Freakonomics
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's best-selling book gets turned into an anthology film, with segments directed by Alex Gibney, Morgan Spurlock, Eugene Jarecki, Rachel Grady, Heidi Ewing, and Seth Gordon. Each director takes on one of the book's arguments that economics can explain behavior far outside markets. Gibney examines corruption in Japanese sumo wrestling, tracing match outcomes that look statistically impossible without fixing. Spurlock asks whether a baby's name affects its life chances, running the data on job applications and college admissions. Jarecki revisits the book's most argued claim, that legalized abortion after Roe v. Wade drove down crime rates a generation later, and lets economists on both sides make their case. Grady and Ewing follow Chicago high schoolers offered cash incentives for better grades, watching the experiment play out in real classrooms. Interstitial segments with Levitt and Dubner tie the stories back to the book's central pitch: that incentives, not morality, drive most human decisions, and the data usually says something ordinary people would not guess.