Freakonomics: Chapter 1

So through a complicated, haphazard, and constantly readjusted web of economic, social, and moral incentives, modern society does its best to militate against crime.

Thomas Jefferson noted this while reflecting on the tiny incentive that led to the Boston Tea Party and, in turn, the American Revolution: “So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.”

They might circumvent donation limits by using fake IDs.

There are two noteworthy points to be made about the children in classroom A, tangential to the cheating itself.

This is a conservative estimate, since the algorithm was able to identify only the most egregious form of cheating—in which teachers systematically changed students’ answers—and not the many subtler ways a teacher might cheat.

Not every result of the Chicago cheating analysis was so dour.

With its purification rituals and its imperial roots, sumo is sacrosanct in a way that American sports will never be. Indeed, sumo is said to be less about competition than about honor itself.

The 1919 Chicago White Sox, who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series (and are therefore known forever as the Black Sox), retain a stench of iniquity among even casual baseball fans.

The City College of New York’s championship basketball team, once beloved for its smart and scrappy play, was instantly reviled when it was discovered in 1951 that several players had taken mob money to shave points—intentionally missing baskets to help gamblers beat the point spread.

Since so much depends on a wrestler’s eighth win, he should be expected to fight harder in a crucial bout.

But perhaps there are further clues in the data that prove collusion.

Aside from the crooked matches, they said, sumo was rife with drug use and sexcapades, bribes and tax evasion, and close ties to the yakuza, the Japanese mafia.

So if sumo wrestlers, schoolteachers, and day-care parents all cheat, are we to assume that mankind is innately and universally corrupt?

It might seem ludicrous to address as large and intractable a problem as white-collar crime through the life of a bagel man. But often a small and simple question can help chisel away at the biggest problems.

If a company habitually paid below 80 percent, Feldman might post a hectoring note, like this one: The cost of bagels has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear without being paid for has also gone up. Don’t let that continue.