Finally Done With Freakonomics!

I have finally finished Freakonomics and I can honestly say that I enjoyed reading this book. It was very interesting and put an... interesting perspective on everyday life. So Chapter 6, A Roshanda By Any Other Name, focused on how what a child is named correlates with thier parent's income and what hopes they have for the child. It told the story of a father who named one of his sons Winner and the other Loser, just based off of feeling he had during the pregnancy. In the end, however, Loser became a cheif policeman and Winner became a criminal. Then the chapter listed the popular names based on income and education and which names were correlated with high income and success in the future. It explained name trend cycels, where the names the high end people use trickel down to the low income people and then go out of style.

I could draw some parallels from this chapter and some of the stuff that we learned in class, like how as demand of a product, or name, goes up, the price, or "quailty" of the name goes down. All in all, I felt that he book helped me to look at everyday choices and see how that when you choose, you loose.

Freakonomics Post 5

Alright, so after my Spanish final today, I finished the Fifth Chapter of Freakonomics ( What Makes a Perfect Parent). This chapter discussed the fear parents have of raising thier child "wrong". The topic that was discussed first was that people often fear the wrong things, such as not letting your 6-year old daughter play at a house where there is a gun, but letting her swim frequently in her other friend's pool, when more children drown yearly than by playing with a gun. The second thing the chapter addressed was how important parents are in the outcome of a child. After assessing a list of 16 items that were often thought of as things that helped children succed in school, the eight that were true statements were: Having highly educated parents, Having parents that had high sociceconomic status, Having a mother who was 30 or older at the time of thier first child's birth, the child's birth weight, If the child's parents speak English at home, Wether or not the child is adopted, Wether the child's parents were involved in teh PTA, and How many books the child had in thier home. These eight topics trupmed stuff like wether or not the child went to Head Start and cultural expierences, which leads to the conclusion that it is not what the parents do but who they are that influences the child the most.

This chapter was semi-interesting. I failed to see how it related much to economics other than the choices the parents could make.

Freakonomics Post 4

Chapter 4 (Where Have All the Criminals Gone?) explored the reasons previoulsy given for the drop in crime in the 1990s after people said it to be "apocolyptic". Levitt and Dubar seemed to find something wrong with each one. One problem was with the "the stong eoconomy" theory.The flaw was many things, but praticularly that the unemployment rate v. crime rate ratio did not match up to its past numbers. You see, in the past, with a 1% drop in unemployment, ther was a 1% drop in nonviolent crime, but in the 19902, there was a 2% drop in unemployment and a 40% raise in nonviolent crime. The conclusion that the authors came to was that the legalization of abortion led to the drop in crime. With the passing of Roe v. Wade, many women who felt that they could not support a child for various reasons just simpy did not have the child that they were already impregnated with. The result was that all of those "uncared" for kids did not grow up to be troubled teenagers looking to cause trouble, which studies showed that most teenagers growing up in the enviroment provided my most women who would have had an abortion, end up doing.

As someone who is pro-choice, reading this chapter gave me another reason to back up my belief. Honestly, abortion and crime are two things that i would never connect, but upon completeing this chapter, the connection is promenint.

Freakonomics Post 3

I finished Chapter 3(Drug Dealers Living With Their Moms)the other day. This chapter answered the question of why, if crack dealers make so much money, do they still live with thier moms. It followed the story of Sudhir Venkatesh, who lived with a gang for numerous months and studied their way of dealing crack. He found that J.T., the leader of the pack, earned $8,500 a month, but that he had to take care of his gang. He had to keep the wars down and care for his foot soldiers, so that he still had to live in the same area as his gang. The point of this chapter was to emphasize the role of incentives in every part of every economy. For J.T.'s Foot Soldiers, it was to start a war so they could move up in ranking. For J.T, the incentive was to keep the wars down so that crack heads would come to his area to buy crack instead of going elsewhere in fear of violence.

I found this chapeter to be very interesting. Getting a close up of gang life was of great benifit to the book, for it went off of the legal market and into the black market. It also benefited by showing how life sometimes outweighs the incentives. In this case: money v. life.

Freakonomic's Post 2

Well, I finished Chapter 2( The Ku Klux Klan and Real-Estate Agents)last night. This chapeter focused on the importance of information in the world and how it can be misused. The chapeter started off by telling the story of Stetson Kennedy, who, thourgh broadcasting the KKK's information, discouraged people to join the terriable group. It then gave statistics on how real-estate agents use the information they have on a house and thier personal opinion to sell a house at a profit that benefits the borker rather than the seller. The second chapeter concluded by showing the importance of discriptions in the housing market and online dating. For example, if a realeste agent thinks a house to be of low quailty, they will say it is "charming" so that the seller takes it as a compliment and the buyer takes it as a fixer upper.

