freakonomics

crime rate fell not because of good policing, better gun control laws or better job scenario but because abortion was made legal, as the unwanted children were not born.
obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas—suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures.
most disease-ridden province in his empire was also the province with the most doctors. His solution? He promptly ordered all the doctors shot dead.
that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge? In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, about $1 billion is spentper year—which sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections.It is the same amount, for instance, that citizens spend every year on chewing gum
here they imposd fine for parents coming late to pick their children from a day care centre.But there was another problem with the day-care center fine. It substituted an economicincentive (the $3 penalty) for a moral incentive (the guilt that parents were supposed tofeel when they came late). For just a few dollars each day, parents could buy off theirguilt. Furthermore, the small size of the fine sent a signal to the parents that late pickupsweren’t such a big problem. If the day-care center suffers only $3 worth of pain for eachlate pickup, why bother to cut short the tennis game? Indeed, when the economistseliminated the $3 fine in the seventeenth week of their study, the number of late-arrivingparents didn’t change. Now they could arrive late, pay no fine, and feel no guilt.
economic incentive vs moral incentive :they wanted to learn about the motivation behind blood donations. Their discovery: when people are given a smallstipend for donating blood rather than simply being praised for their altruism, they tend todonate less blood. The stipend turned a noble act of charity into a painful way to make afew dollars, and it wasn’t worth it.What if the blood donors had been offered an incentive of $50, or $500, or $5,000?Surely the number of donors would have changed dramatically.But something else would have changed dramatically as well, for every incentive has itsdark side. If a pint of blood were suddenly worth $5,000, you can be sure that plenty ofpeople would take note. They might literally steal blood at knifepoint. They might pass off pig blood as their own. They might circumvent donation limits by using fake IDs.Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain anadvantage by whatever means necessary.
For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there isan army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time tryingto beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominentfeature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act:getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names—inside-trading CEOs and pillpoppingballplayers and perk-abusing politicians—who cheat. It is the waitress whopockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goesinto the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance lookbetter. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copiestest answers from the kid sitting next to him
The incentive scheme that rules sumo is intricate and extraordinarily powerful. Eachwrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice of his life: how much money hemakes, how large an entourage he carries, how much he gets to eat, sleep, and otherwisetake advantage of his success. The sixty-six highest-ranked wrestlers in Japan,comprising the makuuchi and juryo divisions, make up the sumo elite. A wrestler near thetop of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated like royalty. Any wrestler in thetop forty earns at least $170,000 a year. The seventieth-ranked wrestler in Japan,meanwhile, earns only $15,000 a year. Life isn’t very sweet outside the elite. Low-rankedwrestlers must tend to their superiors, preparing their meals and cleaning their quartersand even soaping up their hardest-to-reach body parts. So ranking is everything
Kennedy balked at the various fees, pretending to play hard to get, but agreed to join. Notlong after, he took the Klan oath in a nighttime mass initiation atop Stone Mountain.Kennedy began attending weekly Klan meetings, hurrying home afterward to write notesin a cryptic shorthand he invented. He learned the identities of the Klan’s local andregional leaders and deciphered the Klan’s hierarchy, rituals, and language. It was Klancustom to affix a Kl to many words; thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation inthe local Klavern. Many of the customs struck Kennedy as almost laughably childish.The secret Klan handshake, for instance, was a left-handed, limp-wristed fish wiggle.When a traveling Klansman wanted to locate brethren in a strange town, he would ask fora “Mr. Ayak”—“Ayak” being code for “Are You a Klansman?” He would hope to hear,“Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai”—code for “A Klansman Am I.”
The day that a car is driven off the lot is the worst day in its life, for it instantly loses asmuch as a quarter of its value. This might seem absurd, but we know it to be true. A newcar that was bought for $20,000 cannot be resold for more than perhaps $15,000. Why?Because the only person who might logically want to resell a brand-new car is someonewho found the car to be a lemon. So even if the car isn’t a lemon, a potential buyerassumes that it is. He assumes that the seller has some information about the car that he,the buyer, does not have—and the seller is punished for this assumed information.
Most impressively, fully 70 percent of the women claimed “above average” looks,including 24 percent claiming “very good looks.” The online men too were gorgeous: 67percent called themselves “above average,” including 21 percent with “very good looks.”This leaves only about 30 percent of the users with “average” looks, including a paltry 1percent with “less than average” looks—which suggests that the typical online dater iseither a fabulist, a narcissist, or simply resistant to the meaning of “average.” (Or perhapsthey are all just realists: as any real-estate agent knows, the typical house isn’t“charming” or “fantastic,” but unless you say it is, no one will even bother to take alook.) Twenty-eight percent of the women on the site said they were blond, a number farbeyond the national average, which indicates a lot of dyeing, or lying, or both.
The richer a man is, the more e-mails he receives. But a woman’sincome appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, butonce a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off. Men want to datestudents, artists, musicians, veterinarians, and celebrities (while avoiding secretaries,retirees, and women in the military and law enforcement). Women do want to datemilitary men, policemen, and firemen (possibly the result of a 9/11 Effect, like the higherpayments to Paul Feldman’s bagel business), along with lawyers and financialexecutives. Women avoid laborers, actors, students, and men who work in food servicesor hospitality. For men, being short is a big disadvantage (which is probably why somany lie about it), but weight doesn’t much matter. For women, being overweight isdeadly (which is probably why they lie). For a man, having red hair or curly hair is adowner, as is baldness—but a shaved head is okay. For a woman, salt-and-pepper hair isbad, while blond hair is very good. In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hairon a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree—and, with a $100 dyejob versus a $100,000 tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.