Hw#9

In the movie “Freakanomics” the protagonists look at certain topics in particular ways in order to make sense of them. In the movie one of the tools they used in order to make sense of their topics and theories was by conducting street interviews to find answers to their questions and get people’s perspectives on certain topics like “what are typical black names and what are typical white names”.

In the movie by the protagonists use the tool of conducting experiments, to use as evidence to prove their theories on certain topics. One of the experiments they conducted was to find out if they could bribe a ninth grader to succeed. So they went to one school to see if they could get the ninth graders to pick up their grades and pass all of their classes with a C or above by awarding them 50 dollars a month if their grades improved. They wanted to see if the incentive of giving the students cash would be motivation enough for them to want to do better in school. The results turned out to be surprising.

Another tool that was used was analyzing the data and results of the experiments they conducted. Going back to their experiment of seeing if bribery would work in getting ninth graders to do better in school, they analyzed the data to draw conclusion to see if their experiment actually worked. It turned out that only 5-7% of the students passed, who wouldn’t have passed otherwise. This meant that their experiment didn’t have the desired effect on the students as they hoped for. So they proposed targeting the experiment towards even younger kids to if they would get better results.

In the movie the protagonists address the issue of correlation versus causation. For example in the film when they addressed if a person’s name had anything to do with their success in life. If a person with a more unique name had less of a chance of making it than a person with a more traditional name. They did an experiment to find out if a person’s name has anything to do with their success in life. One professor argued that a person’s name does have an effect on their success. So he conducted an experiment to prove his theory by sending out identical resumes to companies, just changing the name on them by putting unique ( recognizably black) names on half and traditional ( recognizably white) names on the other half, to see which resume would get called back first. By doing this experiment he was trying to figure out if a person’s name has anything to do with if they will be more likely to get the job or not. It turned out that the resumes with the more traditional names got called back than the ones with the unique names. While another professor argued that a person’s name is correlated to their success in life but not what’s causing it. What causes a person to be unsuccessful is dependent on the type of neighborhood they come from, whether they live in poverty, family background, etc. He argues that a person’s success is based on where they come from not about the name they have. So success and a person’s name are correlated to one another but the causation of a person’s success is based on their backgrounds and where they come from.

I agree that “Freakonomics” served as an inspiration and good example of our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices. In the ways that they took a look at social issues in a different way that got people thinking differently. It explored people’s behaviors and reactions that tested if incentives work and it turned out some incentives work better than others. This can be related to food ways because farmers are given incentives by the government. They are paid subsidies to grow lots of cheap corn that turns into all the unhealthy processed foods we consume, but if the corn growers weren’t being paid subsidies by the government then they wouldn’t have the incentive to grow corn. Therefore encouraging people to eat healthier.