Top 100 Steven 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. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world. In other words, guns do not cause crime.
Steven D. Levitt
#4. As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
Steven D. Levitt
#5. As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
Steven D. Levitt
#6. Mullaney often took the subway to visit the client. His ride sometimes coincided with the end of the school day;
Steven D. Levitt
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. So when it comes to solving problems, channeling your inner child can really pay off. It all starts with thinking small.
Steven D. Levitt
#12. 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
#13. The major challenge facing most foundations is that they are risk averse. This inhibits their ability to experiment and commit to the experimentation and innovation process.
Steven Levitt
#14. Every big problem has been thought about endlessly by people much smarter than we are. The fact that it remains a problem means it is too damned hard to be cracked in full.
Steven D. Levitt
#15. 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
#16. Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or,
Steven D. Levitt
#17. If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.
Steven D. Levitt
#18. Poverty is a symptom - of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
Steven D. Levitt
#19. The most obvious things are often right there, but you don't think about them because you've narrowed your vision.
Steven Levitt
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.
Steven Levitt
#24. It is often possible to elicit the behavior you want through nonfinancial means.
Steven D. Levitt
#25. As I see it, most major philanthropists have been bullied into giving. They feel social pressure to give. It has become a cost of doing business.
Steven Levitt
#26. Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane.
Steven D. Levitt
#27. When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
Steven D. Levitt
#28. Goldstein found that on average, the people in his experiment "enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.
Steven D. Levitt
#29. 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
#30. There is a difference between correlation and causation - many people mistake one for the other
Steven D. Levitt
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
Steven D. Levitt
#35. 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
#36. People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.
Steven Levitt
#37. As the Inuits say, "Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.
Steven D. Levitt
#38. Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.
Steven D. Levitt
#39. Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent
all depending on who wields it and how.
Steven D. Levitt
#40. 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
#41. Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about.
Steven D. Levitt
#42. Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.
Steven Levitt
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.
Steven D. Levitt
#46. 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
#47. I don't expect perfection, I expect excellence. I expect 100 percent effort in all you do.
Steven D. Levitt
#48. 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
#49. Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.
Steven D. Levitt
#50. Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do.
Steven D. Levitt
#51. 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
#52. Wall Street is populated by a bunch of people whose primary goal is to make money, and the rules are pretty much caveat emptor.
Steven Levitt
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.
Steven D. Levitt
#58. Borody claims to have used fecal transplants to effectively cure people who were suffering from ulcerative colitis - which, he says, was
Steven D. Levitt
#59. No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.
Steven Levitt
#60. 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
#61. Good social media is authentic. What makes social media work is actually having something to say.
Steven Levitt
#64. The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.
Steven D. Levitt
#65. Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.
Steven D. Levitt
#66. 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
#67. The best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.
Steven D. Levitt
#68. Go out and collect data and, instead of having the answer, just look at the data and see if the data tells you anything. When we're allowed to do this with companies, it's almost magical.
Steven Levitt
#69. Come up with a terrible idea? No problem - just don't act on it.
Steven D. Levitt
#70. 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
#71. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.
Steven D. Levitt
#72. 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
#73. You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.
Steven Levitt
#74. Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.
Steven Levitt
#75. Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?
Steven D. Levitt
#76. When I was starting, I was very much influenced by the straight up, eyes to camera style of August Sander. He is really the only one. Had I known then the work of people like Ken Russell, Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt, and Steven Berkoff, they would undoubtedly have influenced me too.
Derek Ridgers
#77. 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
#78. A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person.
Steven D. Levitt
#79. There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.
Steven D. Levitt
#80. Most people are too busy to rethink the way they think - or to even spend much time thinking at all.
Steven D. Levitt
#81. The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.
Steven Levitt
#82. 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
#85. it is even harder to persuade people who do not wish to be persuaded.
Steven D. Levitt
#86. Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon
Steven D. Levitt
#87. An opponent who feels his argument is ignored isn't likely to engage with you at all.
Steven D. Levitt
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. But being confident you are right is not the same as being right.
Steven D. Levitt
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
Steven D. Levitt
#96. I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.
Steven Levitt
#97. If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.
Steven D. Levitt
#98. 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
#99. If you really accept that global warming puts the world at risk, then you think you would be open to any solution that could undo it.
Steven Levitt
#100. 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
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