Freakonomics

Today I went to see the movie Freakonomics with school. It is about two guys, an economist and a journalist who talk about economic and social issues. They explore many different topics and use tools to go about explaining or maybe figuring out many of these issues. One important thing that I noticed was that they always refereed to people as a whole. They never really brought in their own personal experiences. When they interviewed people, it would always be a variety of people from the group that is important in the issue. Always looking at the bigger picture in a way. They were also very straight forward with all of their issues. For example when they were talking about the difference in names between blacks and whites they were very straight forward with the type of questions asked. Or it might have just seemed like that because it can be considered slightly controversial. (Not really in my opinion).
I think that the authors pretended that correlation is causation in a way because there was proof that it was true but there was also proof that it wasn't true and that its just a coincidence in many situations. I think that you can usually link it far back to correlation vs. causation but they were talking about specific things. For example, when abortions were legalized the crime rate went down a lot. Is the crime rate dropping due to abortions, maybe we can't know for sure. But that does seem very probable. So they don't know for sure but they believe as much as they can. They most relied on experiments and peoples opinions. Every Segment they did was like an experiment or a review in a way. When they gave the kids money to raise their grades that was a test. When they were looking at names and what it has to do with race they interviewed a lot of people. They relied on people for their experiment. When they were examining sumo wrestling thats like a review where they relied on people once again.
I don't really agree because it wasn't showing anything that wasn't normal. They showed pretty normal issues so I didn't find anything particularly weird. They showed cheating in sports which happens all the time. Kids and their grades which is a common problem. Names may be the most common thing in the world.