Poll Position: Freakonomics (2010)

I love documentaries and when this poll went up I thought to myself, this was going to be win-win. I mean I have a hard time finding documentaries that don’t really entertain me, even if it is about the most obscure topics. Even though “Freakonomics” won, I was kind of hoping “Through the Wormhole” would take it. But after diving deeper into what this movie was all about, mainly centering on incentives and causality, I thought I could really dig this. Click read more to find out more about this enticing documentary.

The documentary is made up of several mini-docs that are about parts of the books. The neat thing is that the documentary isn’t made by the authors of the book “Freakonomics” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Instead a bunch of other people directed and documented on different aspects of the book from cheating teachers, weird baby names, crime rates vs. abortion laws and even sumo wrestling. This was interesting, because they give tidbits of various topics and kind of giving you the whole idea in different scenarios.

The most impressive and interesting section was the one with baby names and how it effects a child’s future. It was eye opening to see that people still judge others by their names. For example, one of the tests was to send out a number of resumes, all the same. But the only differences was one had a typical white name like Greg and the other was a typical black name like Tyrone. And what they gather was that the white names would get called back sooner and had a higher success rate of even getting a call from the future employer. The segment goes on and talks about how white names are more generic with: Steve, Greg, Emily, John, etc. And black names are more unique, such as: DeShaw, Unique and Tyrone. Oh yeah, someone named their kid unique, this was to makes sure she got beat up during lunch. Still better than naming your kid Apple I guess.

Levitt and Dubner give you their take on the world.

Now I just wished all the segments were this interesting, sadly there was one that I did not give a dirty diaper about. It was about the match fixing, Yaochiō, in sumo wrestling. And we dive into how the Japanese culture of being honorable and pure is the perfect cover for a dirty little game. And anyone who would try to out the wrestling federation would be severely punished. The main point that I got out of it is that, everyone will cheat as long as there is a good enough incentive to do so. But this is a problem I had; I kind of already knew that. I mean we all know that if given the opportunity, most humans are selfish so they will ‘cheat’ to do what is best for them. They dive more into Japanese culture and I just really did not find any of that interesting.

And maybe this is where the underlying problem lies; there are too many topics but not enough content to really support some of these ideas. I did find the cheating teachers’ topic real interesting. Teachers will cheat on their students’ tests, giving them answers so that their class doesn’t look so bad. I really wished they got all the nitty-gritty of all that.

Even though this isn’t the most interesting documentary in the world, it is the vastest. It covers a bunch of topics and I am sure a lot of people will find a few interesting. And because the movie is fairly short at 93 minutes, you aren’t going to waste a lot of your time. I just think that most people shouldn’t go out of their way to see this. There are a lot of better documentaries that talk about social culture and their effects. “Super High Me”, “Capitalism: A Love Story” and “Beer Wars” are some of my favourites.