Steven D. Levitt > Quotes

“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, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The conventional wisdom is often wrong.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”
― levitt, steven, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“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, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“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.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“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, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“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.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“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, Think Like a Freak

“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, Think Like a Freak

“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, Think Like a Freak

“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, Think Like a Freak

“There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“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, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“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, Think Like a Freak

“A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“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.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commission is typically split between the seller’s agent and the buyer’s. Each agent then kicks back roughly half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent’s pocket. So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4,500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent’s additional share—her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000—is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren’t aligned after all.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
conventional wisdom.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“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.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“If you really want to persuade someone who doesn’t wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“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.”
― Steven D. Levitt, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance