HW 9

The authors of freakonomics used several tools they used in generating and proving their theories on the issues sealt with in this movie. The 3 tools i saw used most frequently were 1) Questioning the common assumptions on certain aspects of our society 2)Figuring out the incentives of the people who have influence over this certain topic and how different situation help or hurt them 3)Finding statistics relevant to their study/theory to help them prove the point they are making.

1) A perfect example of this tool in use is during the portion of the film in which the protagonists examine the possible reasons for the drop in crime from the 1990's to the 2000's. Mr. Levitt takes the common reasons people give for the crime drop and examines how much of the crime drop can truly be attributed to these different reasons. He then questions what can truly be the determining factor and comes up with the idea of abortion for which he provides multiple data tables and presents an arguement complete with numerical data to prove his theory.

2) A good example of exploring the incentives is the Sumo wrestling part of the movie. They go in to depth on cheating in the world of sumo wrestling. To analyze the statists in an efficient way they think about incentives which lets them see the data and ways it had not been looked at before. The incentive they find for cheating is when a sumo wrestler already has enough wins they can lose one on purpose and the numbers of wins in situations where the sumo wrestlers can afford to lose a fight were much higher. Another example of this was when Levitt was explaining how he saw patterns in the test answers from schools in chicago and when looking at the incentives of the teachers it became clear that there was cheating occuring.

3) The two protagonists found statistics that were not only relevant to their studies but also bery persuasive. For example the abortion data in comparison to crime rates. Not only was the data relevant and had correlation but there were multiple examples of how abortion can lower crime rates. Although the evidence left room for interpretation they used data that help them create and explain an arguement with solid evidence that logically made sense.

On the topic of correlation versus causation I believe the makers of this film could have been a bit more clear on their stance as it was a bit fuzzy. However their film argued that correlation does not neccessarily mean causation but that in some cases correlation does have a somewhat or very significant implication or factor. For example many of the common causes people attribute the crime rate drop to did have somewhat of an affect on the crime rate but could not be solely held liable for the drop in crime rate. They did a good job at not disregarding common opinion as pure lies as many extremeist often do but showed that the issue is much more complex than what is shown or explained which is often the case.

I do think the movie did a good job at showing examples of hiden in plain sight weirdness but nothing they showed in the movie particularly stood out to me as a great discovery. This is partly because our course this year and last year has pointed out many of these hidden in plain sight abnormalities. I would not call this movie an ispiriation but it did have many good aspects although if they were to show the actual evidence rather than saying "we examined the data" it would make the movie much stronger. I think that the idea of examining data through incentives in the way they did was a very useful tool and could be of great use during our food unit and throughout the whole year. Rather than looking at what normal people think, examing the incentives of infulential people in the food business could give us a very different, deeper, and more interesting view on food in our society.