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Summary of The Freakonomics

Levitt addresses a number of everyday questions in Freakonomics and uses straight-forward analysis to turn conventional wisdom on its head. The authors of the novel Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner maintain that "if morality is how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work." The authors also show that conventional wisdom is often a convenient way to think about a problem more than a correct way to think about it. Freakonomics asks some good questions, and it inspires readers to do the same. Freakonomics lies not in the answers it gives, but in the revelation that answers exist and can be discovered if only we know the right questions to ask. It looks at the world and how it works by exploring the hidden side of everything. It asks fresh, interesting questions like, if drug dealers have so much money, why do they still live with their moms? Or which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime in USA? Freakonomics explores the hidden side of many common experiences that everybody comes across. The Introduction begins with a discussion of how, in the 1990s, experts predicted a dire and dramatic increase in crime, particularly in murder by teenagers. The predicted crime wave never happens, and, in fact, crime rates for all types of crimes begin to plunge all over the country. Experts credit the dramatic decrease to various factors, such as the robust 1990s economy, gun control laws and smart policing strategies. The authors however explain that the primary reason for the dramatic decrease in the crime rate is the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which recognizes a woman's constitutional right to have an abortion. As the authors explain, because of Roe v. Wade, the types of children who are most likely to become criminals never took birth. Freakonomics demonstrates how incentives affect human behaviour. Economics is the study of incentives, which are ways to get people to do good things. There are three different types of incentives - economic, social and moral. The book states that sometimes an incentive may have unintended consequences. As an example, the

authors first cite a study of daycare centers in Haifa, Israel, in which a $3 fine is imposed on parents who pick their children late from the centers. After the fine is introduced, the number of late pick-ups immediately goes up. The researchers find that the $3 fine turns out to be a poor incentive for parents to pick their children on time form school. The book also talks about information asymmetry. As the book explains, the term information asymmetry refers to when a person uses his information advantage to gain an unfair advantage on others. To elaborate the point the author gives a brief history of the Ku Klux Klan. According to the authors, much of the Klan's power in the 1940s lie in the fact that it maintained so much secrecy in everything it did. After World War II, a man named Stetson Kennedy lead to the Klan's ultimate downfall by exposing many of its secrets. Kennedy infiltrates the Klan by becoming a member of a Klan group in Atlanta, where he learns all of the group's secret rituals, names and handshakes, as well as its hierarchy and transfers all the information to people through radio. The authors explore the topic of names and, specifically, whether a person's given name affects his or her outcome in life and why people give their babies certain names to begin with. The authors discuss, more particularly, how blacks and whites name their babies very differently and whether having a distinctively black-sounding name affects one's life outcome as most parents believe that the name that they give their child will affect their child's life outcome and hence there is a pattern in the names that children have.

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