Unveiling Social Myths: A Freakonomics Analysis

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The book “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner is a dissection of anecdotes. The authors intensely dismantle ideas that are social norms, using economic and demographic data. The book has no central theme other than to “explore the hidden side of… everything.”pg.14 One chapter the subject will be on corruption in the sumo wrestling community, then another on how legalizing abortion lowers crime rates, then another on what effect parenting has on children. Chapter three explains why the popular idea that most drug dealers were rich is almost entirely false. The authors blame the media for this idea. When crack cocaine first started to appear en masse, the cops and the media put an emphasis on how unfair the fight was, because the …show more content…

In simplest terms, conventional wisdom must be “simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting”pg.90. While reasoning behind the claim that drug dealers are poor might be complex, the claim itself is much simpler than all of the others in the book. Consider again the unusual topics of the book; abortion drastically lowered crime because future criminals were not being born; the Ku Klux Klan was defeated by a single man and the writers of Superman. The drug dealer claim is also convenient, comfortable, and comforting because most people would prefer to think that crime is very unrewarding. However the context of this claim in society has changed since this book was written, in a way that makes the claim seem more reasonable. “Freakonomics” was published in 2005, and it was during the 1990’s that the media was portraying drug dealers as especially wealthy. However the public perception of drug dealers has changed in the last ten years to match the authors’ claim. Nowadays people think that most drug dealers are poor, uneducated, and that only a small percentage can make a decent profit from drugs. This means that even if the authors claim on drug dealers was radical at the time, society has caught up with it, and it is even more like conventional wisdom than

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