HW 9 - Freakonomics Response

1. What intellectual moves serve as the basis of "Freakonomics"? Just as Allen Iverson relied on his crossover dribble to beat bigger and stronger defenders, intellectuals such as the protagonists in "Freakonomics" have a "tool box" of particular ways of looking at the world: figuring out topics, asking questions, finding evidence, and evaluating truth. Please describe the 3-5 "tools" that the film repeatedly shows in use, with an example of a moment from the film for each one.

 

The goal of a documentary is generally to spread knowledge to it's audience. But what qualifies a film to be a "documentary"? The tools of the documentary trade; data, experts, and intriguing visuals. Throughout the entire film the audience is thrown numbers, charts, graphs and statistics. One part of the movie focuses on names. More specifically, how names effect the future of a baby. The audience was given an expert (a professor who had done a study on baby names/race and the effect on their future) who narrated visuals by using data. One example is when the audience is shown two boys; one is black one is white. The boys are standing in front of a nice house; the narrator tells us that this is the white boy's house. A new house shows up, it's smaller, dirtier, and uglier; it's the black boy's house. Immediately so much data is thrown at you by this man's voice behind these two boys in front of houses your head begins to spin. He starts bringing up statistics, "In the black boy's neighborhood there is a higher percentage of single-mothers", etcetera. We learn that names don't necessarily plan out the child's future but that it's more of a matter of where they're from. In each of the sections there is always an expert who relays data to a most-likely after-effected* visual.

*please don't kill me for using wikipedia, it does give a pretty good description

 

3. What sources of evidence do the Freakonomics authors most rely on? Why is this innovative? 

 

The Freakonomics filmakers seem to rely on the authors quite a bit for evidence in this film. While each section of the movie had other experts to give us our data and statistics and narrate our visuals, a lot of the talking seemed to come from the authors. I think that it's an interesting approach. Steven Levitt does have certain qualifications to be considered a source seeing as he is an economist and Stephen Dubner has been writing books and articles for quite some time and has been exposed to many topics. I don't really think it's terribly innovative, I just think it's a good way of putting more "expertise" into the film.

Response:

Freakonomics serves as an inspiration and good example to our attempt to explore the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of dominant social practices.

I do think that Freakonomics makes me think a little harder about social practices but I think that people are already aware of certain things. Example; the sumo wrestling. People knew that the cheating was going on; but they didn't face it. There's things that I do, my friends do, and other people around me do, and I question those actions; but I never fight it or dig deeper. I feel as though the hidden in plain sight "weirdness" is actually quite normal. People just don't want to face the "weirdness" (meaning normality) of it all.

Here in the U.S. we've had a number of documentarys/informative films come out about our food. "Food Inc.", "Supersize me" and "King Corn" just to name a few.  For some, these films have changed their lives; they started to look at their plate and instead of wondering they actually changed what they saw. But for some others they looked at the plate, wondered, and dug in.