Freakonomics

If economics is a science primarily concerned with incentives, it is also—fortunately—a science with statistical tools to measure how people respond to those incentives.

An analysis of the entire Chicago data reveals evidence of teacher cheating in more than two hundred classrooms per year, roughly 5 percent of the total.

If economics is a science primarily concerned with incentives, it is also—fortunately—a science with statistical tools to measure how people respond to those incentives.

A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.

It is not only the participants who cheat. Cagey baseball managers try to steal an opponent’s signs.

If cheating to lose is sport’s premier sin, and if sumo wrestling is the premier sport of a great nation, cheating to lose couldn’t possibly exist in sumo. Could it?

When Gyges put on the ring, he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, Gyges proceeded to do woeful things—seduce the queen, murder the king, and so on.

High-stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added reason to cheat.

A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.

An analysis of the entire Chicago data reveals evidence of teacher cheating in more than two hundred classrooms per year, roughly 5 percent of the total.