Have you ever wondered if any of your teachers have ever cheated on a test for you to help you pass a class? Or how real estate agents are able to sell a property so easily? Have you ever thought about how criminals begin their life in crime? These are just a few of the topics that are discussed in the book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. In the first chapter of this book, the main discussion is based around cheating. Almost everyone cheats depending on the situation. The book compares how school teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat. School teachers may cheat their students way through a grade or a class in order to make themselves look good. Whereas sumo wrestling fights are rigged as far as winning and losing.
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The Ku Klux Klan had specific words that meant certain things that only members of the group knew. Real estate agents have certain words that they use to help to try to sell something. Both of these groups had/have their own “code” words, but also both of these groups’ code words were exposed. In the 1940s a man named Stetson Kennedy was trying to break up the Ku Klux Klan. “Kennedy turned to the most powerful mass medium of his day: radio. He began feeding Klan reports to the journalist Drew Pearson…” (page 57-58). Something similar to this happened to the real estate agents. “The Internet happened. In the spring of 1996, Quotesmith.com became the first of several websites that enabled a customer to compare, within seconds, the price of term life insurance sold by dozens of different companies.” found on page 62 that explains how what real estate agents told their customs strated to matter less and less because they could just look it up on the internet most of the time. Even though these two groups were/are very successful in their area of expertise, they both lost their secrets one way or …show more content…
A man named Roland G. Fryer Jr. thought of the question: is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it? Fryer looked at data of birth-certificate information of every child born in California since 1961 and found how unsimilar black and white parents name their kids. What type of parents give their kids distinct black names? The answer to that question is found on page 186, “...an unmarried, low-income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself.” So does it actually matter how distinctively black or white your name is as far as your future goes? “The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name--weather 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.” (page 191). This isn’t necessarily caused by the name itself. It appears to be caused by the location and economic circumstances of the family of the child. “...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. And that’s why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn.” (page 191). In the end results as you can see,
The Ku Klux Klan had specific words that meant certain things that only members of the group knew. Real estate agents have certain words that they use to help to try to sell something. Both of these groups had/have their own “code” words, but also both of these groups’ code words were exposed. In the 1940s a man named Stetson Kennedy was trying to break up the Ku Klux Klan. “Kennedy turned to the most powerful mass medium of his day: radio. He began feeding Klan reports to the journalist Drew Pearson…” (page 57-58). Something similar to this happened to the real estate agents. “The Internet happened. In the spring of 1996, Quotesmith.com became the first of several websites that enabled a customer to compare, within seconds, the price of term life insurance sold by dozens of different companies.” found on page 62 that explains how what real estate agents told their customs strated to matter less and less because they could just look it up on the internet most of the time. Even though these two groups were/are very successful in their area of expertise, they both lost their secrets one way or …show more content…
A man named Roland G. Fryer Jr. thought of the question: is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it? Fryer looked at data of birth-certificate information of every child born in California since 1961 and found how unsimilar black and white parents name their kids. What type of parents give their kids distinct black names? The answer to that question is found on page 186, “...an unmarried, low-income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself.” So does it actually matter how distinctively black or white your name is as far as your future goes? “The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name--weather 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.” (page 191). This isn’t necessarily caused by the name itself. It appears to be caused by the location and economic circumstances of the family of the child. “...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. And that’s why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn.” (page 191). In the end results as you can see,