William Levitt

its everyday life. Throughout the book Stephen Levitt discusses how we as humans are driven by incentives daily. Levitt explains the concept of ‘correlation does not prove causation’ to show that one thing happening might not have any correlation to the thing it may cause. For example, he disputes that the more money a candidate uses on his/her election, the more likely that candidate is to win elections. In the first chapter of Freakonomics, Levitt begins to tell how if people are given incentives

Recently in class we read a book, Freakonomics. I didn’t like the book very much. I personally think that it was racist a little bit. When it was comparing people’s successes depending on whether they had a black or white name made me angry. And they bassically wasted a whole chapter giving a lesson on the KKK. Anyways, Freakonomics is a mass market book about economics. As I read through the book I found that the author return to and referred to 3 major themes that I am focusing in this essay, how

What is wrong with the ivory tower? The appointment of Peter ("Death to Disabled Newborns!") Singer to the bioethics faculty at Princeton University has generated considerable controversy. Recently, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and Stanford University Law School professor John Donohue III created a furor with their research paper "Legalized Abortion and Crime." The authors contend that legalized abortion fueled the drop in crime in the 1990s because a new subclass of humanity

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

book Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner, emphasize how people are constantly responding to incentives, and how these incentives motivate and affect people’s decision making in their daily lives. The authors of this book talk about economics from a different perspective, and they do it by relating unusual and unasked questions to the field of economics. Levitt and Dubner define an incentive as the “means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing” (Levitt and Dubner 17). These

era, Drucker was one of the first educators and authors who identify marketing as a way to understand customers’ needs rather than to sell the products. With the same thinking as Drucker, in a journal article named Marketing Myopia (1960), Theodore Levitt examines and analyzes limitations of managers in approaching the philosophy of modern business. The core

The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, is designed to pose fundamental questions concerning economics using a variety of imaginative comparisons and questions. Examples of these comparisons and questions can be seen in the list of contents, with chapter titles such as “How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents?” and “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?” Not everyone is interested in economics, but with titles that grab attention, it is almost

People are altruistic when helping is profitable. In chapter 3: “Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism” of their book SuperFreakonomics (2009), Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner state that people are not pure altruistic. (125) Furthermore, people are altruistic when there are beneficial incentives for them. On my high school’s Hallowmas back in China, some students possess booths for selling things. One friend who wanted to sell lottery tickets asked me for help because he didn’t have

When I was a child, my parents always pushed me to move further in my learning. One of the ways they enforced that on me was to get me to read for at least thirty minutes to an hour every day. This may not seem like much now, but back then, I definitely had strong feelings about it. During elementary school, my parents would always take me and my siblings to the local library, and even though there were times when I wasn’t interested in reading and would count the minutes go by, I thank my parents

The Freaky questions of Freakonomics The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is a book that takes you through facts and statistics that seem reasonable and logical at the beginning but soon they dissect it and show you the true side of the statistic. The whole premise of the book is to show you the “hidden side of everything. (Cover page)” Like how dropping crime rate throughout the 90’s drastically dropped seemingly overnight. This drop was associated with better policing