Category: Freakonomics

The book Freakonomics is a collection of numerous economics articles by Levitt. The author has gained an enormous reputation as an economist who has successfully applied economics concepts to diverse fields that have not been handled previously by any classical economist. The authors of the book, Levitt and Dubner propose that economics is basically the study of incentives. In their economics arguments, the authors ask such questions as between a swimming pool and a more dangerous gun? What are the major similarities between the schoolteachers and the sumo wrestlers? Try to establish the reasons why drug dealers never leave their mothers homes and the impacts of the legalization of abortion on the prevalence of violent crimes.

These do not form the typical economic questions. However, the author of the book is not interested in the conventional views of economics. He is much enthusiastic about understanding the riddles that entail our daily lives such as corruption, sports, crime and child nurturing; topics without any form of conventional wisdom. The book includes six chapters all of which handle varied life-related topics.

The author uses theories of economics to demonstrate the cheating that is done by the sumo dancers. Top division sumo dancers are expected to participate in fifteen matches during a sumo tournament; additionally, the wrestlers are supposed to win at least eight matches failure to which they are demonized. Levitt collects data from the wrestling matches in the sumo community and incorporates the corruption allegations of match-fixing to make conclusions. Levitt concludes that wrestlers with an eight-win record, who have already secured their place in the next tournament, often collude with those with a seven-win record to let them win.

Additionally, Levitt tries to exhibit the supremacy of data mining. This is exemplified by the investigations of dishonesty in the Chicago School system. Through the analysis of numerous databases and posing the right questions, Levitt emerges with various results.

The second chapter of the book deals with the visit of the author to the home of folklorist Stetson Kennedy. During the visit, the authors discuss Stetsons explorations on the Ku Klax Llan. However, Levitt and Dubner later raise queries on the investigations that were conducted by Kennedy. They conclude that the effectiveness of the researches conducted by Kennedy was at times exaggerated (Levitt and Dubner 26). The authors observed that Kennedys portrayal of his investigations and other issues relating to the Klan were overly exaggerated.

Abortion is another issue that is handled in the book. The author investigates the impacts of abortion in Romania; he concludes that a lot of children who were born a year after the abortion ban would perform dismally in all measurable areas. According to Levitt and Dubner, these children would be poorer at school, the job market and would have higher chances of becoming criminals (118). The authors allegations were in contradiction of the proposed claims.

Freakonomics continues to argue that the need for additional police to combat crime can be eliminated by analyzing the electoral cycles. These allegations were partly evidenced by a computer programming error that occurred during the simulation. No relationship has been established between elections and the variations in the police recruitment process that establish a strong relationship between the effects of the police on combating crime.

In conclusion, Levitt and Dubner successfully portray economics as the study of incentives; the methods that people utilize to satisfy their needs and wants especially if other people desire the same thing. In Freakonomics the authors portray the hidden side of all things; from the activities of the illegal gangs, the theories of campaign finance to the covert of the Ku Klax Klan. The book ascertains an unconventional economics concept; morality dictates how the world is expected to work while economics dictates the actual working of the world.

Works Cited

Steven, Levitt and Stephen Dubner J. (2005). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. William Morrow.

The first chapter of ‘Freakonomics’, written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, will respond to the inquiry, ‘What do teachers and sumo grapplers share for all intents and purpose?’. It starts with a tale about a couple of financial analysts who attempted to discover an answer for late guardians who continually arrive behind schedule to get their kids from childcare. Before clarifying why this occurred, Levitt goes into a top to bottom discourse of motivators. He characterizes them as the manner in which individuals get what they need or need, particularly when others need or need something very similar. There are three sorts of motivating forces which are monetary, social, and moral, and regularly impetus plans will incorporate them all. Levitt utilizes wrongdoing for instance: for what reason don’t more individuals perform violations? Proceeding with the exchange of motivating forces, Levitt next inspects the motivators that cause individuals to cheat, which he characterizes as getting more for less. The main case of cheating is an anecdote about high-stakes testing at Chicago state funded schools. So, as to find conning educators in the Chicago state funded educational system, examiners searched for rehashed examples of letter answers on understudies’ answer sheets in study halls that had encountered a sensational improvement in test scores from the earlier year, a sign that the instructor had potentially been cheating by changing her understudies’ answers before turning in the appropriate response sheets. Nearly a similar sort of cheating can be found in games, particularly in the Japanese game of sumo. The motivator conspire in sumo is amazing, since a sumo grappler’s positioning decides everything from how a lot of cash, he makes to the amount he gets the opportunity to eat and rest.

