Analysis Of The Book Freakonomics By Steven D. Levitt

In the book Freakonomics, written by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubne, the authors go through different parts of modern life to show how economics describes why people act a certain way as well as the way specific outcomes occur. They look into different aspects of society and view them with different perspectives. With the use of specific data and the fundamentals of economics, the very obscure comparisons and the different chapters in the book show correlation between economics and human nature. The main point of this book is to explain a few fundamental ideas through the answers of strange questions and how they play a major role in society.

After reading Chapter 3 of “High Price” by Dr. Carl Hart, I learned he lived with his mother and father until the as halfway thru the second grade. Then got a divorce and he stayed with his father for about two week, but once his father realized that he was unable to take care, he then went to live with his Big Mama. His great grandmother was a Bahamian woman. She came to the United States when she was a young adult. His big mama was a women who believed and stressed that going school and being self sufficient was important. She believed that a black men in this society had no chance if they weren’t educated. Dr. Carl Hart’s family based their family morals off of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, based on the beliefs of the his grandmother and great grandmother. His great grandmother followed role of W. E. B. DuBois, because she believed that education was important and this was a way for African Americans can advance. Although his great grandmother believed that education was important, she did not believe that it would not help someone of his race in a world where racism played a big part of being successful. Carl’s father would promise to pick him up on the weekends and would never show or even showed up drunk. Although his father was an alcoholic, Carl didn’t mind it he just wanted to be around him. Being the his great grandmother loved him dearly, his great grandmother loved him and always had his back. When Carl’s father didn’t play a the role of being a

​Freakonomics is a book that explores the many possibilities of why some things are the way they are. Principles of everyday life are examined and explained while Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner search for logic in statistical economics. This book answers the questions: how can things affect what people do, why are things the way they are, and why experts routinely make up statistics. This book highlights the commonalities between schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers as well as the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents, the life of drug dealers, criminals, and the art of parenting.

To counter the constant negativity, he also exemplifies solutions for fixing grade inflation. For example, Brent Staples references Valen Johnson’s proposal for a grade point average reform that accounts the selected major into the grade point average system (389). With this example, the reform will significantly decrease the median grade point average and reward those who achieve high grades in courses related to their respective major. Behind this positive message, Brent Staples still criticizes college administrators for prioritizing their public image over a legitimate grading system without the complaining tone in the majority of his essay. Furthermore, Brent Staple’s examples do solve an actual issue and not a phantom problem. In 1975 alone, there was over tens times more bachelors in psychology than there were available jobs for them (Bird 424). Because the current grading system allows for counterfeit grade point averages, there are an excessive number of psychology bachelors. Brent Staples provided solutions because this issue proves his criticisms in

The author Steven Levitt studied economics at Harvard University and MIT. He is primarily known for his work in the field of crime. The title Freakonomics means a study of economics based on the principles of incentives. The title is related to the book since he emphasizes how incentives drive and affect people’s actions. Although this book does not have a single theme, the main focus of the book is a new way of interpreting the world using economic tools. He explores incentives, information asymmetry, conventional wisdom, crime and abortion, and parenting throughout the six chapters of the book.

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

This is juxtaposition because he's comparing black people and white people. He uses this to show that these two different types of people want to do to same things, which is kind of unexpected as how black people and white people historically weren't that

In addition, the high standards are constantly checked by tests that can reveal students’ future prospects. Tom is an exchange student from Pennsylvania who studies in Poland. In Tom’s Polish math class, unlike the American math class, no Polish students are allowed to use calculators to do math. Polish students are trained to be good at calculating just like it is mentioned in the book: “Tom could tell the kids were doing a lot of the math in their minds… their brains were freed up to do the harder work. It was the difference between being fluent in a language and not”(Page 92). After every test, teachers publically announce students’ grades from a 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). Tom expected to see someone getting a 5 for a year but no one ever did. “ ‘Success,’ as Winston Churchill once said, ‘is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.’ ”(Page 92) Kids in Poland have gotten used to failing, but instead of giving up; Polish kids give themselves a boost in academic performance. In 2000, “Polish fifteen-year-olds ranked twenty-first in reading and twentieth in math, below the United States and below average for the developed world.” But after some reforms that included raising the educational standards, Poland “ranked thirteenth in reading and eighteenth in math, just above the United States in both subjects. In the space of three years, Poland had caught up with the developed world”(Page 165).

