View Of Society In Steven Levitt's Freakonomics

The book begins by saying that economics has more incorrect arguments than any other study. The two critical reasons for this are: People don’t care about the long term health of the public, as much as the care about the short term gain in their private lives. Special interest groups create or reuse correct-sounding fallacies to promote their viewpoint. Economics consists in looking at more than the immediate policy; It includes seeing the problems of the policy for not just one group but for all groups. The misconception that government spending boosts the Economy, is a result of a system of misconceptions. The fact that, we don’t address deficit spending and inflation and assume that public spending will be covered in taxes, is a delusional dream.

During the Great Depression in 1929, there was Fernando Francisco the farmer with his only alluring and style 16 year old daughter Nancy Francisco at their barn. On a Tuesday morning in October 29, 1929, Fernando rocked back and forth, while glimpsing through the newspaper. Something caught his eye, it was this “The stock market has just crashed today, Wall street is in a panic and wiped out millions of investors.” After reading, Fernando went straight to the front of the entrance, and started to make billboards.

In chapter one of Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt describe how when incentives are strong enough, many usually honest people from different walks of life will cheat in order to gain financially or climb the ladder in their careers. The authors define an incentive as “a means of urging people to do more of a good thing or less of a bad thing.” This chapter covers three varieties of incentives: Economic, Social and Moral. Economic incentives motivate people with the promise of money or goods. Social incentives motivate people to respond in a certain way because they care about how they will be viewed by others. Moral incentives motivate people on the basis of right and wrong. We look at four

What most negatively occurred to me was that, at least partly due to Levitt’s deliberate distinction between morality and economics, no

1. The first chapter in the book is about the market and its inner workings. The book briefly explains the idea of supply and demand, in which the price of a certain good or service will reach the point where all the demand is equivalent to the supply. However, the value of something is not determined by its necessity, but its desire within society, as seen by the difference in cost between a diamond and life giving water. Markets operate as they do because people try to maximize the amount of utility for themselves. Nevertheless, a strict rationalism model cannot be used for predicting all the occurrences of a market because of the ever changing behavior of people; thus economists must take precautions against

“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 United States, we encounter quite a bit of obstacles that we can’t seem to get rid of completely. We as a nation deal with inflation, unemployment, stagflation, recessions, depressions, and so much more. Reading these three articles opened my eyes to the world of economics, and even made me question the society we live in. I’ve learned that sometimes questions can’t be answered, and I learned that once we solve one issue, there is always another issue on its way. These articles made me analyze, and think about the future of economics, and what I can do to try and help the economy. These authors of these three articles make it very clear that there are issues in the United States, and they do an amazing job

The overall role of the audience, made up of teenagers and adults, in Freakonomics is to act as the receiving end of a personal conversation just like Gladwell’s audience in Outliers. The audience always remains constant because it would be folly for an author to alter his or her intended audience part way through a text unless they wished to create a book intended to confuse its readers. The audience of teenagers and adults is meant to learn from the speaker of Freakonomics much in the same way that a student would glean knowledge from a professor. The audience is meant to carefully read and accumulate new information and ultimately understand why it can be beneficial to look at the world through a different perspective. When the speaker states, “” he effectively implies that the audience is still teenagers and

They repeat the subject regularly in order for the reader to become accustomed to it. The constant repetition not only keeps the reader thinking about the themes, but also gets them used to the ideas, so that the proposed theories are not as offensive. Levitt and Dubner make their points clear, and each chapter follows a similar formula. It opens with a question, then uses skills and tactics explained in earlier chapters to analyze new subjects. They teach the importance of incentives, that conventional wisdom is not always correct, along with dramatic effects having subtle causes and experts using their information to help themselves. The continual reiteration of these ideas shown in a formulaic is another point that helps the audience to comprehend the often confusing concepts that are

“Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them” (Paul,1). Despite Paul Samuelson’s accomplishments, his life growing up was not as ideal as a child would like. Paul was born in Gary, Indiana on May 15, 1915 to parents Frank and Ella Samuelson. Frank Samuelson was a pharmacist, who had financial difficulties after WWI. Thus, the family was forced to move to Chicago, Illinois. Enrolling at the early age of 16 to the University of Chicago, on his first day of college he claimed he was “Born as an

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

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.

During the 1920s or the “Roaring Twenties,” there was monumental social and political changes. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled, so there was lots of money to be spent and that's exacting what the American people did. One opportunity available for spending newly gained wealth was purchasing stocks from Wall Street , the banking district for the NYSE. For a while, buying stocks was something only the rich upper class could participate in but a new method of purchasing shares called “buying on margin” allowed the middle class to buy shares of stocks by borrowing the money from a broker

Joseph Stiglitz is a self made economist from Gary Indiana who gained his PhD from MIT before embarking on understanding how to make the social world a better place with economics mainly in how the markets work and how that knowledge can be used to help the individual. Stephen Levitt is an American economist known for his rigorous work in the field of crime and his podcasts with co-founder Stephen Dubner. In this comparative essay the similarities and differences of both Joseph Stiglitz and Steven Levitt will be compared and contrasted. The highlights of both economists careers will be covered, this will include their place and level of education, and any jobs, positions, or careers of importance they held. Finally economic theories for both economists will be displayed and to conclude this essay both economists will be compared to each other for similarities and differences.

The informative novel by Naroff and Scherer, “Big Picture Economics”, explains economics to the general public with personable events that unseeingly relate to the context of the new global economy. The authors discuss hot topic economical issues in a way that allows uniformed persons to learn how many events in the world, small or large, can essentially relate to the economy. An important economical issue that is discussed in multiple chapters throughout the novel is tax reform. Tax cutting is a complex topic that is often simplified by politicians attempting to expand their polls, however there is a much greater thought process when it comes to tax reform that has to be considered for a successful economic expansion.