Levitt takes the thought he quickly talked about in the presentation, impetuses, and does a top to bottom examination of motivators at work in various strange circumstances. This part further separates motivators into three unique classifications. The first of these is financial impetuses, which is the thing that we for the most part envision when we consider motivating forces. These are things like cash based and material prizes or disciplines that drive us to settle on specific choices. Moral motivators exist, indicating that people have a feeling of good and bad, regardless of whether they’re brought into the world with it or just put in by cultural standards, as some others accept. At last, social motivations are very incredible. These frequently have to do with notoriety: the idea of others making a decision about you emphatically or contrarily for going in a specific direction can be a ground-breaking explanation behind accomplishing something.

The second chapter of ‘Freakonomics’, written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, means to address the inquiry, ‘How is the Ku Klux Klan like a gathering of realtors?’. Levitt starts by going into the historical backdrop of the KKK, established at first in the repercussions of the Civil War by six men doing innocuous 12 PM tricks, and later advancing into a multi-state fear-based oppressor association focusing on liberated slaves. While World War II made the Klan go underground for some time, it renewed firmly after the war, with its base camp in the city of Atlanta. There, Stetson Kennedy, an author who was committed to closure bias, chose to go covert and join the Klan so as to uncover its pined for privileged insights that may help lead to its obliteration. He wormed his way into their positions, adapting all their mystery customs, and in the end was welcome to join the Klavaliers, who were the Klan’s mystery police. Levitt ascribes Kennedy’s prosperity to his comprehension of the intensity of data. The following piece of the part goes inside and out on the realtor issue examined in the book’s presentation. Since a realtor has substantially less to pick up from an expansion in the selling cost of your home than you do, she realizes the house could really sell for more if she somehow happened to keep it available longer. The last portion of the part talks about whether individuals make careful arrangements to apparently show up non-unfair in certain social circumstances, and whether this absence of segregation is true or only an act.

Part 2 limits in explicitly on a marvel known as data asymmetry. Data asymmetry concerns communications that occur where one gathering has more data than the other, for example, when specialists like realtors or vehicle sales reps have more data about the item they are selling and the market they are selling it in than the purchaser. Data asymmetry doesn’t really need to be mishandled, yet it regularly is, as prove by the distinction between realtors selling their very own home as opposed to selling a client’s. Levitt quickly discusses the web entering the image and leveling the monetary playing field, turning into an incredible equalizer among buyers and specialists and disposing of a great part of the data asymmetry that recently described exchanges. The last piece of this section discussed an alternate side of the job that data plays in regular daily existence. This concentrated on specific data: via cautiously picking what data we share about ourselves, our inclinations, and our exchanges, we radically impact the manner in which others see us. The examination looking at Internet dating sites is the most ideal approach to see this in real life.

‘Freakonomics’ being a true to life book was composed by Dubner S.J (a journalist) and Levitt S.D (financial expert), the authors experienced different bits of present-day life to exhibit how financial aspects explains why individuals act in a way similarly as the manner in which express outcomes occur. They analyze various bits of society and view them with trade points of view. With the utilization of unequivocal information and the fundamentals of financial aspects, the obscure examinations and the different areas in the book show connection between human instinct and financial matters. The journalist’s view on educational system, child rearing, budgetary perspective and human nature really caught my attention and widened my understanding.

