Freakonomics Chapter 1 Summary

The problem is lack of awareness in the marketplace. Lazy Listers continue to exist because homeowners have not been given the questions to ask of, or shown what to look for in, a listing agent. As a result, there is a lower bar of expectation that listing agents have to reach and they get away with putting in less effort than is needed to sell your home for the highest price possible.

Not necessarily cheating by lying about a game or sneakily finding an unfair way to win that violates the rules. The cheating that is becoming controversial in sports are about athletes using sports performance enhancing drugs. The motif to cheat in sports is similar to the motif to cheat in schools. Athletes use drugs to boost their performance or to beat other competitors. Athletes just like High School students face a lot of pressure to do well or to at least do better than other athletes. In a text written by Chuck Klosterman, Klosterman explains that steroid scandals are no longer uncommon amongst the National football League athletes. These huge athletes are expected to be massive compared to normal humans and to perform task that no ordinary human could perform. It should not come as a surprise to the public that these football hero’s use steroids to live up to there expectations. On the contrary it is a let down and disappointment to the NFL fans once they discover their favorite athletes have been deceiving and cheating by using unpermitted substances to increase their performances. “My point is that sports are unique in the way they’re retrospectively colored by the specter of drug use.” stated by Chuck Klosterman. Many famous musicians, authors, and stockbrokers were on drugs when they did their best work and yet these titles are not stripped away from them and they face little to no

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

The athletes at the college level are still student athletes. In order to key in on the Student part.,athletes must put their education first. There has already been reports of athletes cheating academically, like the UNC cheating scandal in 2008. UNC went on to push athletes towards taking fake classes so they could get the credit for the class without actually taking the class. (Long Ago UNC…)So people want to pay them more money for being a Student athlete further more encouraging, more people to cheat because they're getting paid already.

Chapter 5 of Freakonomics starts of by telling the reader that parenting has changed over the years. There has been a lot of contradicting methods, the authors explain on how parenting should be done. These methods range from how long you should breastfeed as to why letting a baby cry is like its exercise (Levitt and Dubner, 2009). The authors then say that fear is the biggest component when it comes to parenting (Levitt and Dubner, 2009). The chapter then leads into a story about how a girl’s parents will not let her go to a friend’s house because they have a gun in their house.

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

Cheating, you may do it, you probably have done it somewhere in your life, but what about the penalties you may suffer for being caught? People cheat in many things: school, sports, and, but not limited to, relationships. But there is many ways to cheat in those multiple examples, like in sports you can cheat with: drugs, academic eligibility, or even through recruiting. The topic of this paper is college basketball and cheating. What makes college basketball coaches break the rules, is it worth the penalty you might ultimately face?

They cheat to get the better grade than

Powers, E. (2009). Academic Fraud Is Rampant in College Athletics. In C. Watkins, Sports and Athletes (pp. 79-86). Detroit: Greenhaven Press.

​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.

In this instance, I was unsure of how the authors would compare sumo wrestlers and teachers, but if the thought of teachers cheating is disrespectful then the thought of sumo wrestlers cheating may also be disquieting because it is a sport shrouded in spirituality. However, sumo wrestlers purposely lose their matches due to blackmail and bribery. Additionally, some elite wrestlers earn high wages for their wrestling matches, but most wrestlers earn low wages. As a result, they are much more susceptible to offers of violent threats or money than the elite because they have much more to lose (Freakonomics, N/A). For example, the comparison between actual fights and predicted fight results displayed a strong favoring towards wrestlers that were not anticipated to win.

Buying or selling a house or an apartment is one of the biggest decisions of a person’s life. And when selling or establishing a price for real estate, people seek out real estate agents to do the dirty work. A real estate agent has to convince a prospective homeowner that he or she is trustworthy and knowledgeable. In many ways, the agent acts as a counselor to individuals and families about to embark on a huge commitment. Real estate agents have a thorough knowledge or real estate market in their community. They

“Real estate is a year-round opportunity to help countless people realize the American dream” (“Why Real Estate”, 2012). Eighty-five percent of buyers believe that home purchases are good financial investments, and a majority of homebuyers and sellers rely on the services and expertise of real estate professionals to assist them with their transactions (Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 2010). “The primary job description for an agent is communicating with potential clients to determine what kind of property they are looking for” (Richard, 2012). This means, setting up interviews with clients to see if the agents firm possesses property that meets the client’s specific needs. Once it is apparent exactly what the client is looking for, the agent sets appointments to show houses to clients and many times the agent physically accompanies couples while showing off properties.

In fact this year, the World Anti-Doping Agency found an elaborate Russian cover up of doping in the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games. Corrupt Russian Anti-Doping officials were found to have, not only, swapped positive urine samples, but also intimidated the laboratory to report false negatives. Quite possibly the worst aspect of the scandal, however, was the fact that Russia got away with it for two years. Some evidence suggests that Russian doping began as far back as the 2012 London Olympic Games. Furthermore, in the United States, the NFL and other major league organizations have shown a reluctance to cooperate with anti-doping agencies (Houlihan, 2002). As stated before, corporate sport cares only about the numbers, not necessarily how they get to those numbers. This absence of cooperation creates a “Wild West” for cheaters. Take Brady’s “Deflategate” or Armstrong’s steroid use, the best will try to get away with it, and sometimes do, given the chance. With the lack of cooperation and current level of corruption, international and corporate sport today have become open to doping and

The authors used all constructs of the theory through pre- and post-survey questionnaires for subjects studied that went through the training course. Through the pre-survey they were able to determine what realtors prior perceptions on lead and whether or not they understood its implications and any of the background information relating to lead prior to taking the course. After completion of the course, in six months, they were followed up with surveys and phone calls to determine how effective the course was. The realtors enrolled in the study were volunteers and were provided with a $200 financial incentive. The behavior researchers sought was to see if the realtors put into action what they learned and whether or not they were able to inform potential clients about the homes they were selling. An increase in realtor awareness is seen through the feedback they provided therefore it reveals to have sustained a continuous behavioral change in the thought process of selling a home to potential buyers. The authors did not clearly define the theories they used. Instead they stated using quantitative and qualitative measures and also described their methodology in detail.