Summary: Freakonomics A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner visit the common social issues of today and dissect them from an economist’s and statistician’s point of view. In doing so they find solutions to popular scenarios that may not appeal to people’s morality, but are nevertheless correct according to data. Levitt and Dubner use a multitude of comparisons and hypothetic scenarios to show the extremes of their concepts and to make their themes relatable to the reader. Freakonomics, whether comparing teachers to sumo wrestlers or the Ku Klux Klan to Real Estate Agents, strips the surface layer of society to reveal the truth lurking below. In the first chapter Levitt and Dubner present a scenario in which a day care manager is seek a solution to ensure no parents will be tardy. The economists tackle this be attaching the incentive of a fine for all tardy parents but this backfired as now more parents came to pick up their child late. This scenario was used to introduce the concept of incentives which would then be used to explain the motives of cheating. Levitt and Dubner then go on to explain the new situation of teachers who have been tempted to cheat on standardized tests. The future employment of students is now not the only thing at stake with standardized tests …show more content…
The authors push that parents have minimal impact on their children and the thing that impact children the most are peers and their environment. Levitt and Dubner also state that parents are horrible risk accessors and are more like to put their child at risk with some of their decisions due the fallacy in conventional wisdom. Levitt and Dubner due however, concede that parents have a significant impact on their children by the name they give them as different names are associated with different levels of education, income, and social