Steven Levitt Quotes

• The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

  Steven Levitt

  Conventional Wisdom, Conventional

  "Think Like a Freak extract: joining the dots between hot dogs, Van Halen and David Cameron" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, www.theguardian.com. May 10, 2014.

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• An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

  Steven Levitt

  Keys, Incentives, Bullets

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2006). “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”, p.22, Penguin UK

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

  Steven Levitt

  Done, Problem, Enough

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2014). “Think Like a Freak: Secrets of the Rogue Economist”, p.47, Penguin UK

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

  Steven Levitt

  People, Cost, Pay

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2014). “Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain”, p.11, Harper Collins

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• 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

  Powerful, Thinking, Data

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• 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 Levitt

  People, Doe, World

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2006). “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”, p.18, Penguin UK

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

  Steven Levitt

  Keys, Impossible, Feedback

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2014). “Think Like a Freak: Secrets of the Rogue Economist”, p.28, Penguin UK

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• Don't trust, just verify.

  Steven Levitt

  Don't Trust, Verify

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• No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.

  Steven Levitt

  Time Management, Experts, May

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• If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

  Steven Levitt

  Children, Swimming, Gun

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• Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

  Steven Levitt

  Inquiry, Corruption, Purity

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• 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.

  Steven Levitt

  Mother, Home, Mean

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• Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

  Steven Levitt

  Olive Branches, Information, Olives

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• 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

  Information, Being True, Knows

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• As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

  Steven Levitt

  Cheating, Fields, Said

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2006). “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”, p.25, Penguin UK

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• 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 Levitt

  Real, Law, People

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2010). “SuperFreakonomics, Illustrated edition: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”, p.44, Harper Collins

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• 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 Levitt

  Reality, Thinking, Average

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2010). “SuperFreakonomics, Illustrated edition: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”, p.31, Harper Collins

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• 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 Levitt

  Fun, Winning, Impact

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2006). “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”, p.190, Penguin UK

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• The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.

  Steven Levitt

  Sex, Lying, Data

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• Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.

  Steven Levitt

  Book, Simple, Ideas

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• An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
  conventional wisdom.

  Steven Levitt

  Experts, Theory, Conventional Wisdom

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2006). “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”, p.121, Penguin UK

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• 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 Levitt

  People, Incentives, Littles

  Stephen J. Dubner, Steven D. Levitt (2010). “Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”, p.77, Penguin UK

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• Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.

  Steven Levitt

  Girl, Reading, Twilight

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• 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

  Wisdom, Believe, Reading

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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