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a6eaf5e
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Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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f6f4ab8
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With any problem, it's important to figure out which incentives will actually work, not just what your moral compass tells you should work.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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d71f84a
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Most people are too busy to rethink the way they think--or to even spend much time thinking at all.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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d498196
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0f951a5
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Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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29ed8b4
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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."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9b4419b
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Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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53f7bcb
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It's much better to ask small questions than big ones.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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022eb6e
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The non-profit industry itself, "the most dysfunctional $300 billion industry in the world," as he saw it. Mullaney had come to believe that too many philanthropists engage in what Peter Buffett, a son of the uber-billionaire Warren Buffett, calls "conscience laundering"--doing charity to make themselves feel better rather than fighting to figure out the best ways to alleviate suffering."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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c9cfdfb
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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1218839
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In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. 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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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35638a7
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3. Once people are asked to donate, the social pressure is so great that they get bullied into giving, even though they wish they'd never been asked in the first place. Mullaney knew that number 3 was important to Smile Train's success. That's why their millions of mailings included a photograph of a disfigured child in need of cleft surgery. While no fund-raiser in his right mind would ever publicly admit to manipulating donors with socia..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a55c21d
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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 ..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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98ea744
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We've come to the conclusion that it's much better to ask small questions than big ones. Here are a few reasons: 1. Small questions are by their nature less often asked and investigated, and maybe not at all. They are virgin territory for true learning. 2. Since big problems are usually a dense mass of intertwined small problems, you can make more progress by tackling a small piece of the big problem than by flailing away at grand solutio..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9f9bc0f
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If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That's easy: in most cases, the cost of saying "I don't know" is higher than the cost of being wrong--at least for the individual."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ce18a94
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Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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929c2bf
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There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.
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political-philosophy
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ff340ba
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There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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7a9d6a5
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Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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34e687a
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People aren't "good" or "bad." 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."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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df79f69
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Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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95e0c76
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And then there's the tale of an economist on holiday in Las Vegas. 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..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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3d40008
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Poverty is a symptom--of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9b9bf09
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It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." He did not consider it a compliment. "We associate truth with convenience," he wrote, "with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most" --
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Steven D. Levitt |
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2c3548d
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But if you are hell-bent on persuading someone, or if your back is truly against the wall, you might as well give it your best shot.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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cb1fff8
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From 2002 to 2008, the United States was fighting bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; among active military personnel, there were an average 1,643 fatalities per year. But over the same stretch of time in the early 1980s, with the United States fighting no major wars, there were more than 2,100 military deaths per year. How can this possibly be? For one, the military used to be much larger: 2.1 million on active duty in 1988 versus 1.4 mil..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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c91e4d8
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Simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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1232a39
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The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them--smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a ..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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4bb8c33
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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8ef8add
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Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote across many genres, including children's books. In an essay called "Why I Write for Children," he explained the appeal. "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 t..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0dbcbc8
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The fact is that solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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e77c4d5
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One can imagine many patients being turned off by the words fecal transplant or, as researchers call it in their academic papers, "fecal microbiota transplantation." The slang used by some doctors ("shit swap") is no better. But Borody, after years of performing this procedure, believes he has finally come up with a less disturbing name. "Yes," he says, "we call it a 'transpoosion."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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44b6e18
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Over time, some ideas do cross the repugnance barrier to become reality. Charging interest on loans. Selling human sperm and eggs. Profiting from a loved one's premature death. This last example of course describes how life insurance works. Today it is standard practice to wager on your own death in order to provide for your family. Until the mid-nineteenth century, life insurance was considered "a profanation," as the sociologist Viviana Z..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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fc2649c
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Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, asi que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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1ef7a7b
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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.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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6c7830b
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Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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5e05429
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I don't expect perfection, I expect excellence." I expect 100 percent effort in all you do."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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3da66cf
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How are you supposed to get everyone to pull in the same direction when they are all pulling primarily for themselves?
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Steven D. Levitt |
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f674096
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When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.
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statistics
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a01b683
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Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.
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journalism
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Steven D. Levitt |
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4512803
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Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.
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journalism
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a227cda
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An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
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politicians
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Steven D. Levitt |
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94fcd97
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For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.
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politics
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Steven D. Levitt |
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b06e770
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Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what.
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Steven D. Levitt |