Treasure 1

Joy Treasure
Mr. Hackney
English: Rhetoric 102
7 February 2014
Parenting Methods Really Do Matter

Freakonomics, written by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, finds convincing ways to
present relationships between the uncommon. Freakonomics tries to uncover different ideas of
topics that correlate in one way or another. The most controversial chapter revolves around what
makes a good parent, and essentially how parenting methods do not matter. There is an
enormous amount of data on children who have died from guns, pool drownings, and children
related with drugs and gangs, yet, he numbers somehow do not add up correctly. Although I
understand the points Levitt and Dubner are arguing, I agree with the critics that their numbers
are misleading because they are reported inconsistently and found to be inaccurate.
A critic who seems to think the book has excellent ideas and likes the approaches Levitt
and Dubner took, does not so much agree with a very important piece of the book. Milena Kats,
who writes for the American Economist seemingly enough thinks Freakonomics is interesting
and, combined pure logical tools or classic economics with understanding the emotional
impulses of human behavior (93). Kats, however, had to think twice about the numbers she
was reading (93). In the book, Levitt and Dubner filled chapters with data and somehow make it
seem like the numbers are correct, but Kats finds them wrong. Another critic, Greg Smithsimon,
assistant professor of Urban Studies at Bard College, claims in his work, Freak Out, Levitt is
not just in his statistical talk by saying 100 times more likely (104). Smithsimon also finds
Levitt wrong when he says driving is less dangerous than flying (104). Of the inconsistent
numbers and statistical manipulations, it poses the question of how consistent are the numbers
between the correlation of criminals and abortions.
Comprehending numbers throughout a book can be difficult. Someone does not read a
book and think to themselves that the numbers do not make sense, especially when an author
presents them in a manipulating and professional manner. The author states that swimming pools
are more dangerous than guns because of the statistics. Kats realizes the numbers are not correct
and Levitt did not think about all of the information when she writes, according to the statistics
in the book, in a given year, one child drowns for every 11,000 residential pools in the United
States (93). Kats discusses statistics given to the contrary, for every one million guns in the
United States, one child is killed by a gun (93). What Levitt does not take in account is it was
possibly just the number of guns or gun owning families and the numbers are skewed (94). The
age threshold was lower however. Kats argues that numbers could have been different, had the
age threshold in the study been changed from 10 to 20 (94).

Treasure 2