Freakonomics: the movie.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Briefly Noted - Movie review - Brief article

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Like the book that inspired it, the 2010 movie Freakonomics, now available on DVD, is an intermittently entertaining hodgepodge unified by no theme except the interests of University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner.

"The closest thing to a worldview in Freakonomics," Levitt suggests in the film, "is that incentives matter." Well, they do in Alex Gibney's compelling segment on cheating in sumo wrestling and in Heidi Ewing and Rachel 6rady's treatment of an experiment aimed at bribing high school students to get better grades. Incentives are far less obvious...