Levitt portrays the book as a push to expel the external layer of the present life and to see what’s going on beneath it. He completed this by taking twofold events that are not related and partners them. From investigating teachers and sumo wrestlers, to inquisitive why drug peddlers would keep on staying with their mothers. Both writers feasibly put a turn on standard point of view by examining it through all things considered different viewpoints. From the earliest starting point phase of the book, the authors were able to attract my attention and to wake my excitement about the affirmations they orchestrated revealing. The way wherein the authors dismembered wrongdoings and the relationship between approved embryo evacuation and the effect it has on crime rates impacted me emphatically. Instead of most books, this book has no focal thought; in truth at the opening portion, Levitt explained this as a structure. The key concern was to make individuals to toss some test on thoughts and ideas that are regularly acknowledged to be valid. One of the fundamental stray pieces in this book is that incentives are the foundation of present-day life and that the examination of economics is the examination of motivators: how a few people gain their needs, most particularly when decent variety of individuals need something essentially the equivalent. The learning of ‘Freakonomics’ opened my mind and eyes on how inspiring powers, inspirations and risks accept a significant activity in customary occasions in our general public today.

With everything taken into account, the examinations in ‘Freakonomics’, maybe like no other quantitatively-sorted out book, accomplished the separations between investigating the world from the perspective of a moralist and the world perspective on an examiner. Regardless, if profound quality tends to the way where that individual may require the society to carry out her work, financial aspects tend to show how the works really function.

After reading ‘Freakonomics’ it really opens the reader’s eyes to unseen things in everyday life. The incentives of just any regular person are greatly shown because money or personal gain can take over any man or woman no matter how old. In a few of the chapters the book showed how two groups that someone would think are far opposite could have common goals or mindsets. As dumb as this book was it did at least teach me a new perspective to life and try to think deeper to see if there’s more than meets the eye.

When reading ‘Freakonomics’, the first chapter said, “What do teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?”. I thought this couldn’t even be worth explaining because that’s so ridiculous that someone would compare sumo wrestlers, who are these gigantic dudes with jock straps and then saying they’re like teachers that are correcting my paper right now. That seems absolutely absurd to even think of that until he explains why. The reason why…. incentives, incentives and incentives. He wrote about teachers in California and how there was this decent sum of money that would be given to teachers who had the best scores on their ACT’s. I’m not hating on teachers or anything but they aren’t exactly rich and when the state waves a lot of money in all the teachers’ faces and says this is yours if you have the best scores, some teachers are obviously going to hurdle the boundary of protocol and law to make some easy money. The role sumo wrestlers’ play in this is the honor and respect thing in their culture. The more wins they get the more respect and fame they get which is what all sumo wrestlers are at least most are in the sport for. In sumo wrestling, a sumo wrestler has to get eight wins to increase in fame otherwise they don’t like to go far. The example he gave was a great one, “So a wrestler entering the final day of a tournament on the bubble, with a 7-7 record, has far more to gain from a victory than an opponent with a record of 8-6 has to lose”. Pretend the 7-7 sumo wrestler asks the 8-6 sumo wrestler to let him win this match. If the 8-6 sumo wrestler says “yes”, he’ll most likely want something in return like his money from the match or maybe win a match to raise in the ranks.

In this book it explains that realtors may sometimes not be the best of people even though I don’t really agree that they can be compared to something as big as the KKK, but I do believe some realtors use lack of information to their advantage. Just that chapter showed me that legal jobs like being a realtor can make that person seem almost bad or corrupt to make personal gain. Unless you are friends with the realtor, they may not even care about you and only care about getting paid at the end of the day. So, this book even has material that can help when buying or selling a house to catch those filthy realtors in their tracks if they aren’t the good ones.

The shape of argument the author gives is a detailed one for sure. First, the author will talk about the comparison with the exception of when he talks about all the processes, expenses, and how much money can be made when in the drug business. He will go into great detail until the point where it almost bores you to death even though credit should be given for such knowledge of the subject. I didn’t even have to ask questions or think I wasn’t filled in enough on what he was talking about. After all the information he gives he then tries to prove his points and back up his comparisons that he made.

The authors’ purpose almost seems like he’s just trying to make you feel stupid and that you lack so much knowledge showing you that you look at everything inside the box. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen JU. Dubner want to give you all the knowledge so you’re not as stupid as you were before and hopefully not end up like the domino’s guy twirling signs around on the corner.

