The First Fifty Pages

The book opens by describing the unprecedented drop of crime in the mid 1990s. Leading up to 1996, people were predicting a huge rise in the rate of crime that 1995 would look like "the good old days" according to experts, the absolute best case scenario we could hope or was a 15% increase in crime. However, when 1996 rolled around, crime began to drop, not just slightly, but rapidly. Experts came up with many explanations for this phenomena including a tough on crime approach, and better police tactics. The author claims that while these were important, they were not the overarching catalyst for this drop. According to him, the real reason for this drop in crime was the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade twenty years prior. This decision, according to the author, ceased many children who would most likely be born into more destitute situations from being born. This anecdote was meant to introduce the reader to the stream of thought that inspired this book. By looking at data, we can discover trends in our society that were previously un-explainable. Questions like how do we discover cheating, or what incentivizes a real estate agent can be answered by merely looking at the data.
   
         
              The first chapter of the book looks at morales and cheating. The first story looks at a day care in Israel that was dealing with the problem of waiting for late parents. To alleviate this problem the managers of the day care instituted a three dollar fine if a parent was more than ten minutes late. Surprisingly, the amount of  late pickups actually increased. To parents, the fact that they only had to pay three dollars to expunge the guilt of showing up late, made them feel that it was not a big problem and could show up late. This story was meant to show that a conventional belief I.E. a fine will cause a behavior to stop, is not always the case, and can be inherently flawed. Then, the author writes about reaches the meat of the chapter, which is cheating. The first example the author uses, is the problem of cheating on standardized tests. The focus was primarily directed at a public elementary school in Chicago where students in sixth grade were receiving higher scores in sixth grade than any other grade. These jumps in test scores caught the attention of Arne Duncan who retested the trouble spots, and found the classrooms with cheating teachers and promptly fired them. The author then draws a parallel between this situation and the one in Japan where it is believed that sumo wrestlers were throwing matches to help their fellow wrestlers. This time, they looked at the percentage of victories that a wrestler's status was in the balance, and the findings showed that the wrestler on the bubble won a disproportionate amount of times compared to their record compared to their competition's. Despite this clear data, there has been little action dealing with these claims of throwing matches. The final example looks at the sale of bagels. A man who had begun selling bagels at his job at one point quit his job and went around selling bagels to companies all around. What he found was he percentage of people took a bagel without paying, (he just dropped off the bagels and a payment box and left) was correlated to many different factors including weather, size of company, and time of the year. A person's sense of morality can be directly affected by outside forces.

                Overall, this book has been blowing my mind. The part that was especially interesting was the section about the day care center. The book takes instances that we would not pay attention to, and strips away the assumptions and gives us the cold hard facts. Although, the one problem I find with the book, is with its focussing on the bigger picture, it takes away from an individual's perspective. I personally would have found it interesting for the author's to focus on why one individual makes a decision, and use the data to explain this decision, but this is just nit-picking. I would recommend this book to everyone interested in the workings of their society.