Freakonomics

So I wanna sell my home

and I put on the market for 300,000 dollars

It's a lovely home you have

I'm the agent

Alright so let me start over, that was my ... i'm sorry

Alright I wanna sell my home

I put on the market for 300,000 dollars

I get an offer today for $290k

The question is if I wait a week

and get the offer for the full $300k

Would I rather wait that week and get the full price?

Or take the offer today for $290k

Ah you want to take it now

I'll be the real estate agent

I'm telling you want to take it right now because

because a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush... The market is starting to really soften up

with these things you just can never tell

If you get a good offer, I really think it's the right thing to take it

And I'm not speaking out of selfinterest cuz I'm the real estate agent

and our interests are aligned

cuz I'm getting a commission out of your sales

I want you to get as much as you can for this house

I really do

When you think about the incentives

that the current contract set up

between the home seller and the agent

representing them, they are not well alligned

But can you ever prove that?

Interestingly, if you look at the sales data on real estate agent own homes

It's not their client's home when they sell their own homes

They get more money than they sell the same home for their client

Now why would that be?

What we find in the data is that agent hold out for better price

and leave their own homes on the market for longer

an average for 10 days longer

But when it comes to your house

The agent has the incentive to sell right away

Why? Cuz sometimes that $10k into his or her pocket

Only $150 I only get $150

Because if you take that $10k that goes to him

6 percent goes to commission but that gets wacked up

Half goes to the buyer's real estate agent

So I get half of that six percent

But then I have to kick back half of that to my agency

So I only get one and a half percents

So really, in order for me to help him gets the extra $10k

I personally only gets $150

But I have to work for an extra week

I have to buy all the marketing

I could be off to another client trying to get another whole commission on another house

So I have a strong incentive to say to him this is a great offer

It's the best offer you can get

I really think you should take it

So no matter what the real estate agency says

I would rather wait a week

and pick up the extra $10k

The agent wouldn't

It's not that real estate agents are bad

It's just that they're human beings and human beings repsond to incentives

If there's only one element

that I say is that almost everything we do

is the idea that incentives matter

and if you can figure out what people's incentives are

you have a good chance to guessing how they're gonna pay it

New prents look at successful families and successful parents

and they just want to copy them and so they try to do the things

they think that they did to get their families so smart and good and whatever

which is really just a ... can be a bad mistake of correlation cuase isolagi

You're gonna take your kid to ... you know ... every mommy and me music class

and you gonna take him to the museum and start looking at all the dreaken roman sculptures

you probably already playing mozart in the worm to get the brain really stimulated

and it turns out; that the best that we can tell

from looking at data of actual parents and children along these dimensions

that that stuffs don't really matters

that it just dones't make your child...better

so it might make you happier, might even make 'em happier, might also make 'em miserable

but it turns out that those are not causoelements

I always said you can teach a kid just as much as in a grocery store

you can as in a museum, maybe more

My entire academic life

has been devoted to figuring out tricky ways to get a causeeality

because the world just doesn't offer you a causeeality

okay, what you see in the world is correlation

So what the world gives you is things are moving together or they aren't

But to be useful, you need to dive down

be able to strip away what's causing what, what's not causing what

The data we looked at

suggests that, by the time you actually have a kid

most of the choices that you make will make you a good parent

you've already made them.

So if you go to the bookstore and buy 10 parenting books,

It's probably not really gonna help the kid that much

But the fact is that you are the kind of person

who as a parent cares enough to buy 10 parenting books even if you dont' read 'em.

That probably means you are a pretty good parent

Just don't think the books are gonna have a magic effect

Ah parents, we wanna believe so much that everything we do

is going to make a difference in our children's lives.

What they eat, where they go to school, who they hang out with

But before any of that takes place,

parents are confronted wth the one single ominous decision

that could shape the entirety of their children's future

what is going to be their name?!

These days, there's an entire industry devoted to naming your baby.

And business is booming

There's magazines, books, websites

There's even high profile baby naming experts.

I'm a baby name expert

I study names, I ask the parents how they choose names for their children

and I look at how names are changing,

because baby names are changing today faster than ever before.

Names are important, because they have a lot to do with your family, your heritage.

Names represent huge, you know what I mean, street creditbility all of that.

Names are definitely a big part of meeting someone

A name can make you popular, and a legend.

Without a name, u're nobody you've got to have a name. It tells your whole identity.

But just how important can name really be?

I mean, unless you're Rockefella or Gates

Can your name have some sort of magical power over your entire destiny?

Not convinced? What about the following stories?

Once upon a time, there was a young mother who thought

she was naming her daughter after her favorite actress on the Cosby show

The smart and fiery Tempest Bledsoe

This is the most humiliating moment of my entire life

and there had been many

But having never seen the way it was spelled

The young mother mistakenly named her new born daughter

Temptress

Well, little Ms. Temptress didn't have an easy life growing up

I don't even know What do you mean?

As a teenager, she became sexually promiscuous

Got into a whole bunch of trouble

Back here you little shit

That's right. I better not let me catch you

And ended up in court

All Rise!

Leaving the judge to ask her mother

Is young temptress just living up to the expectation of her name?

Was that just one little misplaced 'T' and 'R'

all that stood the life of ease and huxtable success,

verses those long hard days in court ... and 'juvie'

Harvard professor Dr. Roland Fryer was determined to find out just that

What happened to Temptress has NOTHING

to do with her name, has everything to do with where she grew up

It turns out, Temptress grew up in a poor black neighborhood

The kind of neighborhood Dr. Fryer has been studying for years

As a world leading renowned economist and an leading expert on race in America

Fryer has been long been interested in what he calls

Cultural Segregation

The gap between White Culture and Black Culture

One embodiment of that culture is

what you name your kid

is probably one of the few cultural items that we can really measure

precisely

What we did was we looked at the effects of your kid's first name

on their life outcomes

Dr. Fryer analyzed the naming records of every baby born in the states of California

over the last forty years

and those names tell an unmistakable story

African American parents are more likely than any other ethnic group

to give their children unique names

There is definitely a distinction between names ...

... for white people and names for black people

Black names will be Molique, JAQuan, NayShan, Naheem

TaSha and Shamika Shaniqua and NaShan and KayShan

I know this girl, her name is "treasure", TREZURE

struck me as typically that's more like an african american name

I like the names that begin with SHA, like Shaheem, Shahee, Shamur

Shakeem, ShaKoor

You know Oprah. It's popular

It was actually in the fifties

and the early sisties that we saw

huge overlaps in the naming patterns of blacks and whites

So people name their kids John and Michael

and names like that

And what you saw was around 19 ... in the 1968 or so

kind of the black power movement actually

you saw distinct biofabrication

with black names getting more disctinctively black

and a lot of them are islamic names

Because the black power movement is about identity who are we?

Who are you? Are you part of us?

It wasn't until the late 80s and 90s that we started to get

you know, kind of the ... made up, concatenated names

that you see now

This is generation today, they saw the change the whole name change concept

they have names that are 30 letters long you know

Everybody try to do something, um ... how do you say, unique

they try to name their kids over something different you know

We had 228 unique versions of the name "Unique"

Again, my favorite was ...

UNEQQEE

another one of my favorite was

UNEEK

ah ... so there are a lot of people trying to be unique

So what happened to all these uniquely named kids?

Kids like poor little temptress

I think it's not the name that's doing the damage to temptress

It's that they grow up in the type of situation

where someone would name their kids Temptress