Tonight (Oct. 7), there is another segment of “Freakonomics Friday” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Last week’s segment was an introduction to Freakonomics that also focused on the book’s cheating-teacher chapter. (It was incredibly well produced: smart and thoughtful and nuanced, which isn’t easy in 2.5 minutes; TV and ideas don’t always mix well but the ABC folks know seem to have figured how to do it.) Tonight, ABC asks this question: “How is your real estate agent like a funeral director?” Later tonight, ABC’s “20/20″ is devoting its entire hour to real estate, and will include some more Freakonomics commentary.
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About Freakonomics
Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist who lives in New York City.
Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
Their book Freakonomics has sold 3 million copies worldwide. This blog, begun in 2005, is meant to keep the conversation going. Recurring guest bloggers include Ian Ayres, Jessica Hagy, Daniel Hamermesh, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Justin Wolfers.
Annika Mengisen is the site editor.
Comment of the Moment
Naked Self-Promotion
Freakonomics is bolstering book sales at airports because it’s sexy, reports TheBookseller.com -- with or without its Turkish cover.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
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18 Comments
Just watched the ABC Evening news “clip” (read book advertising)on real estate agents and their interests. If it represented your book, I and all of my vast network of friends and relatives will make sure no one buys this book. IF the ABC statements are correct, it was incorrect, deceptive, and completely misleading. Your publicist must have paid a lot of money….
— RickIt is not deceptive, it is right about the money incentive for agents.
— AnonymousI for one am buying the book right now! Anyone interested in buying a house should feel a duty to read this book. The show hosts from ABC are using “gorilla tactics” against the Realtors, but that has nothing to do with the book.
— Anonymousit is not clear how much more we would have made had we sold our house ourselves. that is the real interesting question to answer.
doing all this running around that realtors do takes time and that is costly. so it is misleading to make people feel that they should try to sell their own house and not rely on realtors…….. isn’t this what economicsts are suppose to study?
— Anonymous…real estate agents are paid too much because the paperwork ‘transfer-process’ of residential real estate in America is way too complex & deceptive — bewildered sellers/buyers think they must hire an expensive real-estate “agent” to guide them thru the maze.
And there are plenty of other pick-pockets in the transfer-process — from ‘title’ agents to tax men.
Blame the American government. Real estate transactions are much simpler & cheaper in other countries, like the U.K.
— AnonymousWe don’t use real estate agents anymore, and a good title company takes care of all the paperwork. It works in hot markets.
— AnonymousHi I just finished reading Freakonomics last night. Thanks for making an interesting book, it was rather entertaining and truthful. I have an economics professor who strives (and succeeds) in making economics as entertaining as you do.
I believe making good ethical and moral decisions (made individually and collectively) are rewarded in this lifetime. I believe abortion is ethically and morally wrong, and I cannot justify it no matter how I look at it economically. Good ethical and moral decisions are rewarded by God in this life time, so there’s more to the story of abortion than your book concludes.
Kudos on a fine book and having a blog!
Best wishes.
Toby
— Anonymousha! “Gorilla” Tactics!
oooh ooooh ooooooh eeeeeee eeeeeee!!!
— anonymousI watched the ABC news clip on Freakonomics, but I especially liked the clip beforehand about Church-goers addicted to Pornography. I thought that the solution that the one guy was peddling, software that records all the websites you’ve visited and sends the list to your wife and pastor, was a particularly Freakonomish approach, considering the incentives it uses to keep people away from porn.
— Hurricane LongwangUh the point is not get rid of real estate agents altogether, but to realize that when they are telling you this is the best price you’re going to get, to realize that they may just want to settle in lieu of waiting for another offer. Real estate agents wait 10% longer before closing their own homes which possibily translates into some of the 3% gain versus a typical non-real estate agent owned house’s final sale price controlling for housing characteristics and block fixed effects.
— CrazyThere is no where in the United States that a real estate broker is less necessary than on the Stanford Campus. The only buyers who are allowed are Stanford emnployees and a list of property is available. I’m not saying that your or your friends are not geniuses but how could you not know that,
— AnonymousI should have maybe proofed that last comment.
