SuperFreakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to suicide and suicide bombings.

Chapter 2 opens by discussing the lesser-known factors in predicting success in an individual’s life. Though Chapter 1 covered the advantage of the accident of gender, this chapter expands to show that small factors like  a person’s birth month can also predict their later economic success. A person’s birth month affects whether they’ll be the oldest or youngest in their school year, with the oldest students being more likely to succeed. Names also predict success, since more attention is often given to students with names that come first in the alphabet. If talent is truly random—an idea that the authors tend to believe—then no factors should indicate who will grow to be successful at their chosen field. However, the authors determine that success can actually be predicted in a few key ways. For example, in the field of baseball, if a boy’s father played in the Major Leagues, that boy will be 800 times more likely to play in the Major Leagues than a randomly selected boy. Of course, baseball talent is not a matter of genetics alone; many other factors influence that success, including available resources, parental expertise and expectations, and the fact that name recognition leads to early notice in the Minor Leagues.