Splash Biography

What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents? Where Have All the Criminals Gone? This course is explicitly structured around Stephen Levitt's book "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side to Everything." Have no fear: you're NOT expected to have any knowledge about the book! The book’s central idea is that, if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. Why the conventional wisdom is so often wrong...How “experts”— from criminologists to real-estate agents to political scientists—bend the facts...Why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life...What is “freakonomics,” anyway? Some tenants to the study of Freakonomics are: incentives are the cornerstone of modern life; the conventional wisdom is often wrong; dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes; “experts”—from criminologists to real-estate agents—use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda; knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.