Pathos. Being a book of nonfiction and being written with the purpose of educating others, Levitt and Dubner do not hesitate to throw logistics on what they talk about. The title of this chapter asked what schoolteachers and sumo-wrestlers have in common and anyone would be surprised by how much they actually do in fact have in common. A usage of pathos used by Levitt and Dubner is “ Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary”(page 21), in saying this, Levitt and Dubner want you to grasp your mind around the fact that basically people will do whatever they need to do. The whole chapter

In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner write in a colloquial fashion and tend to keep their writing informal. For example, when they write, “like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another” the allusion to the butterfly effect serves to engender common ground with their audience (Levitt and Dubner 5). Additionally, by using the word “butterfly” Levitt and Dubner are able to create imagery which will help their audience better visualize their simile. Also, when Levitt and Dubner write, “it may sometimes feel as if we are peering at the world through a straw or even staring into a funhouse mirror,” the words “straw” and “funhouse mirror” create vivid imagery which helps the audience to better visualize the narrow scope through which people view the world (Levitt and Dubner 14).

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them or, often, ferreting them out—is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.There are three basic incentives economic, moral and social. How do we profit and what incentives drive us to act unethical? The author describes the research he used to identify a number of Chicago public school teachers who helped their students cheat on standardized tests. According to Levitt & Dubner “In 1996, the Chicago Public School System implemented high-stakes

For some students, even though they can get high scores in exam, but that’s all they can do. They just memorize the solution and don’t try to understand and absorb the real knowledge behind the exam, for these kinds of students we can’t say that their teachers do well. Comparing with this, some students have really penetrating understanding to the knowledge, their know how to use them even though it can’t reflect on their exam scores sometimes, but their teachers still deserve higher paid. There is no doubt that we can’t tolerate keeping low-performing teachers in classrooms because it hurts everyone, but the method used to evaluate teacher performance should be sophisticated enough to consider all factors that can affect a child’s success in classroom before they can be used to as a standard to punish or award teachers. Chicago strike also evokes a debate toward salary problem. Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits, compared with the median household income in Chicago is $46,000 (BBC News: para 4). So many people couldn’t understand that teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase when most occupations are not getting and raises and many people are under unemployment. There are two reasons that CTU still raise salary debate even though teachers already get enough paid. Firstly, CTU considered the law aspect. According to Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for teachers to strike on all

What they were all responding to was the force of Levitt’s underly- ing belief: that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not un- knowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more in- triguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. - Stephen J. Dubner.

Visualize a standardized test taken annually by millions of students in the U.S.A. that directly affects teaching methods, school budgets, and grade promotion. Presently, millions of schools are utilizing high-stakes tests to determine these major factors. The United States expects students to perform well on standardized testing, or school districts will suffer financial consequences under the No Child Left Behind Act (Au 502). This places pressure on everyone from administrators to students in a school district. Schools worldwide are stressed to succeed on these standardized tests when they only measure a fraction of a student’s intelligence. Standardized testing must be discontinued because it negatively affects school curricula,

When implemented and data gathered correctly, in the best circumstance, standardized tests can reflect the teacher’s ability to teach. Their knowledge and ability to relate said knowledge can be effectively measured, by the scores of their students. As written by Grant Wiggins, about the proper use of standardized test, “reform of testing depends, however, on teachers’ recognizing that standardized testing evolved and proliferated because the school transcript became untrustworthy,“ (Wiggins 354). In this Wiggins describes how the modern tests developed because of a lack of trust. Teacher dishonestly turned in altered grades, for students, to fake successful teaching and learning. Because of this, these tests depict the students’ true knowledge learned. Another factor that promotes standardized test, is, as written by Wiggins “rather than seeing tests as after-the-fact devices for checking up on what students have learned, we should see them as instructional,” (Wiggins 354). By this Wiggins suggests that such