Freakonomics Book Review Essay

In chapter three of Freakonomics, Levitt answers the question “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Parents?” The chapter begins with a quote by economist John Kenneth Galbraith who said “We associate truth with convenience” . This means that the public will not challenge or doubt a reasonable statistic. For example, an advocate for the homeless named Mitch Snyder compared the recent history of homelessness in the United States, and most of the people being crack dealers. To determine the condition of dealers a man named Sudhir Venkatesh was sent into the field. His assignment was to visit Chicago’s poorest black neighborhood with a clipboard and a seventy-question, multiple-choice survey. The first question started with “How do you

In the book Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, is made up of a series of scenarios in which an economist and a journalist apply basic principles of economics to demonstrate that information can often expose interesting truths about how the world operates. It uses the science of economics and specific data to challenge our assumptions about everything. In the book Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner, compares and contrasts two groups of people or things by using their informational data. This is called juxtaposition, which means the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect. Levitt and Dubner look at the world in a way that is both surprising, occasionally funny, and always enlightening. They do so by drawing unexpected connections between two greatly different but complementary aspects of sociology and economics, such as sumo wrestlers to school teachers, KKK members to the real estate agents, and lastly, crack gangs to McDonalds.

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 addresses three main ideas in the first chapter, titled, “What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?” Steven D. Levitt introduce the scene of a daycare facility which. The author starts out having one imagine themselves as the manager of the daycare center. By four o clock, every child should be picked up from the facility because it is closing time. This is a known policy, but parents don’t abide by it because it is not enforced. There are no consequences for their actions. The author then brings up the idea of incentives. There are three types of them: moral, economic and social. Moral incentives are what motivates people do the “right” thing because they don’t want to feel condemned or like they’re being a bad

The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is a book that takes you through facts and statistics that seem reasonable and logical at the beginning but soon they dissect it and show you the true side of the statistic. The whole premise of the book is to show you the “hidden side of everything. (Cover page)” Like how dropping crime rate throughout the 90’s drastically dropped seemingly overnight. This drop was associated with better policing strategies, this idea is great for reassuring the public, but is it really true? Turns out it was probably closer linked to the legalizing of abortion. The authors of Freakonomics throughout the book think outside the box in order to show you

Freakonomics written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Copyright, 2005 by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. A non-fiction book about the intertwining discourses of pop culture and economics. Steven David Levitt is an American economist who is well known for his work that specifically focuses on crime, and the connection between legalized abortion and the effect it has on crime rates. Mr. Levitt is currently the “William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics” at the University of Chicago. He coauthored the book Freakonomics with Stephen J. Dubner who is an American journalist who has written four books as well as several articles. He is best known however, for his work with Steven Levitt. The intended audience for this book is high school seniors and older. This is the intended audience for this book because the course economics is offered to high school seniors, only. Therefore, it would be logical to offer this piece of literature to this age group as a piece of the class or for better understanding of the subject, economics. This book is also intended for ages older than high school because it is a higher level reading, some of the vocabulary words used throughout the book would be difficult for people of younger age groups to comprehend. The main point the author wishes to make in this book is to challenge prior beliefs and the make the reader see normal, everyday occurrences through a different lense. Although there is not one uniform

What i found the most interesting thing stated in this chapter was,”... Whites, particularly white youths, are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color…. White Students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black

I found chapter 5 to be incredibly interesting, the two subjects that I found eye catching was The “Cuz It’s True Constraint” and the Naïve Realism. After reading the section on the “Cuz its true constraint” I felt I was already somewhat familiar with this idea of thinking, but I did not understand them completely until they were explained more in depth.

is a book that continues to give me surprises and it taught me things that may take me decades to understand.

Overall, this book has astounded me even though it was too short. I rate That Place of Knowledge 4 out of 4 stars as it subsume more useful ideas, and I recommend to everyone who ought to be

Freakonomics, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J, Dubner, is divided into six main sections that all show the similarities between a variety of completely different things. By utilizing statistics and history, the authors are able to create a book that shows that everything is correlated together and that everything is influenced by these statistics.

The major parts of the book are first which is the most obvious, God and his relation to science such as quantum

One question that immediately came to my mind the further I went in this book was

My first impression of the book turned out to be drastically wrong. The book turned out to be more about understanding how and why we engage in the relationships we do, and why individuals comply with other's demands. Upon further reading I felt cheated for not knowing

The books introductory chapter is “The Hidden Side of Everything” which is the best phrase to describe the books purpose. The book doesn’t have a set plot line like most books. The book makes people think about things different from how they normally would; for instance, the concept of real estate agents as the KKK. In the book Levitt and Dubner prove many times that correlation does not mean causation. However the book then goes in and provides of examples of how two unrelated items could in fact be connected. Thus, they are able to prove most unlikely correlations with the right proof.