Now, I know what you’re thinking right now. What in the world is this going to talk about. Economics is something that my dad talks about on the news and I’ll never get to use it in real life. It’s just a bunch of line graphs with numbers on the Internet. But, if you even take a gaze at the book Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, I’ll guarantee you, you’ll be hooked on the idea whenever a real estate agent is similar to the KKK and other global topics.
Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics are theory books written by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and they talk truth throughout the entire book. Each chapter is a question talking about a certain idea or scenario that the government/world has to deal with. In fact, let me run you through the chapters of Freakonomics:
- What do sumo wrestlers and school teachers have in common?
- How is the KKK similar to a group of real estate agents?
- Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
- Where have all the criminals gone?
- What makes the perfect parent?
- Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by any other name smell as sweet?
- Epilogue: Two ways to Harvard
The fancy questions and the ridiculous answers both continue to amaze readers as they continue to think about the certain scenarios that the book throws at them. To make this easier, I’m going to just take 3 chapters from the first book and explain what they each say in terms of answers.
How is the KKK similar to a group of real estate agents?
Think about the situation thoroughly before you judge. How do real estate agents do their job correctly? I’ll throw a situation at you. You’re moving to another neighborhood. You want someone to help sell your house. You call your friend who is a highly intelligent real estate agent and knows the area extremely well. Your friend’s job is to weigh the house’s values and sell it at a reasonable price while still being able to make the most profit. This is what we would usually call “The Golden Mean”, because you don’t want to price the house too low so that you earn little profit, but you also don’t want to price it so high that no one wants to buy it in the first place.
Not only does the right pricing help sell the house, but having to be able to describe to building properly in order to sell it is also a factor, the top ten being fantastic, granite, spacious, state-of-the-art, !, corian, charming, maple, great neighborhood, and gourmet. The infamous Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the United State’s earliest terrorist group, mostly notable active during and after the Civil War, due to their opinion on blacks. They mostly used pamphlets to spread around information about their next move, but despite their attempts to fight post-war Reconstruction, the United States government still kept officers in the Southern States, which means that there was nothing that they could do, and their activity suddenly dropped to zero around 1915 due to the fact that they couldn’t do anything impactful to the government or other races. What this chapter really meant to some people was that there was nothing more important and powerful like information, which could be used to alter history or to destroy it.
Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
Steven Levitt talks more off topic during this chapter, but regardless there was a lot of useful information that can help you in the real world. If you want to skip to the drug dealers, start from the third paragraph.
Something that he talks about during the beginning of the chapter is John Kenneth Galbraith’s coined phrase “conventional wisdom”, in which he did not consider it a compliment. Quote: “We associate truth with convenience, 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.” What he means by this quote is basically his view of the truth being simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting, even though it might not even be 100% true. One example that he listed in this chapter is Mitch Snyder talking about homelessness. He reportedly told a college audience that 45 homeless people die every second. Now, whenever if the media didn’t hear him correctly and he meant to say one homeless person dies every 45 seconds, that’s still around 700,000 people dying every year, nearly ⅓ of the USA’s deaths alone. Levitt describes this perfectly with: “It may be sad but not surprisingly to learn that experts like Snyder can be self-interested to the point of deceit. But they cannot deceive on their own. Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.” What this means is that no matter what circumstance, experts like Mitch Snyder and everyday journalists can both create conventional wisdom. “Everyday there are newspaper pages and television newscasts to be filled, and an expert who can deliver jarring piece of wisdom is always welcome”.
Now, off to the topic that we were all waiting for. During the 1990s, police were spinning around the city looking for another story. The immediate appearance on crack cocaine had a lot of police departments on high alert. They knew they had nothing to prevent this, the dealers were experts, armed with state-of-the-art weapons and a “bottomless supply of cash”. This provided a very high winning edge in many scenarios, leaving policemen on the streets useless. The media eagerly latched itself onto this topic for a while as well, even saying that being a dealer to be one of the most profitable jobs in America.
