Top 100 Steven D. Levitt Quotes

#1. Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them - or, often, deciphering them - is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #8929
#2. Would a diet high in omega-3 lead to world peace?

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #18385
#3. As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #55993
#4. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #56108
#5. Mullaney often took the subway to visit the client. His ride sometimes coincided with the end of the school day;

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #60151
#6. It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #64885
#7. Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. None of us want to look stupid, or at least overmatched, by admitting we don't know an answer.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #71150
#8. So when it comes to solving problems, channeling your inner child can really pay off. It all starts with thinking small.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #72768
#9. What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #73501
#10. A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #84511
#11. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #120173
#12. Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or,

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #121175
#13. If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #129845
#14. Poverty is a symptom - of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #130812
#15. Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially - with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect - are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #148399
#16. Turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #156538
#17. The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #202296
#18. It is often possible to elicit the behavior you want through nonfinancial means.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #237926
#19. Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #242617
#20. When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #254846
#21. Goldstein found that on average, the people in his experiment "enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #297689
#22. One thing we've learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #299573
#23. There is a difference between correlation and causation - many people mistake one for the other

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #345227
#24. Few people think more than two or three times a year," Shaw reportedly said. "I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #351588
#25. Young women in Cameroon have their breasts "ironed" - beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell - to make them less sexually tempting.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #359193
#26. Nor should failure be considered a total loss.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #391460
#27. An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #408502
#28. When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue - whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food - it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #410091
#29. As the Inuits say, "Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #476773
#30. Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #481382
#31. Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent
all depending on who wields it and how.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #488741
#32. People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #505899
#33. That is a lethal combination - cocky plus wrong - especially when a more prudent option exists: simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #558104
#34. Were writing Freakonomics, we had grave doubts that anyone would actually read it - and we certainly never envisioned the need for this revised and expanded edition.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #591842
#35. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #592272
#36. This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #606507
#37. I don't expect perfection, I expect excellence. I expect 100 percent effort in all you do.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #625101
#38. What sort of signal does a college diploma send to a potential employer? That its holder is willing and able to complete all sorts of drawn-out, convoluted tasks - and,

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #635041
#39. Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #640114
#40. Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #694435
#41. Children read books, not reviews," he wrote. "They don't give a hoot about the critics." And: "When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority." Best of all - and to the relief of authors everywhere - children "don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #697498
#42. So in the tradition of Poland Spring, Evian, and other hydro-geniuses, we've decided to bottle something that was freely available and charge you money for it.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #746782
#43. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #779327
#44. Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #813743
#45. The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #817029
#46. Borody claims to have used fecal transplants to effectively cure people who were suffering from ulcerative colitis - which, he says, was

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #819422
#47. If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don't know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don't even know the right question.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #830026
#48. Don't listen to what people say; watch what they do.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #880483
#49. Tetlock's words, even when their predictions prove

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #884638
#50. The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #938609
#51. Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #972948
#52. One of the best things about having a blog is that you've got a place to run your craziest ideas up the flagpole and see just how quickly they get shot down.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1006897
#53. Come up with a terrible idea? No problem - just don't act on it.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1037572
#54. The more social science we learn, the more we realize that people, while treasuring their independence, are in fact drawn to herd behavior in almost every aspect of daily life.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1071772
#55. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1104087
#56. Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn't like the idea of quitting.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1110522
#57. Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1157617
#58. When failure is demonized, people will try to avoid it at all costs - even when it represents nothing more than a temporary setback.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1174130
#59. A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1188568
#60. There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1190545
#61. The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1269130
#62. Just Like Canada, with Better Bacon

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1275657
#63. For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1305430
#64. it is even harder to persuade people who do not wish to be persuaded.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1310467
#65. Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1312114
#66. An opponent who feels his argument is ignored isn't likely to engage with you at all.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1323259
#67. Name-calling will make you an enemy, not an ally, and if that is your objective, then persuasion is probably not what you were after in the first place.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1327636
#68. To Borody and a small band of like-minded brethren who believe in the power of poop, we are standing at the threshold of a new era in medicine. Borody sees the benefits of fecal therapy as "equivalent to the discovery of antibiotics." But first, there is much skepticism to overcome.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1332000
#69. Whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1376169
#70. It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don't know.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1378375
#71. Government agents sardonically known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep "celibacy tax.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1389862
#72. Most of us want to fix or change the world in some fashion. But to change the world, you first have to understand it.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1427302
#73. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1431961
#74. If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1447069
#75. Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1453511
#76. The way economists see it, the chances of an individual's vote influencing an election outcome is vanishingly small, so unless it is fun to vote, it doesn't make much sense to do so.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1468689
#77. It is understandable, therefore, that the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. The core belief is that humankind inherited a pristine Eden, has sinned greatly by polluting it, and must now suffer lest we all perish in a fiery apocalypse.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1487860
#78. That may not be a simple conversation. But when you are dealing with root causes, at least you know you are fighting the real problem and not just boxing with shadows.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1488920
#79. The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1499260
#80. But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1513373
#81. An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1545676
#82. Experts depend on the fact that you don't have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn't know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn't dare challenge them. If

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1577662
#83. When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice their plastic shopping bags, their air-conditioning, their extraneous travel, the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1597887
#84. Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1653979
#85. But wouldn't it be nice if we all smuggled a few childlike instincts across the border into adulthood? We'd spend more time saying what we mean and asking questions we care about;

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1654618
#86. Why do so many frown so sternly at the idea of having fun? Perhaps out of fear that it connotes you aren't serious. But best as we can tell, there is no correlation between appearing to be serious and actually being good at what you do. In fact an argument can be made that the opposite is true.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1661046
#87. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went ... up.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1669124
#88. So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't. Such are the vagaries of life.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1681562
#89. Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1682886
#90. Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they're hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1683751
#91. Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don't be afraid of the obvious.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1696133
#92. Overall, a portfolio of the "good to great" companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1717877
#93. Parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance. But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents?

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1721806
#94. Failure may be an option but quitting is not.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1731494
#95. It's much better to ask small questions than big ones.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1764196
#96. Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1792209
#97. If you really want to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1800216
#98. Vegans are still considered as sort of "out there," a fringe group of animal rights activists with pasty skin and protein issues. However,

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1816479
#99. And while it sounds bad to hear that Americans underpay their taxes by nearly one-fifth, the tax economist Joel Slemrod estimates that the U.S. is easily within the upper tier of worldwide compliance rates.

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Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1823320
#100. Most of us have a lot more experience being consumers than producers, so we tend to view things through the lens of demand rather than supply.

Steven D. Levitt

Steven D. Levitt Quotes #1825259

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