51 pages • 1 hour read
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
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Chapter 5-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “What Makes a Perfect Parent?”
In the US raising children is an art hotly debated. Experts directly contradict each other. Kids need liver; they should never eat liver. Infants should sleep alone; they should sleep with others; they should be stimulated constantly; they should be left alone to cry. Strong opinions rally support and sell more parenting books. It’s hard for parents, already fearful for the safety of their children, to make sense of all the advice.
It’s hard also to assess risks in the modern world. A family might forbid their little girl from playing at a friend’s house where the owners keep a gun, but let her play at a house with a swimming pool. The girl’s chances of dying in the pool, however, are nearly 100 times greater than her odds of being killed by the gun. We underestimate risks we can control, like driving a car or keeping a kitchen clean, and overestimate risks we cannot control, like flying in an airliner or buying food prepared by others. Planes, though, are very safe, and kitchens aren’t.
People also overestimate risks from things that cause dread. Terrorists and mad cow disease are dreadful but much less likely to kill than simple heart disease from bad eating habits. Car seats for kids get nearly all their benefit simply from putting the child in the rear of the car. Flame-retardant pajamas save only five lives a year; safety drawstrings on children’s clothes save two lives per year.
It’s known that abusive parents can damage their kids’ life outcomes, but efforts by good and loving parents to improve those outcomes with extra effort—“the Baby Mozart tapes, the church sermons, the museum trips, the French lessons” (154)—generally make no difference. Neither do the number and gender of parents, the amount of daycare, and whether or not mom works. The biggest influence is “the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates” (155).
A study of Chicago schools evaluated the benefits of a school-choice program. Students could opt out of their local high schools and apply to others in the district. Popular schools selected applicants through a lottery. The school a student ended up with had no effect on academic success unless it was a trade or career-academy school. However, the simple act of applying to a different school was associated with better academic achievement.
Meanwhile, eighth-grade scores predict income levels in adult years equally for both Black and White students: “the black-white income gap is largely a product of a black-white education gap” (161). One possible cause of the gap is a fear among Black kids of being accused of “acting White,” which can lead to ostracism or worse. Basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar changed schools in the fourth grade and discovered his straight As and seventh-grade reading level made him a target: “I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide” (162).
The US Department of Education in the late 1990s launched a study of 20,000 kindergarten to fifth-grade students called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). This study made careful note of each student’s age, gender, race, family situation, parents’ education level, and many other variables, and combined the data with lengthy and searching questionnaires addressed to the parents about how they raise their children. Using a regression analysis, which teases out possible correlations between different variables in students and their abilities, researchers looked for pupils who were basically the same in all measurements except one—for example, number of books at home—that might explain why some students did better or worse at school.
Results showed that, when controlling for things like the mother’s age at birth and the parents’ education and income level, the education gap between Black and White children disappears. However, the gap opens wider as children progress through the grades. This appears to be due to local gang activity, lack of PTA funding (which correlates to lack of parental involvement), and strangers who loiter at school gates. Black students untroubled by these factors don’t lose ground to White students academically.
Other discoveries gleaned from the ECLS data are that urban students do better, and rural students do worse, than suburban students. Also, girls and Asians tend to test higher than boys and Caucasians, respectively.
Eight factors seem to influence a child’s educational outcomes: highly educated parents, high socioeconomic status, a mother “thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth,” low birthweight (a negative), parents who speak English at home, being adopted (a negative), parents in the PTA, and many books at home (169).
Eight other factors aren’t important: intact family, recent move to a better neighborhood, stay-at-home mom, attendance in Head Start, regular museum visits, regular spanking, frequent TV watching, and parents who read daily to the child. As well, computer use has no correlation to test scores.
The list of eight factors that matter “describes things that parents are”; the eight that don’t matter indicate “things that parents do” (177). American and British studies suggest that, though adopted children tend to have lower IQs than their adoptive parents, they grow up to do much better than kids from similar socioeconomic situations who weren’t adopted. Thus, it’s the quality of the parents, and not the actions they take, that most strongly determine the educational outcomes of children.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?”
In 1958 Harlem housing project resident Robert Lane named his baby boy Winner. A few years later he named his newest baby boy Loser. Loser grew up to graduate from college and become a police sergeant (nickname: “Lou”); his brother Winner garnered “nearly three dozen arrests for burglary, domestic violence, trespassing, resisting arrest, and other mayhem” (182).
One woman named her child Temptress, a misspelling of Tempestt Bledsoe, an actor in The Cosby Show. A couple named their baby Amcher (an anagram of the hospital wing, Albany Medical Center Hospital Emergency Room, where the boy was born. Both ended up in trouble with the law. It’s a matter of debate whether names affect life outcomes.
Roland G. Fryer Jr., an African American Harvard economist (who did much of the research on the Black-White education gap discussed in Chapter 5), says Black culture is different from White, with Black people watching different TV shows, smoking different cigarette brands, and naming their children differently. Fryer, who studies underachievement among African Americans, wondered whether those differences influenced Black-White economic disparities.
Fryer found that, in California since 1961, Asian and White people have retained similar naming conventions, and Hispanics differ somewhat from them, but Black names since the 1970s have diverged greatly, with girls’ names 20 times more common in Black neighborhoods than White. Fryer believes the Black Power movement, with its emphasis on a separate culture, influenced this trend. Today, 40% of Black girl names are unknown among Whites, and 30% are entirely new names used by no one else.
