Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics

“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life”(Levitt and Dubner 12). Levitt and Dubner once mentioned in their book “Freakonomics”. According to Oxford dictionary, incentives are something tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity (“incentives”). In business field, incentives are something given by bosses to encourage their employees to endeavour in bringing benefits to their business. For a simple example, the employee who hits the monthly or year sales target will get cash or prizes as incentives. Apparently, these incentives are something that motivates employees maintains their great performance and also to motivate other employee, whoever wants to get the incentives, work harder.

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.

“An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change anything”(Levitt 20). What professor Steven D. Levitt (a professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s dictum here is that the incentive has a lot of power in this world). And that the metaphor of comparing “incentives”to a bullet really speaks wonders to their strengths. They can change almost any situation by motivating someone to do something in a business situation, all the way to education fields. After many years of college, business and economics students are being taught how to be greedy in college. It is only a matter of time before greed is too powerful. Incentives and greed both have favorable and critical effects on individuals and the populace, but when connected together both can have dangerous effects on future selections.

Lastly, they explain the fundamental ideas of the book. Incentives are “means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.”; according to the authors, they “are the cornerstone of modern life”. Levitt and Dubner also focus the book on the following concepts:

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.

Freakonomics is basically a book that explains its own version of the economic history. Dating all the way back to the 1800s with some stated facts explaining what incentives are and what type of incentives there are and what they're used for. Basically there’s a way to motivate someone and set them on a clearer path and bettering themselves in the future. One of the best motivations would be money because well money can get you anything in the world. Clothes, food, and car, Etc. They are a great way to motivate and give people that mind set to work for their money and not just lay there and wait for it on a silver platter. I feel like that people who work against people who never worked. They know more about the struggle than anything. Which is why they actually care when they get money and they spend it wise. Obviously the rich wouldn’t care to get or not because they already have enough to fall back on.

Based on her knowledge as a teacher, with 30 years of experience, Julie Roger-Martin believed that she had established a framework by which students could achieve excellence in the classroom and with standardized tests (Frysh, pp.1-10). Even though she was comfortable with her capabilities, her students did not perform as well as others students. Teachers with mediocre school children were excelling in test scores, while their classroom work did not mirror this increased knowledge. Julie Roger-Martin, confused by the test results, was unaware of the underlying reasons for the improvement. The Atlanta Public School System was cheating in order to obtain good scores. Teachers made the decisions that truthfulness was a value that could be sacrificed in order to attain higher salaries and federal funding.

Freakonomics is a humorous and intriguing book about taking off the top layer of a situation and understanding what is happening underneath. Through everyday examples Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner take perspectives that are unheard of in any other writing while simultaneously comparing the most unique and uncommon ideas to each other. As they study everyday life, readers see insight to the ways in which the world really functions and runs. As they study the world the authors continue to ask questions, thus continuing to challenge the reader to seek for a deeper answer. Through these highly untypical questions, Levitt and Dubner are able to display that the root of economics itself is incentives.

Imagine a perfectly ripe Granny Smith apple. Famished, you bite into it, expecting a crisp, juicy crunch. Instead, it's soggy. Acidic. Different. Confused, you reel back to view the apple's interior: it's not an opaque, light green, it's a glistening orange. The fruit, at least on the inside, is an orange. Your bite, the act of diving into the fruit, revealed a deeper layer, something not expected, something that simply staring at the surface could have never revealed. That is how Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner work. That is Freakonomics.

Freakonomics, published in 2005, is a book centered around the belief that traditional intelligence is not the key to economics. It focuses on the correlations between a person’s morals, wisdom, and social life and economics. In the movie The Distinguished Gentleman, a con man uses the death of a Congressman to boost his own campaign using the same name. As the movie progresses, the former con man begins to see the true corruption of politics. One of the major key concepts discussed in Freakonomics is about conventional wisdom.

1.In the book, Freakonomics, the authors discuss about a group called the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was very popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the article “27 Important Facts Everyone Should Know About The Black Panthers” by The Huffington Post, a group called the Black Panthers was also popular in the twentieth century. The Black Panthers differ from the KKK in many ways, for example the Black Panthers wore black leather jackets and black berets, opposed to the KKK white sheets and hoods. A major difference between the two group was that while the KKK was hunting down black people, the Black Panthers were trying to protect the black community.Another notable difference between the two groups is that the KKK was aided by the

The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner consists of a series of essays in which a journalist and an economist work collectively to find, by applying everyday economic principles, how the world truly works, which reveals some fascinating truths about the world. Some background history of the authors, Steven D. Levitt interviewed Stephen J. Dubner for New York Times Magazine and this is where they initially met and became good friends. With them having similar ideals about the world in an economic lens, they decided to write this book for other enthusiasts that wanted to analyze the world as an economist.

They were able to control the curricula and everything about the entire learning experience along with conducting small scale complimentary experiments to better understand why the effects observed were happening. The hope was to determine which key skills children should acquire to prepare them for later success. The overarching theme in this experiment was that parents, teachers, and students from preschool to ninth grade were motivated to perform better when they were incentivized. Additionally, when students and teachers were provided with an incentive and threatened with the loss of the incentive, everyone preformed

With the NCLB focus on accountability being a driving motivation for teaching to the test it is also important to see if the penalties and incentive systems that use these results are effective at achieving the desired outcome. A comprehensive study published by the National Research Council found that the effect of test based incentive programs on achievement to be negligible and having no measurable impact for many programs. The report concludes that the educational system has yet to learn how to implement incentive programs that consistently yield achievement improvements and better education. In contrast, the study found the implementation of high school exit exams translated to lower graduation rates without any improvement in achievement

In the book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner discuss how child moral behaviors are connected to how effective a parent can be when it comes to enforcing rules and rewarding good actions. This form of tactic, known as incentives, is a way to accomplish things to get what is needed or desired. The concept to incentives is that a child should be able to learn from his or her mistake and gain an understanding of right and wrong. Not only do incentives pertain to a child’s behavioral development but also his or her success as an individual. A child’s response to negative and positive incentives is the most important predictor for success according to Levitt and Dubner.