Overall, the book had a great deal of information. It wasn’t exactly “Genius.. has you gasping in amazement”, – Wall Street Journal, but it certainly was “slightly” interesting and showed me a new perspective. Also, everyone has incentives and sometimes those incentives get the best of people. All it takes is incentive and it can change anyone’s life for better or worse.

The book ‘Freakonomics’ written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, is a novel written with a purpose to examine life’s oddities with the tools of economics. The third chapter of this book is entitled ‘Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms’, and the main idea of this chapter is to elaborate on the fact that people often assume things that are not true as it turns out. Authors prove this by showing statistics from various experiments and showing how conventional wisdom applies in these instances.

The chapter lays itself out with an opening of defining conventional wisdom. According to economic sage, John Galbraith, conventional wisdom is information that is convenient, comfortable, and comforting and typically untrue. Conventional wisdom appears untrue when it is sloppy or self-interested. Levitt and Dubner used an example of a statistic that seemed high, people didn’t really question it initially because it was said by an expert. Although experts can be very deceptive, they depend on journalists and vice versa. Authors Levitt and Dubner say advertising is their powerful tool for creating conventional wisdom. The example they used was Listerine, and how it was advertised as a breath freshener after originally being a floor cleaner. Authors also talk about an experiment regarding Black Disciples, a drug dealing gang.

Sudhir Venkatesh’s assignment was to visit Chicago’s poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and a seventy question, multiple-choice survey. He got to know members of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation and soon became intrigued by their drug dealing operation. His project was comprised of three sixteen-story buildings made of yellow gray brick. Sudhir was wrongly convinced by their false information at first, but decided to keep on going with his task until his questions were genuinely answered. He got to know them well in the 6 years of study. He learned that J.T. was the leader of the crack gang, because he was bred to be a boss.

Levitt and Dubner also elaborate on the gang structure, their payment, and how incentives affect these people as well. Being that J.T. was the leader of the gang, he reported to a central leadership called the board of directors. The way the business worked for these crack dealers was they were paid 20 percent of revenue. J.T.’s branch of the Black Disciples made larger amounts of money while lower members of the hierarchy made very little. J.T. allowed his officers to take home about $700 a month and his foot soldiers only $3.30 per hour, which is less than the minimum wage.

The reason these people are paid so little is later explained by Levitt and Dubner through the history of cocaine. Authors said that more people are doing this job, so it means they make less money off of it. People in the lower ranks of this business would end up quitting because they don’t ever end up moving any higher. The way wages are determined in this occupation is mainly based on the amount of employees doing this job as well. They also determine wages by the specialized skills required, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for the services that a job fulfills.

In summary, this chapter was written to explain the reason why drug dealers still live with their mothers. The reason for this, all in all, is because they are too poor. In this industry it is hard for them to work their way up and make more money. They can’t move up in status.

The first chapter of ‘Freakonomics’, written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, will respond to the inquiry, ‘What do teachers and sumo grapplers share for all intents and purpose?’. It starts with a tale about a couple of financial analysts who attempted to discover an answer for late guardians who continually arrive behind schedule to get their kids from childcare. Before clarifying why this occurred, Levitt goes into a top to bottom discourse of motivators. He characterizes them as the manner in which individuals get what they need or need, particularly when others need or need something very similar. There are three sorts of motivating forces which are monetary, social, and moral, and regularly impetus plans will incorporate them all. Levitt utilizes wrongdoing for instance: for what reason don’t more individuals perform violations? Proceeding with the exchange of motivating forces, Levitt next inspects the motivators that cause individuals to cheat, which he characterizes as getting more for less. The main case of cheating is an anecdote about high-stakes testing at Chicago state funded schools. So, as to find conning educators in the Chicago state funded educational system, examiners searched for rehashed examples of letter answers on understudies’ answer sheets in study halls that had encountered a sensational improvement in test scores from the earlier year, a sign that the instructor had potentially been cheating by changing her understudies’ answers before turning in the appropriate response sheets. Nearly a similar sort of cheating can be found in games, particularly in the Japanese game of sumo. The motivator conspire in sumo is amazing, since a sumo grappler’s positioning decides everything from how a lot of cash, he makes to the amount he gets the opportunity to eat and rest.

