Freakonomics (2005) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

Summary edit see section history

People edit see section history

• Stetson Kennedy: Thirty-year-old man from Atlanta who went undercover and joined the Ku Klux Klan.
• Paul Feldman: Left his corporate job to sell bagels.
• J. T. Berry Brazelton: Pediatrician and child development expert.
• Sudhir Venkatesh: PhD student assigned to visit Chicago's poorest black neighborhoods.
• Temptress: A fifteen-year-old girl, living up to her name, whose misdeeds landed her in Albany County Family Court in New York. Mother originally meant to name her after Tempestt Bledsoe, but an error gave her the more apt birth name.
• Lott: Economist and author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime".
• Deshawn Williams: Fictional name used as an example of a "black" name.
• Bratton: First police commissioner of former NYC Mayor Guiliani.
• Sandman: A self-described "risk communications consultant" from Princeton, New Jersey.
• Molly: Fictional 8-year-old girl in a scenario exploring gun safety.
• Rudolph Giuliani: Former mayor of New York City.
• Fryer: Black Harvard economist who wrote a paper called "The Economics of 'Acting White'".
• Dinkins: New York City's first black mayor.
• James Alan Fox: Criminologist who wrote a report about the coming spike in murders by teenagers.
• Robert: Man from New York City who named his son Winner.
• Emily: A friend of Isaiah, used in an example about the correlation between the number of books at home and reading test results.
• Nicolae Ceauşescu: Former Communist dictator of Romania.
• Jake Williams: Fictional name used as an example of a "whiter" name.
• Duke: White supremacist who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990.
• Arne Duncan: CEO of Chicago public schools. He contacted the authors to have them conduct study to see if his teachers were really "cheating" with student standardization testing.
• Roland G. Fryer: Harvard economist who defied the odds.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Anything worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”

  W. C. Fields

• “For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor.”

• “And an exclamation point in a real estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.”

• “Since the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter, then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach.”

• “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way people would like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does work.”

• “If you learn how to look at data in the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Because there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.”

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• There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

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• Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

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• Or, as W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

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• “The basic reality,” Sandman told the New York Times, “is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.”

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• It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He did not consider it a compliment. “We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.”

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• These budding drug lords bumped up against an immutable law of labor: when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.

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• “How selfish soever man may be supposed,” Smith wrote, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

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• As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

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• Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, ferreting them out—is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating. The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

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• Risk = hazard + outrage. For the CEO with the bad hamburger meat, Sandman engages in “outrage reduction”; for the environmentalists, it’s “outrage increase.” Note that Sandman addresses the outrage but not the hazard itself. He concedes that outrage and hazard do not carry equal weight in his risk equation. “When hazard is high and outrage is low, people underreact,” he says. “And when hazard is low and outrage is high, they overreact.”

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Chicago, IL: Author Steven Lewitt is a professor at Chicago University. A great deal of data was gathered in the Chicago area, most notably the study on Chicago public schools.
• New York, NY: Many studies were conducted in the New York area.
• Atlanta, GA
• Washington, DC
• Madison, WI

Organizations edit see section history

• Ku Klux Klan: Chapter 2 compares the Ku Klu Klan to real-estate agents.
• Black Disciple Nation: Chicago gang that was the focus of a study as to why drug dealers live with their parents.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Incentives: Expectation of a reward, that induces action or motivates effort.

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Economics: The clear theme in this book is economics, which is ultimately the study of incentives.
• Challenging Assumptions: Describe this theme.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Followed by Super Freakonomics.

Preceded by Schott's Original Miscellany, and followed by The Ghost.

Preceded by Night, and followed by The Glass Castle.

Preceded by Hatchet, and followed by Emma.

Preceded by Ender's Game, and followed by The Scarlet Letter.

Preceded by The Sea of Monsters, and followed by Emma.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Steven D. Levitt (Author)
2. Stephen J. Dubner (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Quill Award (October 2005: Business)
• Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year (2005, Shortlist)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: HB 74 .P8 L479 2005
• Dewey: 330

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Discusses some topics that may not be appropriate for young children.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Mathematics › Applied
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Popular Culture
• Books › Business & Investing › Economics › Econometrics
• Books › Science › Mathematics › Applied
• Books › Business & Investing › Popular Economics

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Opinion - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
• Freakonomics

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Freakonomics (2010) (IMDb): Documentary.

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history