freakonomics

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How many halves are in a college basketball game? 1. 1 2. 2 3. 3 4. 4 How many points does a 3-pt. field goal account for in a basketball game? 1. 1 2. 2 3. 3 4. 4 What is the name of the exam which all high school seniors in the State of Georgia must pass? 1. Eye Exam. 2. How Do the Grits Taste Exam. 3. Bug Control Exam. 4. Georgia Exit Exam In your opinion, who is the best Division I assistant coach in the country? 1. Ron Jirsa. 2. John Pelphrey. 3. Jim Harrick Jr. 4. Steve Wojciechowski If you are stumped by the final question, it might help to know that Coaching Principles was taught by Jim Harrick Jr., an assistant coach with the university’s basketball team. It might also help to know that his father, Jim Harrick Sr., was the head basketball coach. Not surprisingly, Coaching Principles was a favorite course among players on the Harricks’ team. Every student in the class received an A. Not long afterward, both Harricks were relieved of their coaching duties. If it strikes you as disgraceful that Chicago schoolteachers and University of Georgia professors will cheat—a teacher, after all, is meant to instill values along with the facts— then the thought of cheating among sumo wrestlers may also be deeply disturbing. In Japan, sumo is not only the national sport but also a repository of the country’s religious, military, and historical emotion. With its purification rituals and its imperial roots, sumo is sacrosanct in a way that American sports can never be. Indeed, sumo is said to be less about competition than about honor itself.
It is true that sports and cheating go hand in hand. That’s because cheating is more common in the face of a bright-line incentive (the line between winning and losing, for instance) than with a murky incentive. Olympic sprinters and weightlifters, cyclists in the Tour de France, football linemen and baseball sluggers: they have all been shown to swallow whatever pill or powder may give them an edge. It is not only the participants who cheat. Cagey baseball managers try to steal an opponent’s signs. In the 2002 Winter Olympic figure-skating competition, a French judge and a Russian judge were caught trying to swap votes to make sure their skaters medaled. (The man accused of orchestrating the vote swap, a reputed Russian mob boss named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, was also suspected of rigging beauty pageants in Moscow.) An athlete who gets caught cheating is generally condemned, but most fans at least appreciate his motive: he wanted so badly to win that he bent the rules. (As the baseball player Mark Grace once said, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”) An athlete who cheats to lose, meanwhile, is consigned to a deep circle of sporting hell. The 1919 Chicago White Sox, who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series (and are therefore known forever as the Black Sox), retain a stench of iniquity among even casual baseball fans. The City College of New York’s championship basketball team, once beloved for its smart and scrappy play, was instantly reviled when it was discovered in 1951 that several players had taken mob money to shave points—intentionally missing baskets to help gamblers beat the point spread. Remember Terry Malloy, the tormented former boxer played by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront? As Malloy saw it, all his troubles stemmed from the one fight in which he took a dive. Otherwise, he could have had class; he could have been a contender. If cheating to lose is sport’s premier sin, and if sumo wrestling is the premier sport of a great nation, cheating to lose couldn’t possibly exist in sumo. Could it? Once again, the data can tell the story. As with the Chicago school tests, the data set under consideration here is surpassingly large: the results from nearly every official sumo match among the top rank of Japanese sumo wrestlers between January 1989 and January 2000, a total of 32,000 bouts fought by 281 different wrestlers. The incentive scheme that rules sumo is intricate and extraordinarily powerful. Each wrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice of his life: how much money he makes, how large an entourage he carries, how much he gets to eat, sleep, and otherwise take 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 the top of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated like royalty. Any wrestler in the top 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-ranked wrestlers must tend to their superiors, preparing their meals and cleaning their quarters and even soaping up their hardest-to-reach body parts. So ranking is everything. A wrestler’s ranking is based on his performance in the elite tournaments that are held six times a year. Each wrestler has fifteen bouts per tournament, one per day over fifteen
Page 1 and 2: FREAKONOMICS A Rogue Economist Expl
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Page 13 and 14: per year—which sounds like a lot
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Page 19 and 20: off pig blood as their own. They mi
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Page 27: The best way to get rid of cheating
Page 31 and 32: 7-7 WRESTLER’S PREDICTED WIN PERC
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Page 35 and 36: agels cost one dollar each, cream c
Page 37 and 38: “kuklux,” a slight mangling of
Page 39 and 40: y the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy saw the
Page 41 and 42: more lynchings of blacks between 19
Page 43 and 44: Kennedy couldn’t wait for the fir
Page 45 and 46: perfectly good year-old cars, and t
Page 47 and 48: Armed with information, experts can
Page 49 and 50: Fantastic Granite Spacious State-of
Page 51 and 52: It would be naïve to suppose that
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Page 57 and 58: But if you can question something t
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Page 61 and 62: Just as things were looking their b
Page 63 and 64: One of the society’s aims was to
Page 65 and 66: Net monthly profit accruing to lead
Page 67 and 68: writers. But in the neighborhood wh
Page 69 and 70: could do what he did. He was a tall
Page 71 and 72: drug dealers. In the past, the blac
Page 73 and 74: Still, the very topic managed to of
Page 75 and 76: When the crime rate began falling i
Page 77 and 78: commit a crime, the incentives were
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Let’s address the second one firs
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percent. Rudolph Giuliani, however,
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The most famous gun-control law is
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other words, the net effect of crac
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earliest years of legalized abortio
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Indeed, there are plenty of people
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What the link between abortion and
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creature’s life, a creature who i
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factor. Just as most people spend m
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Still, the question of how much par
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The answer will not be heartening t
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Correlation is nothing more than a
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samples of twenty children from eac
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The child’s parents speak English
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Doesn’t: The child attended Head
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Doesn’t: The child’s parents re
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To overgeneralize a bit, the first
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Amcher, had been named for the firs
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girls are given a name that is uniq
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19. Hunter 20. Colin The Twenty “
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So does a name matter? The data sho
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6. Sarah 7. Kayla 8. Amber 9. Megan
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5. William Most Common White Boy Na
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14. Ronnie (12.03) 15. Randy (12.07
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1990 2000 1. Michael (532) 1. Isaia
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5. Rachel Most Common “Low-End”
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Maya Philippa Phoebe Quinn Sophie W
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The second child, now twenty-seven
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(2003); also presented in Manuel Ei
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SUPREME COURT JUSTICE LOUIS D. BRAN
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NOT AS MUCH CRIME AS THERE ACTUALLY
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papers: Cristian Pop-Eleches, “Th
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Reason, May 2003; and Richard Morin
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“The Peter Sandman Risk Communica
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WILLIAM MORRIS, NÉ ZELMAN MOSES: A
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Venus (12.73), Veronica (13.83), Ve
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Thernstrom, Lisa Chase, and Colin C
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anti-communism Anti-Defamation Leag
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Booty (gang member) Boston Tea Part
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abandonment of adoption of conflict
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crack cocaine changes in market for
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ecording of selection of sports tas
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homicide and in sports see also cra
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environmental hazards evil, resisti
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guns: availability of buyback of de
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ImClone incentives bright-line vs.
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Iraq: U.S. invasion of weapons of m
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New York Times Magazine profile on
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incentives and self-interest and Mo
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corrupt judging of “On Behalf of
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eal-estate agents clients’ best i
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Social Security societal norms soci
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evasion of “sin,” withholding o
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Wade, Henry Wade, Wyn Craig Waksal,
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HarperCollins Publishers (Australia
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