Levitt takes the thought he quickly talked about in the presentation, impetuses, and does a top to bottom examination of motivators at work in various strange circumstances. This part further separates motivators into three unique classifications. The first of these is financial impetuses, which is the thing that we for the most part envision when we consider motivating forces. These are things like cash based and material prizes or disciplines that drive us to settle on specific choices. Moral motivators exist, indicating that people have a feeling of good and bad, regardless of whether they’re brought into the world with it or just put in by cultural standards, as some others accept. At last, social motivations are very incredible. These frequently have to do with notoriety: the idea of others making a decision about you emphatically or contrarily for going in a specific direction can be a ground-breaking explanation behind accomplishing something.

The second chapter of ‘Freakonomics’, written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, means to address the inquiry, ‘How is the Ku Klux Klan like a gathering of realtors?’. Levitt starts by going into the historical backdrop of the KKK, established at first in the repercussions of the Civil War by six men doing innocuous 12 PM tricks, and later advancing into a multi-state fear-based oppressor association focusing on liberated slaves. While World War II made the Klan go underground for some time, it renewed firmly after the war, with its base camp in the city of Atlanta. There, Stetson Kennedy, an author who was committed to closure bias, chose to go covert and join the Klan so as to uncover its pined for privileged insights that may help lead to its obliteration. He wormed his way into their positions, adapting all their mystery customs, and in the end was welcome to join the Klavaliers, who were the Klan’s mystery police. Levitt ascribes Kennedy’s prosperity to his comprehension of the intensity of data. The following piece of the part goes inside and out on the realtor issue examined in the book’s presentation. Since a realtor has substantially less to pick up from an expansion in the selling cost of your home than you do, she realizes the house could really sell for more if she somehow happened to keep it available longer. The last portion of the part talks about whether individuals make careful arrangements to apparently show up non-unfair in certain social circumstances, and whether this absence of segregation is true or only an act.

Part 2 limits in explicitly on a marvel known as data asymmetry. Data asymmetry concerns communications that occur where one gathering has more data than the other, for example, when specialists like realtors or vehicle sales reps have more data about the item they are selling and the market they are selling it in than the purchaser. Data asymmetry doesn’t really need to be mishandled, yet it regularly is, as prove by the distinction between realtors selling their very own home as opposed to selling a client’s. Levitt quickly discusses the web entering the image and leveling the monetary playing field, turning into an incredible equalizer among buyers and specialists and disposing of a great part of the data asymmetry that recently described exchanges. The last piece of this section discussed an alternate side of the job that data plays in regular daily existence. This concentrated on specific data: via cautiously picking what data we share about ourselves, our inclinations, and our exchanges, we radically impact the manner in which others see us. The examination looking at Internet dating sites is the most ideal approach to see this in real life.

‘Freakonomics’ being a true to life book was composed by Dubner S.J (a journalist) and Levitt S.D (financial expert), the authors experienced different bits of present-day life to exhibit how financial aspects explains why individuals act in a way similarly as the manner in which express outcomes occur. They analyze various bits of society and view them with trade points of view. With the utilization of unequivocal information and the fundamentals of financial aspects, the obscure examinations and the different areas in the book show connection between human instinct and financial matters. The journalist’s view on educational system, child rearing, budgetary perspective and human nature really caught my attention and widened my understanding.

Levitt portrays the book as a push to expel the external layer of the present life and to see what’s going on beneath it. He completed this by taking twofold events that are not related and partners them. From investigating teachers and sumo wrestlers, to inquisitive why drug peddlers would keep on staying with their mothers. Both writers feasibly put a turn on standard point of view by examining it through all things considered different viewpoints. From the earliest starting point phase of the book, the authors were able to attract my attention and to wake my excitement about the affirmations they orchestrated revealing. The way wherein the authors dismembered wrongdoings and the relationship between approved embryo evacuation and the effect it has on crime rates impacted me emphatically. Instead of most books, this book has no focal thought; in truth at the opening portion, Levitt explained this as a structure. The key concern was to make individuals to toss some test on thoughts and ideas that are regularly acknowledged to be valid. One of the fundamental stray pieces in this book is that incentives are the foundation of present-day life and that the examination of economics is the examination of motivators: how a few people gain their needs, most particularly when decent variety of individuals need something essentially the equivalent. The learning of ‘Freakonomics’ opened my mind and eyes on how inspiring powers, inspirations and risks accept a significant activity in customary occasions in our general public today.

