Freakonomics – Book Review
This book review will contain the following phrasal verbs. Make a list and try to figure out their meaning in context of the text.
Phrasal Verbs
to drop off
to move on
to look up
to figure out
to set out
to point out
to run into
to sum up
to lead to
to grow up
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Chapter 1: What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?
Economics is the “study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.”
Incentives can have a downsides, disadvantages, or even a “dark side,”. This happens especially when moral incentives are put against economic incentives—leading to dishonesty and cheating when the economic incentive outweighs the moral. Since the majority of people will cheat in some way “if the circumstances are right,” misconduct happens in almost every type of personal interaction, for it is in one’s best interest.
Public school testing: a sensitive issue among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students, has run into incentives for teacher cheating.
Sports stars and athletes are also known to cheat because of the “bright-line” incentive of winning or losing. Cheating to win is not viewed as cheating to lose.
Paul Feldman quit his job to sell bagels on the honor system, dropping off bagels and cash baskets to different companies and keeping rigorous data on his business.
to drop off
to lead to
to run into
These books will change how you think.
Chapter 2: How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?
It is often for one party to the contract to have more information than the other in a transaction. For example, typically a professional knows more than the consumer.
In the late 1990s the cost of term life insurance fell significantly for reasons no one could discern. In retrospect, the Internet played a role in this shift because people could instantly look up and compare different companies’ offers.
Do real estate agents really work in your best interest? A real estate agent’s incentive is to set out the best possible deal, which may or may not include leading to the highest price for a sale, given their commissions are considerably less than 6 percent after they are divided among all parties involved in the sale.
People abuse information asymmetry in personal environments as well, such as online dating sites. Various types of data can be summed up through these sites: what people set out in their personal profiles and how other people respond.
to look up
to lead to
to set out
Chapter 3: Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with their Moms?
Throughout the book, the authors go to great lengths to break down long-held, incorrect beliefs provided by conventional wisdom. Using examples, they demonstrate just how crazy and wrong such beliefs can be, leading to stereotypes and giving people with rationales for their beliefs. They aim to ask readers to question the origin of conventional wisdom and to examine accepted facts more closely.
to break down
to lead to
Chapter 4: Where Have All the Criminals Gone?
What happened?
1960-2010 US National Crime Rates
Source – FBI
This chapter will make you understand cause and effect. Since conventional wisdom often leads to cause and effect by proximity and distance, the link between abortion and low crime rates 20 years later shows how hard it can be for the brain to make these kinds of connections without evidence. The authors point out causes of some effects are much more distant than one might expect.
to lead to
to point out
These books will change how you think.
Chapter 5: What Makes a Perfect Parent?
What is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool
Now that the reader understands that correlation and coincidence aren’t necessarily connected, and also that people usually choose the easiest explanations, the authors figured out that most parents don’t have real understandings of the statistical dangers their children can run into. They point out the fact that even though economics is a rational science, emotions often trump evidence, and economic theory is often about managing information and power through the controlling of emotions.
to figure out
to run into
to point out
Chapter 6: Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?
The authors again point out that although conventional wisdom shows some obvious correlations between the act of naming and success, the data shows that the causality goes much further back than a name. The names most parents give their children are mirrors of their social classes and backgrounds. The decisions white and black parents make when coming up with names for their children also lead to observation rooms through which to view class divisions along racial lines.
These books will change how you think.
to come up with
to lead to
to point out
Epilogue: Two Paths to Harvard
The authors figure out seemingly unrelated topics and fields through the spyglass of economics. They set out to prove that given the right data, one can run into obvious correlations and conventional wisdom to real, often more nuanced, events.
- Although no “unifying theme” exists among the topics in the book, there is a common string regarding how people act in the real world, one need only take a novel approach to discern and measure data to write a script about it.
- The aim is to have people take a deeper look at conventional wisdom and figure out that things may not be quite what they seem.
- There is not always a proximate connections between morality and economic decisions.
- To point this out, the authors refer to two earlier examples: one a white boy who grew up with loving, educated parents and the other a black boy who was abandoned, beaten, and joined a gang.
- Both boys figured out how to get into Harvard, one as a faculty member, the other as an undergraduate.
- The black boy grew up to become the Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr., who studied black underachievement, and the white boy grew up to be the terrorist Ted Kaczynski (known as the Unabomber).
These books will change how you think.
About the Author
Eric Froiland
Eric is a legal English teacher from the United States and has been based out of Bogota, Colombia for the last 10 years. He is the owner and founder of Legal English Innovation SAS, which is recognized as the top legal English academy in Colombia and is an official Test of Legal English Skills (TOLES) examination center.
