Freakonomics

After years of listening to the Freakonomics podcast, I finally realized that there is a book and a documentary with this name and that the whole idea came from the book by Levitt and Dubner. Yes, I expect to have such late discoveries for the rest of my life! I watched the documentary last weekend (in parallel with doing other things), and I am going to read the book. It felt like a gap in my education that had to be filled. The documentary is almost twenty years old, and it’s surprising that so many things that are mentioned there are still not commonplace and still not taken into account. And politicians and voters still debate on the consequences of potential actions or lack of those without consulting the data which is already available. A couple of takeaways.

1. The first episode in the documentary (about how a name defines a person’s future) is probably the only one that is well-known and frequently cited. In fact, the reason I turned “to the source” was a citation in another book I was reading at that moment. It’s good that we know what might drive our biases, but unfortunately, it rarely helps the situation.
2. The episode about the impact of Roe-Wade on the crime decline twenty years later was a shock. I never saw this research results, I never heard anybody speaking publicly about it, and if that’s me, a person heavily involved in the reproductive rights struggle, what does it say about the general population? And another question – what should we expect twenty years from now?!
3. The last episode (about monetary incentives for falling behind students to improve their grades) conveys a very important message, and not only in the field of education. It demonstrates that when the gap is too wide (somebody falls too far behind), even a relatively big incentive is not enough for a person to start moving in the right direction. That’s the rationale for many programs that offer support for people in a challenging situation to help them on their way out. For many people, no legislation and no financial support is enough to reverse the course of their lives, and more targeted actions are needed.