Steven D. Levitt Quotes

The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don't. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.

Why is it so important to have fun? Because if you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you'll want to do more of it. You'll think about it before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up; your mind is always in gear. When you're that engaged, you'll run circles around other people even if they are more naturally talented. From what we've seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do. If they approach their job like - well, a job - they aren't likely to thrive. But if they've somehow convinced themselves that running regressions or interviewing strangers is the funnest thing in the world, you know they have a shot.

A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.

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.

Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?
such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.

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.

The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understand how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love).

Keepers jump left 57 percent of the time and right 41 percent - which means they stay in the center only 2 times out of 100. A leaping keeper may of course still stop a ball aimed at the center, but how often can that happen? If only you could see the data on all penalty kicks taken toward the center of the goal! Okay, we just happen to have that: a kick toward the center, as risky as it may appear, is seven percentage points more likely to succeed than a kick to the corner. Are you willing to take the chance?

Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?

As the Inuits say, "Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.

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.

Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.

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.

For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.

Letting go of the conventional wisdoms that torment us. Letting go of the artificial limits that hold us back - and of the fear of admitting what we don't know. Letting go of the habits of mind that tell us to kick into the corner of the goal even though we stand a better chance by going up the middle.

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.

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

Don't listen to what people say; watch what they do.

Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.

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.

Just Like Canada, with Better Bacon

Consider the kind of questions that kids ask. Sure, they may be silly or simplistic or out of bounds. But kids are also relentlessly curious and relatively unbiased. Because they know so little, they don't carry around the preconceptions that often stop people from seeing things as they are. When it comes to solving problems, this is a big advantage.

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.

So when it comes to solving problems, channeling your inner child can really pay off. It all starts with thinking small.

Come up with a terrible idea? No problem - just don't act on it.

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.

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;

Colleges and universities, meanwhile, have no such qualms about torturing their applicants. Think about how much work a high-school student must do to even be considered for a spot at a decent college. The difference in college and job applications is especially striking when you consider that a job applicant will be getting paid upon acceptance while a college applicant will be paying for the privilege to attend.

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.

Borody claims to have used fecal transplants to effectively cure people who were suffering from ulcerative colitis - which, he says, was

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.

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.

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,

An opponent who feels his argument is ignored isn't likely to engage with you at all.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Would a diet high in omega-3 lead to world peace?

In the United States especially, politics and economics don't mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

The leader of another crack gang once told Venkatesh that he could easily afford to pay his foot soldiers more, but it wouldn't be prudent. "You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig?" he said. "So, you know, you try to take care of them, but you know, you also have to show them you the boss. You always have to get yours first, or else you really ain't no leader. If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit.

As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

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.

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded?

The first step is to appreciate that your opponent's opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." Few of us are immune to this blind spot. That goes for you, and that goes for the two of us as well. And so, as the basketball legend-cum-philosopher Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it, "It's easier to jump out of a plane - hopefully with a parachute - than it is to change your mind about an opinion.

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.

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.

Most of us want to fix or change the world in some fashion. But to change the world, you first have to understand it.

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.

When it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? 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. A moral compass can convince you that all the answers are obvious (even when they're not); that there is a bright line between right and wrong (when often there isn't); and, worst, that you are certain you already know everything you need to know about a subject so you stop trying to learn more.

A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person.

Goldstein found that on average, the people in his experiment "enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.

Tetlock's words, even when their predictions prove

He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. "Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million?" he asked her. She looked him over. There wasn't much to see - but still, $1 million! She agreed to go back to his room. "All right then, " he said. "Would you be willing to sleep with me for $100?" "A hundred dollars!" she shot back. "What do you think I am, a prostitute?" "We've already established that. Now we're just negotiating the price.

There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.

We are blind to our blindness.

An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.

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.

When a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.

People are complicated creatures, with a nuanced set of private and public incentives, and that our behavior is enormously influenced by circumstances.

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.

Vegans are still considered as sort of "out there," a fringe group of animal rights activists with pasty skin and protein issues. However,

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.

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.

So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade - poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get - were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born.

It might be worthwhile to take a familiar question - why there is so much crime in modern society? - and stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime?
After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to main, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail - thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties - is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong).

The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

Failure may be an option but quitting is not.

Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or,

We'd like to bury the idea that there's a right way and a wrong way, a smart way and a foolish way, a red way and a blue way. The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like - ahem - a Freak.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.

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.

Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

If you really want to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.

There is a difference between correlation and causation - many people mistake one for the other

Here is the broader point: 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. Before spending all your time and resources, it's incredibly important to properly define the problem - or, better yet, redefine the problem.

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.

If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.

When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

It's much better to ask small questions than big ones.

The takeaway here is simple but powerful: just because you're great at something doesn't mean you're good at everything. Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in - take a deep breath - ultracrepidarianism, or the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge or competence.

Have fun, think small, don't fear the obvious.

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.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

When the solution to a given problem doesn't lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That's why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as "creative destruction." But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn't that the problem isn't potentially large. It's just that human ingenuity - when given proper incentives - is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we'll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky.

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.

Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This disparity has often been called racist, since it disproportionately imprisons blacks.

By the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago - who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed. (Nor does it hurt, in all likelihood, to be honest, thoughtful, loving, and curious about the world.) But it isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are

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.

Poverty is a symptom - of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

In Freakonomics, we examined the causes of the rise and fall of violent crime in the United States. In 1960, crime began a sudden climb. By 1980, the homicide rate had doubled, reaching a historic peak. For several years crime stayed perilously high, but in the early 1990s it began to fall and kept falling. So what happened?
In Freakonomics, we identified one missing factor - the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s. The theory was jarring but simple. A rise in abortion meant that fewer unwanted children were being born, which meant fewer children growing up in the sort of difficult circumstances that increase the likelihood of criminality.

What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?

Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they're hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.

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.

But his graduate advisor, the eminent poverty scholar William Julius Wilson, promptly sent Venkatesh into the field. His assignment: to visit Chicago's poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and a seventy-question, multiple-choice survey. This was the first question on the survey: How do you feel about being black and poor? a. Very bad b. Bad c. Neither bad nor good d. Somewhat good e. Very good

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.

Most people are too busy to rethink the way they think - or to even spend much time thinking at all.

While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. "If you're unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on - if it's the government, or the economy, or something - then that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide," he says. "It's when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely.

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.

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.

That is in part because the very words "education reform" indicate that the question is "What's wrong with our schools?" when in reality, the question might be better phrased as "Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?" When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.