Freakonomics Chapter 1 Summary Essay

In chapter one of Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt describe how when incentives are noniceable enough, many usually estimable sight from opposite walks of life lead stratagem in order to supercharge financially or saddle horse the ladder in their worryers. The authors de exquisite an incentive as a mover of urging people to do more of a good topic or less of a bad thing. This chapter covers three varieties of incentives scotch, Social and Moral. Economic incentives trigger rack up people with the bode of gold or goods. Social incentives motivate people to respond in a certain way because they care about how they will be viewed by others. Moral incentives motivate people on the basis of right and wrong. We look at four different slip studies that show how these types of incentives can push people to cheat. The first case looks at ten day care centers in Israel. The centers started to beautiful the parents who were tardily picking up their children thr ee dollars.For the weeks before the fine was added at that place was an add up of eight late pick-ups per week. After the fine was implemented, the number of late pick-ups change magnitude to an average of 20 per week. The day care center was using an economic incentive for the parents to get there on quantify to avoid the fine and that plan failed. The authors believed this plan failed because parents felt they were paying off their guilt and the fine was too base. Next we looked at the tall stakes examination in the Chicago Public School System. The government orders high stakes testing as part of the No Child Left Behind law. Schools with low testing scores would be punished or shut down, and schools who did s sanitary were awarded. Teachers whose students tested badly could be fired while teachers whose students tested well would receive large bonuses. This was economic incentive for teachers to cheat because they could gain capital for doing well or lose their job for poor testing.Levitt developed a computer algorithm to look for strings of suspicious answers on regularise tests. After analyzing the information it revealed that in about five percent of the classrooms there was evidence of the teacher cheating one way or another. The near case study was on Sumo Wrestling matches in Japan. Sumo wrestling is considerable in Japan and the ranking is everything to the sumo wrestlers. Highest ranked wrestlers are treated homogeneous royalty while those who dont rank as high must tend to their superiors and do jobs that are less than desirable. The results of the data in this chapter shows that a wrestlervery well might throw a match to help his opponent maintain his current ranking, when throwing the match does not hurt or help his current ranking. There was economic and complaisant incentive for them to cheat.A wrestler would help another out with the promise of beingness helped out when they needed it. It was proven that the majority of sumo w restlers do cheat at one point or another. The last study was data collected by an entrepreneur named Paul Feldman who decided to start a bagel business in the Washington D.C. area. He would drop off bagels to different offices and leave a basket for the employees to drop in the money for the bagel, a sort of honor system. He kept track of the payments and started an inadvertent study on honesty.The data showed that smaller offices are more honest than larger ones. Also, someones mood could affect if they would pay or not. After reviewing his findings, Feldman believed that morale was a key factor in whether the employees were being honest. Evidently people are not above cheating, even when the gain is very low (95 cents for a bagel) and cheating appears to be more belike as the income level of customers increases. Although this is true, we now know that 87 percent of the time people are honest, even if they know they can get apart with it.