Chapter 2 did not make as much sense to me as the first one did. I understood the paralles that the authors were trying to draw, but I felt it was a stretch to come to those conclusions. I don't think there is much relationship between the Stetson Kennedy situation and information of real-estate agents. Kennedy had used information to shut down an organization, where people tend to trust the people who are "experts" in a field as stressful houseing and not call them out on thier faulties.

Freakonomics Post 1

Due to me having an 82 in Economics class, I decided to read the book Freakonomics by Steven Levit and Stephen Dubner. To be honest, I was not so happy about having to read and blog about it at first, but I have enjoyed reading it do far. So to get the extra credit, I am going to blog about each chapter as I finish it. So here is Chapter 1's post!

Chapter one is titled: "Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers" and focuses on the presence of incentives and cheating in our economy through real life examples. First Levit and Dubner spoke about how they tried to instill a fine in day cares in Israel to parents who picked up their child more than 10 minutes late. Hoping to find the number of late parents drop, the exact opposite was found. The number rose because parents felt that they could pay off their conscience with only 1/3 of their monthly bill. Then they spoke about Chicago teachers who cheated by fixing their student's standardized tests. You see, since the No Child Left Behind Act was enforced, stating that teachers and schools would receive money based on their students' test scores, so if a teacher had a poor class, they would, sometimes, change incorrect answers on their students' Iowa tests. The authors then related that to Sumo Wrestlers in Japan. If one is an elitist sumo wrestler in Japan, that person is served by the lower wrestlers. Also, being a top wrestler pays more, therefore, giving a sumo wrestler the same incentive the school teacher does: money. The final point brought up in the chapter on cheating was the story of Paul Feldman, who would sell bagels for a dollar apiece to business who then sold them to their employees. Feldman would deliver the bagels in the morning along with a wooden box to put the payment in. When Feldman came back in the afternoon, he found that about 87% of the money that ought to be there was and that the smaller businesses had the higher percentage.
After reading this chapter, I already have a high respect for the authors and their ideas on life. I agree with everything they touched on and was surprised at some of the things I learned in this chapter, like that incentives are everything. Without an incentive like money, why would someone work?

New Title

So I decided that I did not like the title of my blog-- it was not... creative enough to suit me. After long pondering i decided to re title it "Chinese Mermaids and Mocha Cookies". Enjoy!

DO Good Grades Predict Success??

After reading an article, Do Good Grades Predict Success, as posted by Stephen J. Dubnar on the blog "Freakanomics", in which Dubnar addresses the fact that good grades throughout school cannot ensure success, I began to think about the subject myself. Although one may have great grades throughout school, is does not prevent them from ending up homeless or flipping burgers at McDonald's. At the same time, one could not have the best grades or even fail a few classes, but still turn out to be a big shot. Let's take Albert Einstein for an example. Everyone knows who he is, he discovered major scientific ideals, and failed Latin in grade school, which goes to show that grades don't mean you're a success or a failure. I am certainly not implying, however, that one does not need to care about their grades for, also stated in the article, persistence is one of the main things one should learn out of failure. If one does not endure the strife of making and maintaing the grade in a subject where they are not strong, then what can one endure in modern society, where everything is fast-paced and people are willing to step on you to get the extra $100 at the end of the month?

Stock Market

Just to let everyone know, in case you didn't find already, the stock market took a big fall today. It was worse than in 1987 and during the Great Depression, due to the fact that the House did not pass the bailout bill. I don't want to rewrite the article I read, so here is the link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/wall_street

A Response to "Should Moviegoers Pay for Good Seats" posted by Daniel Hamermesh

Well, after reading this article, i made some connections between class and the real world. It would seem to me that prices for movie seats are pretty inelastic, based on the information provided. The fact that those seats in the front, although they cost less, are still empty shows that people are willing to pay any price for a good seat. As for my opinion, I am not spilt in my opinion. Some movies i go to see with my friends for something to do on Saturday night are not ones that i would really want to pay a higher price for just to sit in a decent seat. But as for other movies, I would pay good money to sit in a great seat. For example, when my dad and i wanted to go see The Dark Knight on opening night, we waited in line and sat in our seats for an hour before the movie began, just so we could seat in a good seat. If I could have paid a few dollars more to just buy good tickets and not have to sit there for an hour, I would have.

So, here is my blog

yep, so i have a blog now. i am going to be using it for economics, but i will probably end up putting other stuff here to like stuff i find about the election and other things i find importnat.
so ya, here is my blog