to allow other wrestlers to win) so other wrestlers do not drop in the rankings. The results of these tests—which all public school students must take—dictate whether or not the students’ teachers get raises and promotions, and whether or not the students will be accepted into certain classes. The most aggressively revised section of the book is the beginning of chapter 2, which tells the story of one man’s crusade against the Ku Klux Klan. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Since unwanted children have an unusually high probability of growing up to become criminals, Roe v. Wade may have drastically decreased the number of children who grow up to commit crimes—an effect that didn’t become clear until the mid-90s, as the post-Roe v. Wade generation entered its twenties. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything applies the tools of economics to explain real-world phenomena that are not conventionally thought of as “economic.” Experts often abuse information asymmetry between themselves and consumers, but things like the internet are working to erase this information imbalance by providing more information to everyday people. The chapter then turns to the United States in the mid-1990s: while crime had been rapidly rising in the year prior, the trend suddenly reversed, leaving many experts puzzled and attempting to explain it. Crack became so widespread that gangs made small fortunes by selling it. However, the bulk of this money went to a small number of leaders of drug gangs—the foot soldiers assumed almost all of the risk, in return for exceptionally small cuts of the profits. Struggling with distance learning? From then on, each chapter centers on an unusual question. Parents who are highly educated with a high income are most likely to have successful children; these factors are determined before the child is even born. The point of it and its sequel is to "explore the hidden side of everything"; essentially, it was an attempt to explain social phenomena using microeconomic principles to try and get at the root cause of these phenomena. Levitt points out that many parents are misguided, and the things they do matter much less than the things they are. These incentives fall into three general categories: economic incentives, moral incentives (i.e., doing the “right thing”), and social incentives (i.e., being praised or criticized by one’s peers). In much the same way, real estate agents have a secret language of “code words,” which they can use to communicate with one another. GradeSaver, 27 July 2016 Web. "Freakonomics Summary". His theory, which he backs up the data, is that pregnant women tended to live in conditions associated with later criminality of their children, including low levels of education, single par… My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”, Easy-to-use guides to literature, poetry, literary terms, and more, Super-helpful explanations and citation info for over 30,000 important quotes, Unrestricted access to all 50,000+ pages of our website and mobile app. Freakonomics is a ground-breaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. Freakonomics essays are academic essays for citation. There are three kinds of incentives: economic, social, and moral, and often incentive schemes will include all three of these. Introduction. The book takes the form of six chapters. In this chapter, the authors discuss eight hypotheses for why crime rates went down so dramatically in the mid-90s. The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. The authors analyze 16 different factors that are hypothesized to play a role in a child’s development. This same truth applies to naming children, as discussed in Chapter 6. One can even predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, what baby names will be most common in 20 years by studying which baby names are currently the most popular among upper-class families. Because of incentives, people are sometimes driven to cheat. Economically speaking, drug gangs selling crack aren’t all that different from a McDonald’s franchise. Incentives are the basic building blocks of economics: according to economists, nearly every decision can be explained through incentives. Similarly, sumo wrestlers in Japan are incentivized through bribes and social incentives to cheat and throw certain important matches (i.e. Steven Levitt, the author, penned a best-seller thanks to a good mix of solid social-psychology principles and fun facts delivered within a frame of good entertainment. It first tells the story of Romania, a country that experienced a huge rise in crime after its dictator banned abortion. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is the second non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and The New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner, released in early October 2009 in Europe and on October 20, 2009 in the United States. Various studies suggest that at least half of a parent’s influence on a child is genetic in nature. As a result, after 1973, many women in impoverished communities had abortions where they would otherwise have had unwanted children. This meant that many babies who would have grown up unwanted and impoverished—and, by this trend, more likely to become criminals as they neared adulthood—were not being born. But in reality, real estate agents’ main incentive is to sell more houses, quickly—therefore, they’ll sometimes intentionally sell a house for a cheaper price to “speed things along.” There are many other examples of asymmetric information: for example, most people will fudge the details about themselves when they’re on a date or in a job interview. Not affiliated with Harvard College. The book takes a novel approach to studying economics, sharing its most interesting research. Gundersen, Kathryn. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The epilogue tells readers that, while there is no single unifying theme to this book, the main takeaway is a new way of thinking, looking at, and interpreting the world according to the tools of economics discussed in the book's chapters. The book takes the form of six chapters. The primary causes of the declining crime rates include increased incarceration rates, a growing number of police officers, and—perhaps most important of all—the influence of abortions. They usually begin with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. These types of incentives are how society attempts to mitigat… In the second chapter, the authors look at the history of the Ku Klux Klan. In the sixth chapter, the authors study the influence of a child’s name on his or her development. 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