimate and others that are really quite horrible. The goal of this book is not that the average every day person be able to read a statistical table from a scholarly journal, but rather that anyone could personally value a statistic he or she may come across in a newspaper article or on a news program. Best was essentially effective in achieving his goal; however, he was effective to the point of overdoing his job of showing that there are bad statistics which give readers cause to evaluate them outside of hearing them on the news.
Freakonomics explores multiple circumstances and the difference between correlation and causation. A standout question that the authors delve into asks, “What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?” (15). The authors begin with the Chicago Public School system and standardized testing. The CPS (Chicago Public School system) placed elementary and secondary schools with low test scores on probation, who then “face[ed] the threat of being shut down” (22). As one can realize, some teachers would do everything in their power to avoid low test scores, even cheating. Fortunately for teachers, “teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished” (23). Teachers in the CPS who received low test
"Anybody living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin... The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly - a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile... Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace, So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery, and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome and constant companion...
It's true that this desire for things is what drives our economy. The free market has given us great blessings, but it has in some ways also put us on the wrong path -- the path to a selfish, unhappy society. Michael Lerner, who worked as a psychotherapist to middle-income Americans notes that
Incentives do matter because we care about what others think of us. Incentives don’t always come in the safest forms. They can motivate someone to
Filthy Lucre For The Working Affluent RSS. N.p., 18 Dec. 2008. Web. 30 Nov. 2013.
“Convincing the non-elite that inequality is morally right. Those most advantaged are justified in giving orders and receiving a greater proportion of valued goods and services, or at least, creating doubts about alternatives. All, individuals strive for cognitive consistency and will develop principles of fairness, such as Distributive Justice. Lastly, there is some evidence for distribution based on need as a result of ability to understand the needs of others. This is called the process of legitimation […]” (2011:461).
...en Goldachre. (2011). The statistical error that just keeps on coming. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/. Last accessed 10/12/2011.
Economics; is an important subject to understand the workings of finances. The common definition of economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution and consumption of goods. Freakonomics, the title of this book has the reader wondering what this book is about. From the title and even the cover picture it is clear it is not your average text book on economics. Yet, the authors have collected data and analyzed it to come to their conclusions on some unusual hypotheses. The photo on the cover is actually a good visual of the books content, it looks like apple on the outside but is an orange on the inside, signifying there is a hidden side of everything, just as the book subtitle reads. Authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner take on the economics of the day to day situations as their topic for this bestselling book.