They Say/I Say Journal 1
Subject: Freakonomics Chapter 1 “School Teachers and Sumo Wrestlers”
They Say: In this chapter the author, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, define the economic as root to pursue of incentives. The author define an incentive as “a means of urging people to do more of a good thing of a bad thing”. Sometimes these incentives are so irresistible that people are driven to obtain them through a bad behavior. In addition the authors describe some circumstances of cheating. There is an analysis of data to detect some cheating patterns. The most prominent cases are included the Chicago public schools teacher who changed answers on their students’ test, and Japanese sumo wrestlers who conspired to discard certain high stakes matches.
Basically the main point of this chapter analyzed different scenarios to explain that humans always are looking for incentives. These incentive are categorized as economic, social, and moral. All of this, are explained in a different scenarios starting with the situation of the day care and finalized with the business man who run a bagel business. The author focused at the end explaining that humans are honest even when no one is watching them.
I say: I am completely agreed with the ideas described by the author in this chapter related how human behavior depends of the incentives. To better understanding of these behavior the author states that: “economists love incentives....The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.” On my own experience I know some cases on which there are the three types of incentives: economic, mora, and social. This chapter helped me to distinguish among these types of incentives by using some examples such as the day care center in Haifa, Israel, The case of teacher cheating