Freakonomics Essay

Baseball has always been considered as American as apple pie. If that is true than cheating should be just as American. Ever since the creation of America’s favorite pastime, baseball, cheating has been a major part of the game. Each era of baseball has showed more complex ways of cheating the game. Although, cheating in baseball has been around since the introduction of the game, only few scandals have really made history. Some of the most famous scandals include the Black Sox Scandal, the gambling of Pete Rose, and the use of steroids by players to enhance their performance. Despite these corruptions the game has still managed to stay America’s most loved sport.

Author Wheelan writes, "Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics." Indeed, so is Naked Economics. This book promises to be a good introduction to economics for the layman. Throughout the book, the author uses easy-to-understand language and vivid examples to illustrate his points in strategic places maintaining a sense of lightness with the readers in reading the material. Here is a summary of each of the 12 Chapters of the book Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan.

Gambling has an adverse impact on the individual athlete's or coach's integrity. Reputation diminishes, and the athlete becomes better known for participation in gambling activities than for athletic feats and career accomplishments. Gambling scandals can ruin careers, and permanently mar the individual's ability to participate in the sport again. As Finley, Finley & Fountain (n.d.). point out, gambling also has the potential to ruin the integrity of the entire team, league, or whole sport. "Ensuring an honest and uncorrupted game has been one of the biggest challenges facing sport," (Finley, Finley & Fountain, n.d., p. 41). Baseball in particular has been plagued by gambling scandals. However, other professional sports have also revealed the prevalence of widespread corruption. Finley, Finley & Fountain (n.d.) also note that gambling on college sports has been a problem since the CCNY point-shaving scandal of the 1950s. Point shaving proved lucrative enough for high-profile black market gambling syndicates to flourish. Although most players, coaches, and teams are not corrupt, the few that are have sullied the image of all sports.

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

The game has no set rule but most people would count this as cheating. The lives that the IOI has taken and the rules they have broken to increase their chances of winning has had a negative effect on the

In what way are schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers similar? At first, this question might be puzzling, but the answer is provided in the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Freakonomics is the result of a partnership between an award winning economist, Steven D. Levitt, and a journalist, Stephen J. Dubner. The duo decided upon making a book after Dubner was given an assignment to profile Levitt. Dubner realized that Levitt took a different approach to economics than other economists and he saw that Levitt had an interesting and effective way to explain statistics. This pushed the two to release the 315 page book to the public in 2005 in New York, New York. Since then, the book has flourished and has been republished numerous times. In Freakonomics, Dubner and Levitt reveal that fundamental ideas of economics can be used to interpret just about everything in modern society. The book focuses on a few key points including; incentives are the driving force behind everything, conventional wisdom is often wrong, small causes can often have dramatic effects, and the advantages of having information. The authors use many interesting stories and statistics to demonstrate these economic themes in the modern world. Stories include how some school teachers in the Chicago school system cheat, the influence that the legalization of abortions had on crime rates, and how real estate agents tend to sell their own homes for higher prices than if they

The sport forces a wrestler to go out on the mat and put out their best performance and show their strength is madly impressive. Coach Evans once said, "you can't just wait for things to come your way, you have to go and take it." In order for a wrestler to get what they want, they have to put in work and go out and get it. Dedication is a huge factor in wrestling. Throughout the season, wrestlers have to cut down weight for at least four to five months and make their weight class two times a week. Often times, wrestlers will wrestle off-season, to help stay in shape, as well as, improving their

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

READ: Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, Charles Wheeland, W.W. Norton, 2003. Completely- cover to cover.

12. What advice about investing in the stock market did you find most interesting and/or useful?

Since its creation in 1980, World Wrestling Entertainment has been determined to shine a spotlight on the sport of professional wrestling. Delivering up to eight hours of weekly programing and their own subscription-based online library, consumers are able to receive as much content as they please. Although the WWE product as a whole is immensely popular, it does not go without fault. While other professional sports have succeeded in showcasing all genders and races in a positive light, the same can not always be said about WWE. What separates the WWE from other professional sports in a negative manner is the constant use of racial stereotypes, depiction of women in a degrading fashion, and mediocre storytelling.

The Baseball World Series of 1919 involved the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds (Linder, 2010). The Series was an exciting exchange that boiled down to the last game, which was taken by the victorious Cincinnati Reds (Linder, 2010). However, a year later, news broke that the game was rigged by the Chicago White Sox (Linder, 2010). They threw the game in order to receive a large payout, which was never given (Linder, 2010). The eight players involved disgraced the sport and the American public (Linder, 2010). In today’s world of sports, scandals continue to happen. A recent example is the doping scandal of the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team and, their captain, Lance Armstrong. While the US Postal Service team’s doping does not seem to be connected to the White Sox’s gambling problem, they share many similarities.

Freakonomics has no one topic. It has many, it challenges you to think more and see there is a reason to why things happen or why people do what they do. Chapter one focus mainly on the study of incentives and how they are pursued. Chapter two focus on information and the way that individuals, organizations, and businesses often exploit their access to crucial information at the expense of

In chapter 1, Levitt and Dubner describe how many people in different cultures and walks of life, which are otherwise inclined to be honest, find subtle ways of cheating to advance their position or increase monetary awards when incentives are strong enough. The authors define an incentive as “a means of urging people to do more of a good thing or less of a bad thing,” and identify three varieties of incentives. Economic incentives are those, which a person responds to in the marketplace. Social incentives motivate people to respond in a certain way because they care or are worried about how they will be viewed by others. Moral incentives appeal to a person’s sense of right versus wrong. Three case studies of the

When I was first given this assignment I was extremely perplexed at how I would even begin to finish it. I had no idea how economics related to my life in anyway. I hadn’t thought about it critically and I struggling terribly. Thanks to some much needed help from a fellow classmate, he allowed me to get an idea of things from his own essay. After reading not one, but two other essays, I was so surprised at how oblivious I had been. I never realized that just about everything that goes on in my daily life is, in fact, economics. I never realized that from the things I buy to the money I earn from working is all economics. The things I miss out of while working or going to school is a complete opportunity cost. Or even