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Tag: Freakonomics

  • Are you aware of the THREE flavours of an INCENTIVE?These are what they are..

    Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics

    “There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”

  • This is how INTERNET has bridged the gap between EXPERTS and PUBLIC

    Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics shows how internet has bridged gap between experts and ordinary public.

    “Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.) The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.”

  • Amazing illustration on the THREE components of an INCENTIVE..

    Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics

    “There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”

  • This is how we gauge our IDENTITY..

    Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics

    “Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of “identity“. It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.”

  • What has MORALITY got to do with ECONOMICS?

    Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics..

    “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”

  • Why analyzing data patterns has always been an art

    Super Freakonomics is an amazing book. This book is driven by scientific facts and goes a long way to show as to why studying patterns in data is the most full proof way of coming to conclusions especially when situations go beyond control and need to be quarantined.

    The examples of seemingly trivial solutions being able to cure grave vagaries like puerperal fever, seat belts being able to reduce deaths due to car accidents goes to show that there are times when we can think out of the box and extend solutions from other fields into new unexplored areas. Since our limbic brain understands only signals, at times we fail to comprehend how effective trivial solutions can be to cure seemingly behemoth problems.

    The role of media has been highlighted as well , Kitty Genovese incident, wherein to sell the news facts are twisted and this goes on to have deep impact on humanity down the line. News presented for many decades which sells as hot news, we really need to delve deep and find the true authenticity of the same since facts can be twisted to make the news sell

    Data analysis and data science has always played a major role and numbers/patterns have never lied. What we are seeing in the modern era, the demand for data scientists was always the case over the years now the effect seems more profound due to the high presence of social media.

    Look at data analysis done by Semmelweis for puerperal fever root cause eradication, Robert McNamara for seat belts in cars, Horsley’s data pattern analysis to track down terrorists, proof that good doctors may not have the best reviews, proof that heart ailments can be prevented by taking low cost medicines, the basis for all is data science being able to carve out a pattern from it.The baseball team selection example , with kids who have a full 10 to 11 months more maturity resonates with the message of Gladwell in Outliers on the Canadian ice hockey team selection. This too has been carved out by studying data pattern over the years.

    The best one is towards the end of the book wherein Al Gore’s honest efforts towards reducing global warming by changing human behavior has been compared with injecting Sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to reduce global warming. Such kind of insights are really illuminating and the very fact that organizations like IV are thinking along these lines gives a lot of hope and belief that the world is in charge of innovative individuals who can think their heart out to save humanity from dreaded problems like global warming.

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