Third Chunk AKA chapters 5 & 6

In chapter 5, Levitt tries to figure out what makes a perfect parent. He explains that no book can teach a person how to be a parent. He claims that there are many statistics that a parent does not know that could be very helpful when it comes to letting their child play with who. He gives an example in which the child can play in either a friend's house with a pool or at a friend's house where there is a gun. He states that the hypothetical character's parents made a smart decision in protecting their child by letting her play at the friend with a pool than at a friend with a gun. He then gives his statistics "In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. (In a country with 6 million pools, this means that roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million plus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.)" Later on, he claims that a child's genetics accounts for the child's behavior and such, but later he states that parents can make a difference in such a way that it seems that he does not really answer the question unless you ignore everything except the fact that parents should know more statistics or just keep an eye on their child themselves.

In chapter 6, Levitt attempts an answer to Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet? - or basically Does the child's name have anything to do with the their future. Simply put, the answer is no. Levitt mentions of a situation where a man names one child winner and another loser. Winner becomes a loser and Loser becomes successful. He then goes on about "blackest" names and "whitest" names, but in the end he claims that genetics and other factors in the person's background determine their chance for success.

Tone : serious

Rhetorical Strategies : Appeal to logic through statistics and some humour.

Questions : Since people's names don't determine their ability to succeed, then why do people categorize by name?
With no real unrisky paranting situation, how can a parent protect their child while not allowing the child to become too dependent?

Freakonomics Chapter 3 and 4 A.K.A. Chunk 2

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in the third chapter tackle the issue of drug dealers and why they still live with their mothers. Levitt describes how someone he knew from the University did research on the gangs and drug dealers for sociology. Levitt, as an economist, was asked by the sociologist to help him with a notebook given given to him by one of the members. Levitt looked through it and realized that drug dealing is run like any other business - Levitt compares it to McDonald's. According to Levitt, at the bottom are the people that stand at street corners waiting to run at a threat or sell his merchandise, then there are the ringleaders of the gangs - who don't sell drugs, but do distribute the money within the small sector, then there are the ones at the top - the ones that get the most out of it (of course there are people in between these three, but they are not necessary for this precis). The notebook contained numbers that explained the distribution of the money. From this information, Levitt discovered that the actual dealers aren't rich because they get a very small portion of the earnings - they work at about $3.30 an hour - and they need to take second jobs. Clearly minimum wage makes a person struggle to find a home so how difficult would it be at $3.30 an hour? Thus, the low pay for the dealers means that they can't even rent a place so what other choice do they have but to live with their mothers?
In chapter 4, Levitt and Dubner argue that the reason that there was a decrease in criminal activity in the late 1990s and early 2000 was not so much a larger police force or new ways to find who the criminals are, but that there was a case earlier in the topic of abortion. Levitt argues that because abortion was legalized, all of those children who would have been born - and because the parents did not want them, were drug abusers, and/or were raped - unloved and this is a serous marker of deliquency. Most, if not all, of these children who were not born would have become the next generation of crime, but because they were not born, there was not way they could comitt murder or any other criminal activities.

Tone: serious and excited (from saying all of these realizations)

Rhetorical Strategies : appeal to logic, use of numbers & statistics

Questions: Why do people work as a drug dealer if the pay is not good and they would be better off working at McDonald's at minimum wage?
Why can abortion not be controlled rather than legal or illegal?