Incentives, as read about in the second chapter of Wheelan’s Naked Economics, take on many different faces; good or bad, and all of them are selfish. Incentives are entirely fueled by self-interest and opportunity cost. In order to insure his audience fully grasped the concept of incentives, Wheelan illustrates a variety of example, leaving positive and negative effects on our modern society. Incentives, opportunity costs and self-interest are connected in a way that make the ideas more concrete, and we see that incentives own society. A lot of vital information can be deduced from looking at the incentives of our society.
The persona portrayed by Dubner and Levitt in their novel Freakonomics is that of an unconventional Economist. Levitt’s introduction includes the quote "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how it actually does work." (Levitt 13). This quote details an important distinction that characterizes the rest of Levitt's analysis. As an economist, he studies how the world actually functions, which tends to include deviations from what may be considered the moral.
All rewards will include both monetary and public recognition. By providing average level performers both nonmonetary and monetary rewards at each level will make use of social pressure to motivate those still not
John F. Kasson: Amusing The Million In our modern society of America’s industrialization and exhibit freedom’s in civilization, came a point in time where America’s culture was broad and blatant. The themes, amusements, technology, art, and culture, we have today was from a spark that created a bond of fire for american society. The spark that revolutionized the generations of people and cultural expectations was no other than, Coney Island.
3. Purpose: As the authors put it, “the aim of this book is to explore the hidden side of…everything” (12). Instead of looking at economics as a cold, hard science, the authors aim to add the human touch by taking into consideration human tendencies when making economics arguments. Freakonomics is an unconventional book in that it brings multiples sides and arguments to old data to come to new
The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner talks about many different things, including cheating teachers and sumo wrestlers, how abortion lowered crime rates, how a street crack gang works, and whether the way parents raise their children even matter. These topics seem to have nothing in common, but all of these topics were identified in the same way: an economist (Levitt) looked at school test scores, crime data, and all sorts of other information, looking at them in unconventional ways. Because of that, he has come to many interesting and unique conclusions that make complete sense. These findings were based on some simple ideas: the power of incentives, conventional wisdom is not always right, things may not have obvious causes, and experts often serve their own interests instead of the interests of others. Perhaps the most important idea in the book is, as Levitt and Dubner state, “Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so” (14).
Also to not be afraid to speak up and search for your ideas even if your opinion will make others feel uncomfortable and maybe even make you unliked by others As Freakonomics says in its epilogue on page 209 “and now, with all these pages behind us, an early promise has been confirmed: this book indeed has no ‘unifying theme.’ But if theres is no unifying theme to Freakonomics, there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world.” From reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, I have pondered thoughts i never even knew I had and have even had my mind changed. There were moments I sat there and was like what are they talking about and then there were moments while reading that I would actually say “wow” out loud and just be in absolute awe of what they were
Other examples are used in the book to show that when a material can no longer bring in profit, then they are dispensable. This, Wheelan states, has nothing to do with compassion but everything to do with maximizing the value of a scarce resource. He maintains that many things in life all boil down to economics. The importance of incentives is emphasized. Economic incentives usually lie above other things in the government agenda, and as well as the priorities of the people.
Freakonomics is somewhat random grab bag of topics. The unifying theme of this book for me was finding ways to ask questions so that one's available statistics and data can provide an answer, time after time they used available statistics to provide some time of reasoning or answers to the question being asked. Some of these efforts were more successful than others. Some of the questions Levitt and Dubner study felt unnecessary, that no one really cares about. But there are also some good subjects.
Whether male, female, married, single, conservative or liberal all people have a moral compass. The moral compass in Freakonimics does not point in one direction creating a new approach to economics. Authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephan J. Dubner suggest viewpoints on crime, abortion, and education from an economic prospective while ignoring the right or left minded political viewpoints. Chapter 4 of Freakonimics answers the very question it proposes: “Where have all the criminals gone?” To begin answering the question Levitt and Dubner argue against the causes the press proposed regarding the 1990 crime drop.
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner 1. Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers are all different types of people, they both have stuff in common. In chapter one, Levitt and Dubner discussed about the relationships between the parents coming late to pick up their kids from daycare. Teachers from Chicago began to cheat by give kids a better test score. For Sumo Wrestler, they have a lack of competition in tournaments.
“Perverse incentives” are “… inadvertent incentives that can be created when we set out to do something completely different” (Wheelan, Pg. 36). There are many examples of this in the world. For example, “consider a well-intentioned proposal to require that all infants and small children be restrained in car seats while flying on commercial airlines” (Wheelan, Pg36). This idea with all of its good intention led to an undesirable outcome. Since parents would have to buy an extra seat, the prices would rise due to the extra seating and people would drive more.
For employees, things that aren’t intrinsically interesting requires extrinsic rewards to motivate. Employees can be motivated by extrinsic rewards such as additional monetary compensation, gifts, gift cards, or other monetary rewards. These types of rewards could lead to improved performance and higher motivation. It would also motivate a worker, but only satisfies the person’s lower-level needs. The flip side to this type of motivation stimuli, employees will want the same or better reward to maintain the same level of motivation and performance outcomes.
Introduction On September 4th, 2012, the First Lady Michelle Obama gave a speech about the values of the American Dream. Within her speech she talks about her past and how she shares the same values as the president of the United States of America - her husband, Barack Obama. She talks about why she is proud to be an American and why being the First Lady has changed her life forever. A main focus in the speech is how The American Dream is partly about working to not only make one's own life better, but also to work in order for children and grandchildren of the future to have better opportunities.