With everything taken into account, the examinations in ‘Freakonomics’, maybe like no other quantitatively-sorted out book, accomplished the separations between investigating the world from the perspective of a moralist and the world perspective on an examiner. Regardless, if profound quality tends to the way where that individual may require the society to carry out her work, financial aspects tend to show how the works really function.

After reading ‘Freakonomics’ it really opens the reader’s eyes to unseen things in everyday life. The incentives of just any regular person are greatly shown because money or personal gain can take over any man or woman no matter how old. In a few of the chapters the book showed how two groups that someone would think are far opposite could have common goals or mindsets. As dumb as this book was it did at least teach me a new perspective to life and try to think deeper to see if there’s more than meets the eye.

When reading ‘Freakonomics’, the first chapter said, “What do teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?”. I thought this couldn’t even be worth explaining because that’s so ridiculous that someone would compare sumo wrestlers, who are these gigantic dudes with jock straps and then saying they’re like teachers that are correcting my paper right now. That seems absolutely absurd to even think of that until he explains why. The reason why…. incentives, incentives and incentives. He wrote about teachers in California and how there was this decent sum of money that would be given to teachers who had the best scores on their ACT’s. I’m not hating on teachers or anything but they aren’t exactly rich and when the state waves a lot of money in all the teachers’ faces and says this is yours if you have the best scores, some teachers are obviously going to hurdle the boundary of protocol and law to make some easy money. The role sumo wrestlers’ play in this is the honor and respect thing in their culture. The more wins they get the more respect and fame they get which is what all sumo wrestlers are at least most are in the sport for. In sumo wrestling, a sumo wrestler has to get eight wins to increase in fame otherwise they don’t like to go far. The example he gave was a great one, “So a wrestler entering the final day of a tournament on the bubble, with a 7-7 record, has far more to gain from a victory than an opponent with a record of 8-6 has to lose”. Pretend the 7-7 sumo wrestler asks the 8-6 sumo wrestler to let him win this match. If the 8-6 sumo wrestler says “yes”, he’ll most likely want something in return like his money from the match or maybe win a match to raise in the ranks.

In this book it explains that realtors may sometimes not be the best of people even though I don’t really agree that they can be compared to something as big as the KKK, but I do believe some realtors use lack of information to their advantage. Just that chapter showed me that legal jobs like being a realtor can make that person seem almost bad or corrupt to make personal gain. Unless you are friends with the realtor, they may not even care about you and only care about getting paid at the end of the day. So, this book even has material that can help when buying or selling a house to catch those filthy realtors in their tracks if they aren’t the good ones.

The shape of argument the author gives is a detailed one for sure. First, the author will talk about the comparison with the exception of when he talks about all the processes, expenses, and how much money can be made when in the drug business. He will go into great detail until the point where it almost bores you to death even though credit should be given for such knowledge of the subject. I didn’t even have to ask questions or think I wasn’t filled in enough on what he was talking about. After all the information he gives he then tries to prove his points and back up his comparisons that he made.

The authors’ purpose almost seems like he’s just trying to make you feel stupid and that you lack so much knowledge showing you that you look at everything inside the box. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen JU. Dubner want to give you all the knowledge so you’re not as stupid as you were before and hopefully not end up like the domino’s guy twirling signs around on the corner.

Overall, the book had a great deal of information. It wasn’t exactly “Genius.. has you gasping in amazement”, – Wall Street Journal, but it certainly was “slightly” interesting and showed me a new perspective. Also, everyone has incentives and sometimes those incentives get the best of people. All it takes is incentive and it can change anyone’s life for better or worse.