Steven E. Landsburg > Quotes

“If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone's pants. But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will just have you instead of someone else.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“A few lines of reasoning can change the way we see the world.”
― Steven E. Landsburg

“If it's okay to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn't we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets? Most of us don't think that's a good idea, and not just because it might backfire. We don't think it's a good idea because we believe human beings have human rights, whatever their colour and wherever they live. Stealing assets is wrong, and so is stealing the right to earn a living, no matter where the victim was born.”
― Steven E. Landsburg

“[Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries”
― Steven E. Landsburg, Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life

“Most of economics can be summarized in four words: “People respond to incentives.” The rest is commentary.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“Selling is a painful necessity, buying is what makes it all worthwhile.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life

“...given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution....”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“The chief merit of the price system is that it makes effective use of information that is not available to any single decision maker. When the price system is overridden, information is discarded. When information is discarded, resources are misallocated. When resources are misallocated, prosperity suffers. If you’re trying to make people prosperous, relying on prices is your best strategy.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, Can You Outsmart an Economist?: 100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain

“Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their "responsibilities" are almost always up to no good.”
― Steven Landsburg, Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You about Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life

“Why am I permitted to apply racial criteria when I select a spouse but not when I select a personal assistant?”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“Of course, ideas can always be misleading—but then so can numbers. Still, we advance by learning new ways to think, even if those ways are not infallible. Much”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“A low current stock price forecasts a low future price. If today’s price is low, there is a good reason to buy more (it’s cheap) and also a good reason to buy less (it’s likely to stay cheap). The two reasons cancel out and make “buying more when the price is low” no more attractive than “buying more when the price is high.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“If you support protectionism because you think it’s good for you, you’ve probably just got your economics wrong. But if you support protectionism because you think it’s good for your fellow Americans, at the expense of foreigners, then it seems to me you’ve got your morals wrong too.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

“But when something is easy to imagine, it’s often because you’ve failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

“A few lines of reasoning can change the way we see the world”
― Steven E. Landsburg

“discussion: Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their “responsibilities” are almost always up to no good.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“If, like me, you consider the Drug War a moral outrage, you’ll be distressed to learn that the police are maximizing drug convictions. Stopping motorists because you don’t like their race is reprehensible, but at least it doesn’t retard economic activity. If the police are going to harass a dozen motorists a day, it doesn’t much matter whether they target blacks, whites, or a representative sample; twelve harassed motorists are twelve harassed motorists. But it does matter whether they target drug dealers, because that discourages the drug trade and raises the price of drugs. That strikes me as bad—and in fact, worse than racism.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

“All mainstream economic models assume that people strive to consume more and to work less. All mainstream models judge an economic policy to be successful only when it helps people to accomplish at least one of those goals. By the standards of economics, a policy that does nothing but encourage people to work harder and die wealthy is a bad policy.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“When I find a pair of pants I like, I buy a lot of them. Really a lot. Perhaps there’s something genetic here; I collect pants like my Uncle Morris collected meat. I do this because pants wear out. Is this part of a plot by the clothing manufacturers to keep us buying more? Some people think so. In my Sound and Fury file, I find an old (September 20, 1982) Ann Landers column about pantyhose manufacturers who deliberately create products that self-destruct after a week instead of a year because “the no-run nylons, which they know how to make, would put a serious crimp in their sales.” Ann concludes that she and her readers are “at the mercy of a conspiracy of self-interest.” One wonders whose self-interest Ann has in mind. Surely it’s not the manufacturers’. If there were a cost-justified way to do it, any self-interested manufacturer would switch from selling one-week nylons at $1 to selling one-year nylons at $52. That pleases the customers (whose pantyhose budget doesn’t change but who make fewer trips to the store), maintains the manufacturer’s revenue, and—because he produces about 98 percent fewer nylons—cuts his costs considerably.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“According to the efficient markets hypothesis, no investment strategy based on the use of publicly available information can successfully beat the market.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“Logic matters. It leads us from simple ideas to surprising conclusions.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“Only the philosophers, apparently, are so insecure about the progress of their own subject that they still offer courses mired in antiquity.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“When the government prints money, everyone is temporarily happier. But a lot of them are being tricked, and eventually they’re going to regret their former “good fortune.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“The governing principle is precisely the same one that predicts behavior at the gas pump. When the price of gasoline is low, people choose to buy more gasoline. When the price of accidents (e.g., the probability of being killed or the expected medical bill) is low, people choose to have more accidents. You”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“Economists aspire to understand, predict, and explain all human behavior. We believe that much of that behavior is strategic, which just means that people try to anticipate how others will respond to their behavior and plan accordingly.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, Can You Outsmart an Economist?: 100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain

“We both approach the world as economists, and as economists resigned to - and sometimes even reveling in - the character defect that diverts us from pure science to policy analysis. An economist who has abandoned his resistance to policy analysis is liable to fall prey to even more seductive and dangerous vice of policy formulation.”
― Steven Landsburg

“If you want to defend a policy, your task is not to demonstrate that it does some good, but that it does more good than harm.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life

“Like stem-cell research, another potentially transformative force for good, free trade is held in check largely by the stupid, the ignorant, and the superstitious.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“Strictly speaking, statistics never lie, but the truths they tell are often misinterpreted. This is particularly the case with economic statistics.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life