Freakonomics

Majority of People are truly oblivious to some of the problems that are all around them. people believe what they are told, not knowing if its actually true or not. Freakonomics provides explanations to the way things work in our world. this movies takes a an idea that expresses a dominant view of people and studies it. it helps prove why people do the things they do. The way these economists prove their theories of behavior of humans is by making it simple to understand and by using statistics and conducting experiments. By doing it this way it allow people to grasp the concept and using evidence through data makes the argument more believable.
Starting with incentives, which can easily be found in almost every situation. A segment brought up by freakonmics was school. People have accepted school as if it was natural, necessary part of life. Attending years and years of schooling where good grades are are associated with intelligence and success. The dominant view is that people need to go to school, get good grades, to get an education and be successful. plenty of incentives right there. good grades = success. Freakonicimnos tested the way people react to certain incentives. The went to a high school, and told the students that they would get paid if they got good grades. A student needed to work to get their grades up to at least a C in order to get paid. that would have worked for me. the experiment focused in on one black and one white student, who both were underachievers. And what about the students who are already doing well? that gives those students the incentive to keep their grades the same. if they were not getting paid , it would give then the incentive to do worst in order to get paid. The results at the end showed some students including the black one did improve their grades. Urail King, the black student was thrilled to see the limo that he had the chance to ride in. He worked on his grades just for that incentive alone. It was only until he had these incentive that he really tried for the those grades. However other students like Kevin Muncy, the white kid , is not content with the money incentive, "I don't think I would take any money for giving up my social life." So did the incentive work? how can if be changed to created more of a positive result? how can any incentive be changed in order to produce a result through wide ranges of people? Maybe if people were given more of an incentive to adopt healthier eating they would. but so far what incentives have people found? What if it was money? what if it was more money? Student can try their very best but might just not have what it takes to fit the requirements, "you want milk and cookies. well if the oven is broke you only getting milk." What if student could be promised that good grades would lead to success?
This overlaps with the segment of having success based on a persons name. Well, one researcher believes that a child's name has no impact what so ever on their success . He talks about a father who chose to name one son, loser and the other son winner. in this situation turns out that the more successful one was in fact Loser. While the other son, Winner did not live up to his name. Now what exactly does that prove? Another researcher admitted that in his company names do matter. He helped prove his theory with a much more fact based experiment. where he took the same resume, summited one with a primary white name and the other with a primarily black name. This Resulted in the white name getting a call back much much sooner than the black name. It took some where like 5 weeks longer for the black to receive a call back. why is that? He seems to believe that people associated black names with harsh living condition, and poor education. While the white name is thought about with a respectable family situation and a high level of education.
In seems to me people feel more comfortable with hiring a person with a primarily white name than a primarily black name. which I can relate to eating foods that people feel more or less comfortable with. in my mind, foods with certain names are uneatable. I, tend to proceed with cautious when eating foods like veal, , calf's liver, tribe. Foods like those or foods like rabbit are just foods that make me feel uncomfortable. in the same sense that company chose white names over black because of comfortably.
its funny the way our world works, and almost impossible to understand. Being told so many different points of view it is hard for anyone to distinguish the truth. advisement's purposely tell us what they want to and we chose to believe it. Part of believing has to do with what you want. majority of the time people will chose to believe something because they simply want it to be true, which is easier than accepting reality. All these ideas overlap in so many ways, and all contradict each other. Freakonics tries to answer the difficult question we face, but there seems to be different answers all over the place. Is one more right than the other? does data, statistics, experiments prove it to be true? is there anyway to get a clear true answer to our question?