Freakonomics The movie, Freakonomics, based on the book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner went over how the study of economics is not just how businesses run, but how human behavior is based on incentives as well. Freakonomics goes over different outcomes to situations . The first situation was what role your name plays into the opportunities that become open to you. The second situation was based about why there is so much cheating in sumo wrestling. Followed by what reduced the crime in the USA during the 1990's and onward, and the final situation was about a school experiment using cash prices would be enough incentive to get ninth graders to raise their grades. All four situations that were played in this movie showed a completely new side of economics that I have never seen before. So, Does the name you give your child effect their outcome in the future? In the movie they went over a scenario of a women who named her daughter after Tempestt Bledsoe, but not know how to spell it named her daughter Temptress instead. Temptress then ended up growing up with a hard life. She started sleeping around, robbing convenience stores, and as a young adult went in and out of juvenile hall. Harvard Professor Dr. Fryer argued that it was not just Temptress living up to her name but it was more based on how she was brought up and the community that she lived in. Dr. Fryer did an analysis on everyone born in California for the last 40 years and discovered that around the time of the black power movement black names also became more unique and the worse the circumstances the more unique of a name, although the name of the person has no affect on their life. On the other hand Harvard professor Dr. Mullainathan argued that people with African American names had a harder time in life. He ran a study where he put out 5,000 fake resumes in both Boston and Chicago with half white names and the other half African American names. Through this research he found that people with African American names got a call back 33%. This study proved that people with African American names are more likely to have a harder time getting jobs then people with a white name. Sumo wrestlers will have a life like a king once they reach a certain ranking but if they do not maintain that ranking they can lose it fast or never even get to the king like experience. Sumo wrestlers are like a big family with the other wrestlers, they eat, sleep, and train together. When one sumo wrestler is close to down ranking his opponent is 75% likely to fake slip or fall so that the other one can win. Lets say that sumo wrestler one has eight wins and seven losses and only needs eight wins out of fifteen to rank up but his opponent and friend has seven wins and seven losses, sumo wrestler one is more likely to slip in the match and lose, but the next time sumo wrestler one and sumo wrestler two meet, sumo wrestler one always ends up winning the match. There are a few motives for why sumo wrestlers cheat otherwise known as yaocho in Japanese is to not only get the pay raise that comes with it but to keep the high standing in your community and to not lose respect. In order to stop the cheating in sumo wrestling you need to set regulations so that the wrestlers are too afraid to cheat, although the regulations will not stop it forever because the moment people start to forget about the cheating it will start up again. In the 1980's crime was going higher and higher for an unknown reason but starting the 1990's it started to decrease but no one could figure out why. Many people hypothesized different reason including, innovating police strategies, higher sentencing of criminals, a change in the crack cocaine market, a stable economy, etcetera. All of those changes did help lower the crime rate, but they only account for about half of the crime, so what about the other half? Levitt hypothesized that crime decreased in the 1990's as abortion also became legal
