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
#3. As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
Steven D. Levitt
#4. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
Steven D. Levitt
#5. Mullaney often took the subway to visit the client. His ride sometimes coincided with the end of the school day;
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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
#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
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#12. Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or,
Steven D. Levitt
#13. If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.
Steven D. Levitt
#14. Poverty is a symptom - of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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
#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
#18. It is often possible to elicit the behavior you want through nonfinancial means.
Steven D. Levitt
#19. Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane.
Steven D. Levitt
#20. When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
Steven D. Levitt
#21. Goldstein found that on average, the people in his experiment "enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#23. There is a difference between correlation and causation - many people mistake one for the other
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#27. An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#29. As the Inuits say, "Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.
Steven D. Levitt
#30. Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.
Steven D. Levitt
#31. Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent
all depending on who wields it and how.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#35. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#37. I don't expect perfection, I expect excellence. I expect 100 percent effort in all you do.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#39. Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.
Steven D. Levitt
#40. Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#45. The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.
Steven D. Levitt
#46. Borody claims to have used fecal transplants to effectively cure people who were suffering from ulcerative colitis - which, he says, was
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#50. The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.
Steven D. Levitt
#51. Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#53. Come up with a terrible idea? No problem - just don't act on it.
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#55. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#57. Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#59. A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person.
Steven D. Levitt
#60. There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.
Steven D. Levitt
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#64. it is even harder to persuade people who do not wish to be persuaded.
Steven D. Levitt
#65. Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon
Steven D. Levitt
#66. An opponent who feels his argument is ignored isn't likely to engage with you at all.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#73. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#81. An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#89. Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.
Steven D. Levitt
#90. Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they're hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.
Steven D. Levitt
#91. Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don't be afraid of the obvious.
Steven D. Levitt
#92. Overall, a portfolio of the "good to great" companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.
Steven D. Levitt
#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?
Steven D. Levitt
#96. Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.
Steven D. Levitt
#97. If you really want to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
#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.
Steven D. Levitt
#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
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