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cb05f40
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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 t..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0f67a8c
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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 ju..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9b88deb
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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747b544
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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1b6dac8
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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."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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afa8047
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0627a0a
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The plural of anecdote is not data.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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93fae9c
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Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they're hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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2984863
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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 w..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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c2dd12a
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If you really want to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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8389c7e
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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 ..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9c9ca1f
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An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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bc3d536
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The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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3d346a7
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As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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23acd52
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Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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c04d26d
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Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a3741c3
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0ec54fc
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When failure is demonized, people will try to avoid it at all costs--even when it represents nothing more than a temporary setback.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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d29aca1
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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;
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Steven D. Levitt |
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de9dc4a
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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 human..
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incentives
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Steven D. Levitt |
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b918d5c
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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2538bde
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Have fun, think small, don't fear the obvious.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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4ed123a
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a5a4687
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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1d9f0cc
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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2341ef7
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1. Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about. 2. Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide. 3. Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different. 4. Whenever possible, create incentives that switch the frame from adversarial to cooperative. 5. Never, ever th..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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f10dc1b
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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 gott..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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e64b710
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0f152c4
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Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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525a96b
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Trying to keep a public men's room clean? Sure, go ahead and put up signs urging people to pee neatly--or, better, paint a housefly on the urinal and watch the male instinct for target practice take over.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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e660317
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But in both instances, the dissemination of the information diluted its power. As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once wrote, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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773c065
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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."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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372a420
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ad380da
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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62273e9
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Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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73d987f
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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.
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money
men
women
relationship
freakonomics
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Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner |
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e2598f1
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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1e5f8d9
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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cc069bc
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Thinking like a Freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if there is one thing we've learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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e7da01e
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Just because you're at the office is no reason to stop thinking.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ac5f908
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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aa76656
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Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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d61882c
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Since the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter, then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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5a5d488
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But being confident you are right is not the same as being right.
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Steven D. Levitt |