Freakonomics AOW #3 (IRB)

Freakonomics was written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  Levitt is a Professor of Economics at University of Chicago.  At the University of Chicago, he directs the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory.  Dubner is an award-winning author and journalist who also taught English at Columbia University.  In this first section that I read, these two authors talk about how many solutions to important issues are not always prominent, and how incentives can work positively and negatively.  For example, in the introduction they discussed that the reason that the crime rate dropped so much in the 1990's was not because of the proliferation of gun control laws, nor the new police strategies put into place, not even because of the great economy.  Dubner and Levitt showed us that it was one case for Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, that was taken all the way to the Supreme Court.  This case ended with the legalization of abortion throughout all of the U.S.  This made the crime rate drop because the people who could not afford to have a child, or did not want to support one, could decide not to have one.  These fetuses that were now being aborted, it turns out, had a higher probability of turning to crime when they grew up, but they could not commit these crimes because they never got the chance.  When this book was published, the U.S. economy was not doing too well, just a year later the recession was declared.  It was written to help explain to people who are trying to understand economics where the base of all economics lie, which is incentives.  Some rhetorical elements I found in the piece were that they referenced the appeals through different types of incentives.  They said, "There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral." (Levitt and Dubner 17).  This connects to the appeals through economic being the logical reasoning, or logos, the social being the credibility among peers, or ethos, and moral being how you feel that you acted a certain way, or pathos.  So far, the authors have reached their purpose because I am learning a lot about economics very quickly, while also staying interested.