The documentary, Freakonomics, shows how human behavior can be analyzed from economic standpoint. There were three themes in the video: naming effect (a roshanda by any other name), cheating of Sumo (pure corruption), and dramatic reduction of crime rate (cause and effects).

Firstly, the most interesting part was naming effect. As the expert said that there is no name that guarantee the person’s success or failure, the name has n o direct effect on success. However, the problem child whose name is ‘temptress’ can be seen that her parents were not good parents, so that she might not have a right home environment. Also, I don’t think Categorizing black name and white name is just a naming effect. It is related to tradition. I thought there is no problem to name like African-American or White American, because it’s a kind of cultural difference. After knowing that discrimination exists in employment, however, I think they need some change in the society, not “naming.”

Second theme was corruption of Sumo’s purity which show cheating in Sumo. As a foreigner, I didn’t know that Sumo is a god serving sports. I was surprised there are huge cheating in Sumo, because Sumo is regarded as pure sports. However, as the economist said purity is a good mask for corruption, cheating keeps happening in it. Since Sumo has doubled-sidedness, it is full of contradiction.

Third theme was about dramatic reduction of crime rate. I concentrated on this part a lot, because I am doing research for sexual crime rates in Japan for my assignment. As the video showed us, it is not hard to make the lower crime rate or higher detection rate. I am not sure my research has the same principle like those examples of the video have. Japan shows really low rape rates compared to US or UK. But many experts believed that it doesn’t mean Japan is safe country, because most rape victims usually not want to report to the police because of social stigma. Through this theme, I realized that we should look at the whole picture not the statistics of it.