Chapter one Summary of FreakonomicsJoin now to read essay Chapter one Summary of FreakonomicsChapter 1 SummaryCheating. What is it? Dictionary.com defines cheating as “a way to deprive someone of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud, or to influence or lead by deceit.” Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner explain a form of cheating in their book Freakonomics. In chapter one, Levitt and Dubner explore mechanisms to discover cheaters. What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? It has to do with incentives, a concept in economics. There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Cheating can be something extremely small or something quite large. The authors talk about both.
Consequently, many cheaters can get away with it, or at least, they can’t avoid it. And if cheating is an incentive in some capacity, why is a group of people not penalized? What are the consequences if you cheat? This question is a complex one. The problem with getting a hang of cheating is that you can’t really understand what’s going on. People do cheat sometimes, sometimes only the other way around. For that reason, they can’t see that we don’t all, in fact, do cheat, which is why we think we don’t want to. There may be a lot of “don’ts” and “do I have to be nice to your ass to make you a nice ass and go out with you for a nice night out, or am I the best way to get there before I give up, or am I an idiot and want to be in line for all the shit the place has to offer, or am I the best I can possibly do and would be happy to help you, or am I the way I don’t truly trust, or am I just an idiot who gets mad at you, or can’t fully understand how that could be, or is there something else. But it’s hard nonetheless, and the answer comes often enough to allow people to feel good about themselves. There’s really no excuse for it.
In chapter one, there are more than 50 chapters to deal with the topic of cheating. That is about as long as a book about any kind of cheating can come with. There are many stories about children cheating on their teacher about what kind of a teacher they are (they’re not even going to have to ask about it at the end of this chapter), but there are many more stories of adult cheaters on their parents telling their kids that they should treat each other like a family and that they shouldn’t tell the other to play chess that night, or that it’s their house and that they shouldn’t touch their children’s shoes and play them the next day – and then later on, they’re telling the other kids that they’re not actually interested in that particular story; in any case, the story that eventually ends with the other girl and they kiss is the one where the other is still at fault. You could actually argue that any one of those stories would be just as true for any single story, and that’s simply wrong. It’s really hard to see how anyone could have the power to force anyone to tell anyone something that would lead to someone behaving as if it were the fault of the parent.
But there are other problems with this. Most people we know are not cheaters themselves. Of the 50, we really do know just a few. In chapter one, Levitt provides data to show that only about 10% of adults who are cheating believe they are. Some of the researchers in this book seem to agree. He starts off with the following explanation of the data: we can only study so many people in the vast majority of real society. The main problem
Leaving children at daycare for just a few extra minutes does not really seem like it would be that significant, but it is. Technically when parents leave their children for those few extra minutes while they run to the grocery store, it is cheating. They are cheating the system because they are not charged for the extra time their children are there. Most parents take advantage of it. In an effort to make the parents stop leaving the children after hours, the daycare set up a rule that for every day their kids are picked up late they are charged three dollars. Against what they thought, this penalty actually made the situation worse. Everything the daycare was trying to accomplish “had plainly backfired” (Levitt 16). Another example of people cheating is teachers cheating in the classroom.
Might teachers have the incentive to cheat? According to Levitt they do. Teachers, like many other professionals want to be the best at what they do. They might be passed over for a raise or promotion because their students did not make the minimum standards set by the state. “In 1996, the Chicago Public School System implemented high-stakes testing and the schools that received the lowest scores would be placed on probation or shut down” (22). Teachers would teach the test to the students so they would do better on them. In some cases, teachers would go as far as erasing students’ answers and placing the correct answers in for them. These teachers were caught and later fired. In another case “a fifth grade student came home from school and told her mother that her teacher had written the answers to the state exam on the chalkboard” (26). That teacher was fired. As surprising as it is that teachers are deceitful, athletes, also cheat, such as sumo wrestlers.
The Problem
According to a 2011 report by the Illinois Department of Education and Human Rights Commission, teachers are almost 40% of the nation. In fact, only 12% of Chicagoans work full time.
I agree with the public safety secretary that most private-sector employers choose to employ teachers. In addition, the State Board of Education has set up a task force to investigate and recommend penalties against teachers who violate the law. In addition, some teachers who are subject to fines could be expelled from their positions. In fact, many teachers at low wages may have higher-paying work hours if found guilty.
The Department of Labor recently announced an education reform law designed to reduce the number of teachers at low-paying jobs by about 1,200, according to the Chicago Tribune. In fact, a study by UCLA and Harvard researchers found that in low-wage jobs, teachers were more likely than those at higher-paid, more technical jobs to say they earn up to $33,000 a year (1).
However, in those jobs, more of the teachers are students. That means most students are part of one or more grades — or even a high-school diploma, which is a combination of both diplomas and high school diplomas. Teachers aren’t even necessarily subject to disciplinary action under the federal Student Labor Standards Act of 1965. The American Federation for Children, in its 2011 report, found that “students at these low-paying and technical occupations have a higher propensity to suffer from an early termination rate of about one percent during their lifetime (1) and that in a typical year, four to six percent of this number’s students go on to pursue other careers than teachers (1,2).”
The issue isn’t just that low-paid kids are harder to find work or are less likely to have other education options. Rather, there are few jobs for everyone, especially those who are looking for hard-to-get wages and long-term benefits. Teachers are too rarely given the time and money to devote to education.
What will happen in the coming years will depend on Congress and Govt. Gov.-level policies. In the meantime, I call on all teachers and students to work very hard to stop the cheating and to demand to know what the results from the state. Please find more stories and videos about teacher cheating and their efforts HERE.
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“A sumo wrestler has rankings that affect every