Freakonomics Response

 One of the tools that the economics used from their tool box would be evidence to find the truth, a more specific name; causation. This is seen in the experiment they did at the school. The author was betting on the fact that if given the incentive one will try to work over an obstacle to get it, in this case it was money for the winner’s college. They offered money to the kids for something they did not want to do, so most kids did not work for it. In the end of the experiment a low percentage of the kids actually improved their grades. Another tool used would be surveys. Throughout the whole thing surveys were heavily used like when they were trying to show if names affected ones success rate. The one in particular was the dad that named his son Winner and Loser. Although one would expect that their names would imply their destiny the outcome was on the contrary, Loser grew up to be a success and Winner wound up a convict. They also tried to read between the lines. Sumo was supposed to be a sport buried in honor and culture but if one takes the time to look at the data one can easily see how cheating was in plain sight.

The author’s acknowledge the lack of evidence behind correlation. Correlation is when things are tied together but no one knows what caused what, and causation is when one can tell what caused what. In the movie they proved the actual causation of the issue in their example. They showed the difference between correlation and causation in the example of the crime rate growing down. According to all the charts people would believe that crime went down in the 1990 because of the rise in the police force (correlation), when the actual solution was that abortion was legalized and thus reduced the birth of babies and bad neighborhoods (causation).

I would have to agree with the statement: "Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices". Although I wouldn’t say it did a very good job of it, due to the fact that it did not talk about the "weirdness" of dominant social practices, but it did talk about dominant social practices. It mainly stuck to the idea that opportunities/incentives matter. People tend to make/pick opportunities that work for them. This connects back to our investigation of U.S food ways in the way most would rather plant, grow, and use corn for most things rather then grass. Farmers would rather grow corn than grass because there is a bigger incentive that they actually want to work towards; Its fast and produces more money and the consequence of not growing it would be going broke.