Nolan Menen
Response Paper #3 There were a lot of different interesting topics in the video Freakonomics including cheating in sumo wrestling, legalizing abortion and Incentives. The two topics that I found most interesting were legalizing abortion and giving students in school Incentives do get better grades. Legalizing Abortion isn’t just what it sounds like; it was used to drop crime rates. The reason that crime rates dropped when abortion was legalized is because when a child is born unwanted, they grow up in an environment that a child shouldn’t grow up in. For example, maybe an 18 year old girl had a child on accident and they didn’t have the money or the knowledge to raise a child. This child would grow up and most likely end up being a criminal. When abortion was legalized, there was a 30% drop in crime. Another topic in this video was Incentives. Incentives are ways or bribing someone or something into doing something that they would not do without the bribe. In this case, students were bribed with money to get better grades in school. This means that every time a student got above a C in every class, they would receive $50 every month for the remainder of the year. The results were not what the economists were expecting. There was only a 7% increase in students getting higher grades than they were before. The results also showed that students who had almost all failing grades didn’t do better because they may have already been too low to raise their grades or just didn’t care enough about the money. Maybe the Incentive wasn’t great enough. Maybe they needed to be offered more money like $100 every month that they met the standards. By watching this video with an economic view point, you would see that mostly everything in this video had to do with bettering the future in some way. When the Incentives experiment was done, economists had the mindset of thinking about whether or not a student would do better in his/her future if they