Freakonomics Essay

In researching the important matters in life such as how to best format an online dating profile or finding the reasoning behind why employees in large corporations tend to steal bagels, authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book Freakonomics claim to explore “the hidden side of everything.” The previous examples provided, including the various other topics that Levitt and Dubner touch upon in their book, are likely unimportant to the average reader and as a whole are without any obvious

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

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

Freakonomics P.8 Economics Mr. Mittlestadt Author Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s, “#1 New York Times Bestseller” Freakonomics, is based on how they believe economics relates to past, present and future times and events around the world. Economics is apart of our society no matter what or how we look at it. Economics deals with production, distribution and consumption of how goods and services interact with our every day society. Throughout the story of Freakonomics, incentives

Freakonomics written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Copyright, 2005 by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. A non-fiction book about the intertwining discourses of pop culture and economics. Steven David Levitt is an American economist who is well known for his work that specifically focuses on crime, and the connection between legalized abortion and the effect it has on crime rates. Mr. Levitt is currently the “William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics” at 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

This book is filled with completely polarizing chapters in which the two things discussed seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but the authors find a way to connect them. In this summary, I will take you through some of the highlights of my favorite chapters and some of the more important chapters as well. The interesting thing about the book as a whole is that it does not even seem like you are reading a book that is trying to teach you economics through some outrageous situations. Another

1. In the first chapter of Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, it talks about dealing with societal mores, economic incentives, and cheating. With schoolteachers, the possibility of getting a pay raise and the grades their students get on standardized tests are some of the incentives that derive them to cheat. In the book, Levitt explains how he examines sets of answers to these tests and tries to see a pattern if teachers were changing answers for their students. Dubner and

In Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics, they use unconventional wisdom to explain certain events. They use very solid data in order to support their conclusions about certain events. However, some of their conclusions suffer from errors in reasoning, or rather, fallacies. Although they have done several different types of fallacies, the main one they’ve done is the either-or choice.     The either-or choice is when a piece of evidence that states something is either one way or another

The last section in chapter two of Freakonomics, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, attempts to answer the following questions; “How forthright (and honest) are people when it comes to sharing their personal information,” and “what kind of information in personal ads is considered the most (and least) desirable” (74)? Throughout this section the authors provide statistical data from an online dating site, which encompassed more than 20,000 users. This data showed that not only are