Steven Levitt's Freakonomics

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

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

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.

Julie Lythcott-Haims explains to us all what a perfect child is; straight A student, fabulous test scores, gets homework done without parents asking them to do it… She has the right idea, the right mindset of a parent, every parent wants their child to succeed in life. The way that parents are parenting their children is messing them up. They don’t have a chance to become themselves, they are too focused on whether they did good on that test that they were stressing about for a week, they are too worried about getting the best grade to be able to get accepted into the biggest name colleges around. The parents become too consumed with hovering over their children making sure that they are doing flawlessly in school, the parents are directing their every single move they make. The children then began to think that their parents love comes from the good grades. Then they start making this checklist; Good grades, what they want to be when they grow up, get accepted into good colleges, great SAT scores, the right GPA, the jock of the sports team.

Poor and working-class parents were found to hold to an “accomplishment of natural growth” parental philosophy. Natural growth promotes a clear separation between children and adults, employs the use of directives, places little emphasis on the importance of verbal communication and eye contact, allows children greater independence, and promotes deference and submissiveness to adults. Inspiring and positive qualities can be found in children raised in homes exercising this perspective, qualities such

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

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.

In chapter one of Freakonomics, the authors discuss several key themes. These themes include cheating and incentives. Cheating includes anything from a little white lie to get your way or even committing fraud. The authors use simple concepts like these and tie them into real-world situations using research and exploration of such topics. Among these cheaters are school teachers, sumo wrestlers, and office workers.

​The field of economics is often distinguished as a field of studying financial trends and market advancements, but Freakonomics reveals how the tools used in economic research can be put to use to study the events and problems that our society encounter on a daily basis. Freakonomics presents a vivid display of how informal methods of data accumulation and examination are often necessary to have an appreciation of the world around us. Just knowing what to measure and how to measure data from our routine lives makes the complex world around us somewhat less problematic. Oftentimes, Levitt presents situations that challenge our prior beliefs and leaves the reader in a state of amazement. The situations in the chapters without no doubt demonstrate

Within its 300 or so pages, Freakonomics manages to cover a vast scope of topics that typically wouldn’t be seen as related at all, let alone bound within the same two covers of a best-selling book. From sumo wrestlers to real-estate agents to drug dealers, Levitt and Dubner delve into these and many other unconventional topics in a way that shines a new light on all of them--in a way that an economist would look at them.

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

Freakonomics has a tone that is very casual and humorous, almost sarcastic in a way. Levitt and Dubner make the book interesting by making wild comparisons. Then, they justify these comparisons with hard evidence and it is quite amazing.

Our world cannot afford more spoiled children. “A spoiled child is undisciplined, manipulative, and unpleasant to be with much of the time” (Schmitt). With the way our society is now, kids are becoming very spoiled which is forming them to be narcissistic children. Do we really want more people like Donald Trump? For goodness sake, the man believes a loan of one million dollars to be small! Is that what we want? Well if parenting continues the way it is, that’s what society will get. Spoiling will form youngsters into becoming selfish little pampered brats, and pampered children are problematic for parents; as well as for future children, adults, or others they will encounter along the path of their everyday lives in the future. “Spoiled children run into trouble by the time they reach school age. Other children do not like them because they are too bossy and selfish. Adults do not like them because they are rude and make excessive demands. Eventually spoiled children become hard for even parents to love because of their behavior” (Schmitt). This is why it is crucial for our society to make future parents aware of the need of parenting