— AnonymousDear Freakonomists,
Here’s a fascinating social experiment for you. -Or maybe it should be considered simply an analysis of American troop fatalities in the Iraq war, in relation to the dispersion of data such as: age, race, branch of military and state origins.
I have a feeling that if you were to analyze troop fatalities and injuries, you’d find the largest percentages concentrated in poor, and “politically insignificant” states like Ohio, West Virginia, Wisconsin, etc., as opposed to electoral-rich states like Texas, Florida and California. You might also find that many of our troop fatalities come from poor and minority backgrounds, from which various conclusions could also be made…
I for one, would be very interested to see where Texas and Florida fall in the lists of statewide casualties, based on percentages of population, and even totals, for that matter…
We’re approaching 2000 U.S. Fatalities, with nearly 15,000 seriously wounded, in the month of October, 2005.
— AnonymousGreat Book!!
— AnonymousWow, what a gushing review of ABC News. I guess every hero has to fall a little bit. I don’t suppose the fact that Levitt and Dubner are ABC news consultants has anything to do with the way they fawn over ABC News and visa versa. I wonder what the incentives are.
The current issues facing consumers, real estate agents and the NAR are far more complex than ABC News and “Freakonomics” suggest… and there are many more alternatives to high commissions and poor incentives for good service than are presented by ABC.
Let’s not forget what ABC News does, sells commercials. As any honest news producer will tell you, the best way to do that is to dumb down the debate so the lowest common denominator will be entertained or scared or both.
For information that even an honest agent might not tell you about the real estate industry visit the
— Realty FreakRealty Freak
It was interesting they brought out a guy from the realtor’s lobby to provide a counterpoint and make it a “fair” story. (He blamed the sellers for taking the early offers against the agent’s advice.)
— DejafuIn reading Freakonomics I was both delighted and disappointed.
Delighted that such a book is ‘accessible’; easy to read, simple, powerful concepts realtively well argued.
Disappointed on two counts;
1) the authors do not manage to convey that much of what they are measuring are unconscious effects of vested interests or ‘hidden’ incentives.
Poor or disadvantaged mothers do not consciously think about aborting their baby as a way to reduce crime. Crime reduction is an unconscious effect of a decision made to reduce the significant stress on their own lives.
Online daters do not consciously bias their private selection criteria to those like themselves. It is (likely) an unconscious mechanism for reducing risk of rejection.
The difference between an unconscious action and a conscious one is important and has not been (and perhaps could not be) properly explored in this book.
It is after all a ‘popular’ treatise of observation, not a Ph.D. thesis on anthropology and as such attempts to reach a broad set of people who have a lot of their own unconscious FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt), and are generally poorly equipped to reason through it.
2) they do not touch at all on the two industries that have exceptional vested interest in manuplating morality and lack there of - religion & politics.
For me, the knowledge of unconscious vested interest is a long well established principle and we have seen it in process in politics and religion time and time again, but it is difficult to tease out the statistical proof.
It would have been interesting to read an analysis of the two greatest morality industries using the oblique metric techniques clearly being tuned as part of Levits intellectual development.
For example, it has long been suggested that the Catholic church is against abortion simply because it would drastically reduce the available population for assimilation.
Politicians have similar motivations to increase the birth rate. Declining birthrates hit their heartlands directly. With the abortion-crime causation, there is possibly another since increasing crime rates increase the fear of the population with a resulting increase in their malleability at the hands of politicians with a vast array of vested interests.
What are the real motives behind these groups?
What current politician has any sort of platform if crime is eliminated??
Crime and terrorism are actually a godsend to disingenuous politicians.
What priest is needed if everybody copes with life and is morally ’sound’??
Weak will and low moral standards are actually a godsend to disingenuous clergy.
How many disingenuous politicians, disingenuous clergy?? The numbers should be able to tell us more than our instincts.
Of course, these to topics are most likely to greatly inflame reactive protest - possibly puting such a book ‘beyond the pail’ and thus much too little read.
But this also means that the general population has a depressingly long way to go before reaching any form of enlightened analysis of, and reaction to, the underlying human behavior problems posed by this book.
— Anonymous[...] cheating by teachers [...]
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