Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics

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.

The intended audience of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics is made up of middle class Americans and comprised of adults and teenagers with a basic education and a broad knowledge of a wide range of subjects. Since Levitt and Dubner reference a large variety of topics, it is imperative for the audience to also be familiar with a wide variety of subjects or at the very least to be aware of popular culture and government. For example, when Levitt and Dubner reference a Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade, where a young woman named Norma McCorvey was “...the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion” they establish their audience as one that would be educated enough to know the fundamentals of some of the most important events in American history (Levitt and Dubner 5). By referencing the Roe v. Wade case, a court case which is generally considered to be common knowledge for Americans, Levitt and Dubner reveal that their audience must be comprised of

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 a situation” (Levitt & Dubner 16). Freakonomics is a book written in 2005 by award winning economist Steven Levitt and former New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner while they both resided in different states. The use of simple diction makes it so a larger audience can be reached; readers vary from everyday people to students to economists. In order to better explain economics, Levitt and Dubner appeal to their audience by forgoing economic jargon and using simpler terms to ensure that the readers understand and relate to what is being explained throughout the passages. The authors also appeal to the readers through their credible background and logically by using statistics, researches, facts and parallelism.

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.

In chapter four of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner discuss the downturn of criminal activity in the United States. They begin the chapter by giving a summary of Romania’s abortion law, and then they switch to the history of criminal activity in the U.S. At the end, they also make sure to connect the ideas while including clear explanations of their perspectives (Levitt and Dubner 105-132). The way they examine some of the most impactful components that decreased felonies in the U.S., such as dependency on prisons and police strategies/quantity, is done in an effective way for the reader to understand.

In Freakonomics, incentive emphasizes Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s unification of disparate chapters and American society. Economic incentives drive people like teachers and criminals to make certain decisions. “...high-stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers…” (Levitt, and Dubner 23). School teachers’ incentive is to cheat because they do not want be fired or passed up for promotion because of low test scores. Levitt discovers that the different ranks in gangs have opposite incentives. “A foot soldier’s incentive was to make a name for himself; J. T.’s incentive was, in effect, to keep the foot soldiers from doing so” (Levitt, and Dubner 105-106). Foot soldiers start gang wars in the hopes of becoming noticed

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.

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.

Parenting is an excellent system in how we raise children, but much pressure is added in raising them to live a successful life. Can it be done, and what should a parent do? These are some of the questions that Steven Levitt attempts to give reasons to in his book Freakonomics, and with it are there arguments and theories on how a parent can accomplish this. Levitt makes a good argument in how economic status of the parents affects the success of future children, but I would reevaluate his argument concerning the importance of how you treat your children, and the way his inferences are concrete.

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

In the eyes of the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, economics is not seen as a monetary subject but rather a subject with the ability to gain answers through the utilization of interesting, yet out of the ordinary questions. These “out of the ordinary questions” can be seen as the backbone from which the collaboration was written. Levitt and Dubner structured the novel in this way to explore and reveal “the hidden side of everything.” They focus on the incentives behind people’s motives in all different aspects of society—from sumo wrestlers to crack dealers—and connect the surprising similarities with each other. After reading what Levitt and Dubner had to say, I established that the authors’ goal in creating such a novel was

As I read through the introduction of “Freakonomics” by Stephen J. Dubner and Steve Levitt, I’m highly dissatisfied with the way the author opens the book. Personally, I felt like it was well written, but lacked appeal. To illustrate further, the book starts with information regarding the false predictions of criminologists of crime rates. However, my feelings are slightly positively changed as I find the author exposing “the hidden side of everything”, as he claims (which is also the theme of the book). For example, as he bypasses the information of the sky-high crime rate, he starts talking about a woman who changed crime rates by legalizing an abortion (which is illegal at the time). Sequentially, he explains how the crime-drop

The book Freakonomics about how there are some mysterious cases about students getting high scores in tests but then score less the next year they are put in a higher classroom. Then the immediate question that comes to mind is why did they score less? No one would think that the teachers would were the ones to blame. THEY cheated. That’s how the video and the book are similar, both talk about the teachers changing test scores to make the school look good. The book Freakonomics says, “ ...she might collect her students’ answer sheets and, in the hour or so before turning them in to be read by an electronic scanner, erase the wrong answers and fill in the correct ones.” The video as well shows that the teachers cheated changing test scores.

The collective way of all the decisions on demand and supply, use of resources and opportunity costs made by millions of people or firms sets the price for goods, services, assets and labour demand and supply therefore form the main principle