Below are insights from Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. See those lessons and discussion questions below.
Quotes from Chapter 1: Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers
- There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. (p 17)
- Some of the most compelling incentives yet invented have been put in place to deter crime. (p 17)
- [W]hen it comes to crime, people also respond to moral incentive (they don’t want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don’t want to be seen by others as doing something wrong). (p 18)
- Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. (p 21)
- So if sumo wrestlers, schoolteachers, and day-care parents all cheat, are we to assume that mankind is innately and universally corrupt? (p 43)
- A key fact of white-collar crime is that we hear about only the very slim fraction of people who are caught cheating. Most embezzlers lead quiet and theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected. (p 45)
Quotes from Chapter 2: The Ku Klux Klan and Real-Estate Agents
- The Ku Klux Klan — much like politicians or real-estate agents or stockbrokers — was a group whose power was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information. (p 62)
- Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent — all depending on who wields it and how. (p 63)
- It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. (p 64)
- The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between experts and the public. (p 64)
- Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them. (p 67)
- The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast. (p 82)
Quotes from Chapter 3: Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?
- …if you can question something that people really care about and find an answer that may surprise them — that is, if you can overturn the conventional wisdom — then you may have some luck. (p 85)
- …conventional wisdom…must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting — though not necessarily true. (p 86)
- It may be sad but not surprising to learn that experts like Snyder can be self-interested to the point of deceit. But they cannot deceive on their own. Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists. (p 87)
- …nothing infuriated the law-abiding populace more than the image of the millionaire crack dealer. (p 89)
- …a crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage. (p 100)
- …But criminals, like everyone else, respond to incentives. So if the prize is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance. (p 103)
Quotes from Chapter 4: Where Have The Criminals Gone?
- Until 1966, Romania had one of the most liberal abortion policies in the world. Abortion was in fact the main form of birth control, with four abortions for every live birth. Now, virtually overnight, abortion was forbidden. (p 116)
- Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals. (p 116)
- So if you were the kind of person who might want to commit a crime, the incentives were lining up in your favor: a slimmer likelihood of being convicted and, if convicted, a shorter prison term. Because criminals respond to incentives as readily as anyone, the result was a surge in crime. (p 121)
- The evidence linking increased punishment with lower crime rates is very strong. Harsh prison terms have been shown to act as both a deterrent (or for the would-be criminal on the street) and a prophylactic (for the would-be criminal who is already locked up). (p 121)
- …given the rarity with which executions are carried out in this country and the long delays in doing so, no reasonable criminal should be deterred by the threat of execution. (p 123)
- If life on death row is safer than life on the streets, it’s hard to believe that the fear of execution is a driving force in a criminal’s calculus. (p 123)
- It is extremely unlikely, therefore, that the death penalty, as currently practiced in the United States, exerts any real influence on crime rates. (p 124)
- …yes indeed, additional police substantially lower the crime rate. (p 125)
- The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too. (p 127)
- There are enough guns in the United States that if you gave one to every adult, you would run out of adults before you ran out of guns. (p 131)
- The children born in the wake of the abortion ban were much more likely to become criminals than children born earlier. (p 136)
- Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime. (p 140)
Quotes from Chapter 5: What Makes a Perfect Parent?
- An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. (p 148-149)
- No one is more susceptible to an expert’s fearmongering than a parent. (p 149)
- “When hazard is high and outrage is low, people underreact…and when hazard is low and outrage is high, they overreact.” (p 152)
- …the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates. (p 155)
- A child whose parents are highly educated typically does well in school; not much surprise there. A family with a lot of schooling tends to value schooling. (p 170)
- Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether a child is trotted off to museums, spanked, sent to Head Start or frequently read to or plopped in front of the television. (p 177)
Quotes from Chapter 6: Perfect Parent, Part II; OR: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?
- Obsessive or not, any parent wants to believe that she is making a big difference in the kind of person her child turns out to be. Otherwise, why bother? (p 181)
- The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctly black name — whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn — does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. (p 191)
- But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don’t tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. (p 191)
- Considering the relationship between income and names, and given the fact that income and education are strongly correlated, it is not surprising to find a similarly strong link between the parents’ level of education and the name they give their baby. (p 195)
- What the California names data suggest is that an overwhelming number of parents use a name to signal their own expectations of how successful their children will be. The name isn’t likely to make a shard of difference. But the parents can at least feel better knowing that, from the very outset, they tried their best. (p 207)
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