(2010) By posing fresh questions, carefully looking at the data in a search for distinctive patterns of deviations, economist Stephen Levitt teaming up with journalist Stephen Dubner published in 2005 a best-selling book revealing "the hidden side of everything," upending conventional wisdom, which six directors made into this illustrative documentary.

Divided into chapters about parenting (directed/written by Morgan Spurlock with Jeremy Chilnick), cheating (directed/written by Alex Gibney with Peter Bull), false correlation with causality (directed/written by Eugene Jarecki), and incentives (directed/written by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady), which comes back to parenting, the two authors preface each of the four segments with humorous commentary and examples. Claiming that the only way they could ruin their reputation for honesty would be "to take sides and fight," says Levitt, therefore, they "seek the truth without having an agenda."

Introducing "Roshanda by Any Other Name," Levitt and Dubner disabuse parents of the belief that plying infants and children with stimulating toys, music, and other gimmicks will induce added intelligence to their offspring by saying that none of these things have shown a magic or Mozart effect in and of themselves. In giving an infant a name, parents sometimes consult baby-name experts, as if branding the child with the ideal appellation could launch him or her into a successful life.

The moral of the story of Temptress, an African-American girl who seems to fulfill the prophecy of her designation, is refuted by researchers who argue that where she grew up along with cultural segregation - black children are given more unusual names than other Americans - had more to do with her fate than her name.

Another experiment demonstrated that when résumés with only a different first name (Jake vs Deshawn) were sent out to prospective employers, the more ethnic name received fewer invitations for interviews. A father named his boys Winner and Loser: Loser went on to achieve academic success in college while Winner ended up in prison.

In "Pure Corruption" incidents of cheating (yaocho) in Japanese sumo wrestling are compared with corrupt practices in US high finance (e.g. Bernie Madoff). In both people's illusions (Japanese high regard for the purity and history associated with sumo wrestlers and Americans' trust in brilliant minds) masked chicanery in sport and banking.

An association formerly of eating ice cream with contracting polio as an example of a misconstrued cause-and-effect relationship begins the third part, "It's Not Always a Wonderful Life." When a prediction of increasing crime rates didn't materialize in the 1990s, the drop in lawbreaking was attributed to various popular explanations, including innovative policing strategies and harsher sentencing; but these interpretations of the data could only account for 50% of the decline.

Instead, Levitt came up with the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, legalizing abortion, as the cause for the other half's falling off by eliminating unwanted children and thus producing fewer criminals twenty years later. Responding to criticism, Levitt says he's not an advocate of abortion as a crime-fighting instrument, rather he prefers to say that a woman's right to choose has had a significant effect on crime reduction.

By offering his three-year-old daughter Amanda M&Ms in potty training, Levitt learned once again how incentives can backfire. "We don't know what works," he says since unintended consequences often upset our best laid plans and expectations as happens in "Can a Ninth Grader Be Bribed to Succeed?"

After observing that social and moral incentives have failed in some schools, Levitt and two other University of Chicago economists tried an experiment of paying $50 each month for grade improvement along with a $500 lottery with 900 ninth graders in the Chicago Public School system. In a contrast of students, an irresponsible Caucasian male, Kevin, who lives with his single mother, already has a cellphone, iPod, videogames, skateboard, hip attire, demonstrating how lack of proper parenting with unearned rewards can't compete with a reward system requiring some effort to study and complete homework.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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