1. In the film, there were definitely intellectual moves of asking questions. Asking a question that has no clear answer is always a start to find out answers, or at least an idea/theory of the topic. One question that was asked in the film was, “How can I get my daughter to potty train?” An incentive that the economist used to answer this question was to give the girl a pack of M&M’s every time she went to the bathroom. Ironically, the child ended up taking advantage of the situation and ended up receiving many packs of chocolate-which shows that on a bigger scale(connection), the government can never fully be able to monitor a whole country.
Another “tool” that Freakonomics repeatedly used was number data and statistics to support certain theories. For example, an experiment was used to 9th graders if their grades would rise up if paid $50 dollars just for getting average C’s. Results showed a 5 to 7 percent of students passing because of the money idea, which showed that money does not necessarily always motivate and influence students to achieve educational success.
Lastly, the film used “tools” for figuring out topics. The example for this tool goes back to the first scenario I mentioned in the first paragraph: with the incentive of giving an economist’s girl M&M’s every time she went to potty train. When I started watching the scenario, I did not think too deeply about the topic and thought it was a silly experiment. But, in the end, I realized that this connects on a bigger scale when it comes to trying to get people to listen to you by giving them benefits. This small-scale experiment lead to a technique in figuring out a topic-an idea that it is difficult to manipulate a single girl with chocolate, so how can the government ever be able to get the whole country to listen to his incentives?
2. Freakonomics authors addressed the “correlation versus causation” issue with the theory about ‘typical African American names.’ Two speakers with split opinions spoke about if certain names connect to poverty issues. It was hard to distinguish the two different viewpoints until it was discussed in class, so I would say that they support (not necessarily prove) that some correlation is causation. The Indian speaker talked about how names are definitely causative with their poverty because of the statistics showing that workers with unique ‘African American’ names have a less chance to get the job and regardless of experience, gets paid less than White Americans with typical names.
A/B.) I somewhat agree because not only was the film more entertaining and interesting than I thought, but the film taught a few lessons and theories that changed how I look at things slightly. Even with the scenario with the potty-training and paying 50 dollars to raise grades, the film showed how the simplicity of these little experiments connect to life on a bigger scale. We tend to think we can easily get people to do things with simple things like money and food, but really-it isn’t that simple. Nobody has control over other people’s motivation therefore there won’t ever be a solution to get people to do certain things. Therefore, these simple scenarios throughout the film was a good example of the weirdness of our assumptions for simple solutions-the hidden in plain sight weirdness of or dominant social practices.
C.) One of the theories (even though it didn’t support what the theorists hoped for) was that if we pay money or give something to the person’s benefit, we may be able to get them to do certain things. (i.e. paying money to students to raise their grades) This idea connects to our investigation of U.S. food ways. Omnivore’s Dilemma repeatedly goes back to the idea of corn being the root of all problems. So, an incentive would be to have the government subsidize corns, so farmers are willing to get rid of all that corn if they are going to end up receiving money. This may actually work a lot better than the theories used in the film, since industrial farmers are already overproducing corn for these subsidies-meaning they’ll most likely do anything as long as they get paid.
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