Freakonomics

In this book is about radical economic strategy. It's inventive and inciting and perhaps a touch depressing in its conclusions - a world in which convenience and incentive subvert our attention to the detriment of just about everything. My illustration references one of the central analogous questions.... "What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?"






Pencil drawing scanned as text.

"Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States." Steven D. Levitt