Freakonomic Response

During the course of the movie, the Freakonomics authors address correlation versus causation by saying that many cases of correlation are not causation however some correlation are not causation.  During the segment about names they look into the correlation between what someone’s name is and how successful they are in life. Many people that had common black names were not always as successful as people who had white names. However it was not because these people had these names that gave them a set fate of being less successful in life. Most of the time someone who had a common black name was someone who had less opportunity because they were not in the same housing as the whites and had a different household. There were many college associates that did tests on the way names were spelled and the general race that certain names came from and there was no one name that would put someone ahead in life. However Freakamonics suggests that in some cases a name could be the cause of the way job searches go from the correlation. An experiment was done to see the correlation between a person who had a common white name and someone who had a common black name. The person with the common white name had the exact same resume as someone who was black but  the person who had the common black name had 33% of call backs from places as someone who had a common white name. This would mean that while during a job hunt if it took a person with a white 10 weeks to get a job it would take a person with a black name 15 weeks with the same credentials to get a job. The Freakonomics authors seem to believe that some correlation is causation however in different aspects of a subject it isn’t. According to the film name can’t determine if you do good in life but a name can determine if you might have a slight advantage over other people who may have uncommon names. Another relationship of some correlation is causation is another experiment where children are bribed. The correlation is that when some people are bribed they then try to do better or meet the standard that needs to be met so they can have the reward. In the case of Steve Levitts daughter who was bribed with M&M’s to use the toilet, the M&M’s are what caused her to use the bathroom more. This would be an experiment to support that correlation is causation because she started taking advantage of using the bathroom and just using it more frequently to get the reward. However at the school in Chicago students were bribed with money to do better in school. The school would pay the students to get above C’s and while most students did take this bribe and get C’s that is all they needed to get the money. Also in some cases kids did even worse over a period of time and had to catch up later. Most people didn’t do work because they wanted to learn so they didn’t learn as much however they did the work to get the reward.  This is a part of the film that shows correlation is not causation because even though some kids did do better when bribed some kids actually did worse and kids who didn’t get the award the first time around gave up on trying to get it in general.

The Freakonomics authors mostly rely on the evidence of the results taken by different experiments. Cheating in sumo wrestling, names of people leading to success, and the idea that bribery can get someone to do something positive they wouldn’t do without the bribe. In these experiments and research the Freakonomics authors use these numbers to show how something’s in the world work. They also use the interviews of people who are actually experiencing these different subjects instead of only looking at numbers and talking to professors. Instead of just taking all of the results from the school bribery experiment the Freakonomics authors listened to the people who actually experienced this and took this information as part of the film. This is innovative because a lot of the time when people are numbers you don’t understand why the numbers are this way. For example by looking at the numbers of the kids who were bribed to do good in school there were some kids who did worse. However this could just be taken as a skew or an outlier in the data but if you interview these people it gives you an explanation of what happened. Most people like to take math as something that can’t be incorrect and while that is true to some extent when the numbers are from data by people not everyone is in the same situation. So interviewing someone gives more insight to why something happened and not just what happened. Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices. Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices. I agree with this statement because while some people believe that correlation is causation the Freakonomics takes that and tries to show different aspects of what people see in everyday life to show that it isn’t always as it appears. This is especially true in the sumo wrestling segment. Because some people would see it that sumo’s with 8-6 records usually don’t feel like they need to win the last one and that’s what causes them to lose however there is more to it and sumo’s actually see this as opportunities to put themselves ahead. For US food ways the book Omnivores Dilemma shows that what we think is the cause of some of the ways that we eat aren’t always how they appear.