The most likely parent to use these naming conventions is “an unmarried, low-income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself” (186); she does so to express solidarity with the Black community and to avoid any appearance of “acting white.”
Among White families, 40% of names are four times more commonly White, including girls’ names like Molly, Amy, Claire, Emily, Katie, and Madeleine. Top names for Black girls are Imani, Ebony, Shanice, Aaliyah, Precious, Nia, and Deja. Top White names for boys are Jake, Conner, Tanner, Wyatt, Cody, Dustin, and Luke; the top names among Black boys are DeShawn, DeAndre, Marquis, Darnell, Terrell, Malik, and Trevon.
Studies using fake job applications show that names like Jake do better than names like DeShawn. This may indicate racism or the expectation that distinctly Black names imply lower education. Overall, however, the California data shows that names don’t really influence life outcomes, but they point to factors that do matter, like low-income and low-education environments while growing up.
High-income White parents prefer different names for their children than their low-income counterparts. The most popular high-income names include Alexandra, Lauren, Katherine, Madison, and Rachel, while popular low-income names are Amber, Heather, Kayla, Stephanie, and Alyssa. For boys, high-income White families prefer Benjamin, Samuel, Jonathan, Alexander, and Andrew; common low-income boy names include Cody, Brandon, Anthony, Justin, and Robert.
Among high-education White families, popular girls’ names are Katherine, Emma, Alexandra, Julia, and Rachel; among low-education White families, popular names are Kayla, Amber, Heather, Brittany, and Briana. High-education White boys’ names are topped by Benjamin, Samuel, Alexander, John, and William, while popular low-education boy’s names start with Cody, Brandon, Travis, Justin, and Tyler.
Name popularity varies over the decades, so that some names on the above lists have shifted from high end to low end and vice versa. In fact, the most popular African American names for boys in 1990—Michael, Christopher, Anthony, Brandon, and James—were largely replaced in 2000 with Isaiah, Jordan, Elijah, Michael, and Joshua. Similar changes happen over time with popular names for White boys and girls. Names popular among high-income parents trickle down to lower-income groups until they’re no longer popular at the high-income end. Many girl names begin as boy names, but the reverse rarely happens.
Names go in and out of fashion, but what counts are good parents.
Epilogue Summary
If Freakonomics, with its variety of topics, has no single theme, it does have a common thread: thinking sensibly and taking a new look at human behavior. People are people, and they don’t always act in ways we might wish them to, but knowing their incentives can help us deal more intelligently with the world as it is.
The authors consider that “[o]ne possible result from reading the book is asking a lot of questions” (210). The answers may prove surprising but useful. For example, parents matter, not so much by what they do as by who they are. Sometimes their best efforts come to nothing, and sometimes their worst behaviors don’t prevent a child from becoming successful. The two boys, one White and one Black, mentioned in Chapter 5 had opposite life paths. The Black child was abused but grew up to become famous economist Roland Fryer. The White child had all the advantages—like Fryer, he also attended Harvard—but he, Ted Kaczynski, became the Unabomber.
Chapters 5-Epilogue Analysis
Chapters 5 and 6 deal with parents and their effect on their children’s educational outcomes.
Having books in the house correlates positively with student achievement in the first few grades. The authors suggest that it’s not the books that cause the improvement but what accompanies the books: highly educated parents who have high IQs and are involved in their children’s education.
After five chapters of sometimes-heavy topics—the KKK, drug gangs, abortion and crime, the Black-White education gap—Chapter 6 ends the book on a lighter note with a discussion of American naming traditions. Several lists of boys’ and girls’ names are ranked according to their popularity among African Americans, White Americans, and low- and high-income families. Though naming conventions change slowly, the desirability of a given name rises and falls over the decades. The lists are correct for the year 2005, but top names may be different in later decades, and the authors warn that “[t]hese names, like many others, have shifted hard and fast of late” (197). The point of the exercise is to see how socioeconomic groups distinguish themselves through their names, and how fashions affect the popularity of names.
There’s a large overlap between the names of high-income and high-education families; this likely is because income and education are highly correlated.
Name popularity can signal shifts in community interests. For instance, four of the five most popular Black names for boys in 2000 were different from those of 1990, and the top five were all biblical names—Isaiah, Jordan, Elijah, Michael, and Joshua—compared with only two of the top five in 1990, Michael and James (though 1990’s list included Christopher, which has biblical origins).
The book contains several more lists of popular names from different decades. Between 1960 and 2000, for example, the top five girl names turned over completely.
Much of the book deals with African American concerns about education, income, civil rights, drugs, and crime. A major reason is that author Steven Levitt worked closely with fellow economist Roland Fryer on Black urban issues, and with Sudhir Venkatesh on Chicago’s inner-city street gangs. All three men belong to the Harvard Society of Fellows, where scholars and intellectuals meet and network.
Freakonomics takes on questions and issues that may upset some readers. The authors do so not so much to cause a sensation as to demonstrate the power of closely examining long-ignored corners of society. If, for fear of offending some listeners, no one raises the possibility that abortion affects crime rates, then that possibility is never examined, and its contribution to our understanding of complex social and moral issues is lost.
Any hypothesis, however uncomfortable, bestows benefits only if explored thoroughly and discussed vigorously. A theory may be right or wrong; what counts is to understand it fully. Grappling with controversial ideas generates more knowledge and greater wisdom.
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