Because of all this cash, class and bash with the police, you might scratch your head in confusion when you find out that the dealers still lived with the mothers. The answer is in finding the right data. The author goes on to tell another story about a Harvard student named J.T who goes into different gangs to interview and say: “How do you feel about being black and poor”. His five initial answers were these:
- Very bad
- Bad
- Neither bad nor good
- Good
- Very good
Despite being talked down by many of the members, the four years recorded in the gang’s notebooks coincided with the years in which crack boomed the entire drug industry. In the first year, it took an average of $18,500 each month to make its minimum revenue.
But, digging around even more, if you were a member of J.T’s gang for all four years of the cocaine boom, here’s what the typical destiny awaited you.
Number of times arrested – 5.9
Number of nonfatal wounds or injuries – 2.4
Chance of being killed – 1 in 4
A 1 in 4 chance of being killed! Considering the odds of of a timber cutter having a 1 in 200 chance of being killed, it would take a lot of bravery to stick with that gang throughout the four years. So why on earth would anyone want to take a job as a crack cocaine dealer when you have a 1 in 4 chance of being killed, the most dangerous job in the USA, and a salary of only $3.30 an hour?
Well, the same reason why a farm girl moves to Hollywood. The same reason why a high school quarterback wakes up at 5 a.m to lift weights. They all want to succeed in a very competitive industry. If you ever reached the top, you are paid a fortune ( to say nothing of the attendant glory and power). You don’t want to become your leader’s servants, you want to rise to the top so that you can become the leader. You would get paid high amounts and would have a higher social status amongst your gang members.
What makes the perfect parent?
This questions lingers on for a while because no one is perfect as a “parent” or a guardian to a child. Our younger years between infancy and a toddler are essential due to our brain adapting to most of our surroundings during this time. It’s also the time where we need to learn our basic needs, such as walking and reading.
In her book “Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children”, Ann Hulbert describes basically what all parent experts contradict with one another and even themselves. The banter going around between the chapters is so confounding and sometimes even terrifying. The book stresses on how it is important to train the baby at a young age to sleep alone at night, or else sleep deprivation will “negatively impact an infant’s developing central nervous system” and even lead to learning disabilities. It even states that the baby should be left to cry for around 30 minutes, because “It is the baby’s exercise. From this book, it sounds like the typical parent is prone to sound more exceedingly sure of himself.
One more example of poor parenting is a made up story. Imagine an eight-year-old girl named Molly. Her two friends, Imani and Amy, each live nearby. Molly’s parents know that Amy’s parents keep a gun around the house, so they don’t let Molly go anywhere near Amy’s house. Instead, Amy spends a lot of time at Imani’s house, which has a swimming pool in the backyard. Molly’s parents feel like they made the right decision because both of them are happy and feel good that they protected their daughter from certain danger. Obviously they were both wrong.
The reason why it was wrong was because in a given year, more children die from drowning that from gun accidents. The odds of a child drowning each year is 1 in 11,000 compared to gun accidents 1 in a million plus. Due to these odds, Molly is more likely to drown in Imani’s pool than be accidentally be shot by Amy’s parent’s gun. You might wonder yourself, “Well, then why don’t Molly’s parents know better than that?”. Peter Sandman, a self described “risk communications consultant” in Princeton, New Jersey made the point in 2004 after a single case of mad cow disease in the United States prompted a antibeef frenzy. “The basic reality is that risks that scare people and the risk that kill people are very different”. Molly’s parents in this scenarios are more afraid of the image of a toddler on the ground dying from a gunshot than Molly drowning. This might also explain why many people are scared of flying a plane than driving a car, even though the odds of a car crash are higher.
Steve Levitt, throughout the entire book, explains certain real life scenarios extremely well, due to his high education and well thought out economic perspective. I’ve read through both of his books, Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, and I feel like they are a must need for anybody who is on a Christmas reading list. I highly recommend that you would buy this for someone during the Christmas break, and I will guarantee you that they will enjoy reading through the entire book. 
Grover Middle School's Jagazine 