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846029c
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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. If these home-based inputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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9280098
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So, absent the chance to make every job applicant work as hard as a college applicant, is there some quick, clever, cheap way of weeding out bad employees before they are hired? Zappos has come up with one such trick. You will recall from the last chapter that Zappos, the online shoe store, has a variety of unorthodox ideas about how a business can be run. You may also recall that its customer-service reps are central to the firm's success...
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Steven D. Levitt |
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849f49e
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Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don't be afraid of the obvious.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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8d64312
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It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went...up.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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c2ca627
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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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cf09266
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What sort of signal does a college diploma send to a potential employer? That its holder is willing and able to complete all sorts of drawn-out, convoluted tasks.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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1453fb2
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What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0cbc910
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Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.
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power
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ab07034
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The leader of another crack gang once told Venkatesh that he could easily afford to pay his foot soldiers more, but it wouldn't be prudent. "You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig?" he said. "So, you know, you try to take care of them, but you know, you also have to show them you the boss. You always have to get yours first, or else you really ain't no leader. If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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920b181
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Because 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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d4a2d96
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The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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7988ee6
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In Levitt's view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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7168d16
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David Lester, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, has likely thought about suicide longer, harder, and from more angles than any other human. In more than twenty-five-hundred academic publications, he has explored the relationship between suicide and, among other things, alcohol, anger, antidepressants, astrological signs, biochemistry, blood type, body type, depression, drug abuse, gun control, happiness, holi..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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af88102
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la economia como ciencia consiste fundamentalmente en un conjunto de herramientas, mas que una cuestion de contenido, ningun tema se halla fuera de su alcance.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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8eacfad
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A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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90afb27
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As long as you can tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, generating a boatload of ideas, even outlandish ones, can only be a good thing.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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5e5c499
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Whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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18b3129
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Government agents sardonically known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep "celibacy tax."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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43b9b11
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Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; does this mean that marriage causes happiness? Not necessarily. The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get married in the first place.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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40034bd
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Don't Burn the Food (SDL) In a sample of thirteen African countries between 1999 and 2004, 52 percent of women surveyed say they think that wife-beating is justified if she neglects the children; around 45 percent think it's justified if she goes out without telling the husband or argues with him; 36 percent if she refuses sex, and 30 percent if she burns the food. And this is what the women think. We live in a strange world.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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a9ac2c0
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Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn't like the idea of quitting.
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quitting
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Steven D. Levitt |
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cda4c7d
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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. That's a shame, for until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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048d603
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The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don't. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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06bd37a
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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 to self-esteem." Economic and social behaviors..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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63b3417
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The next time you encounter such a barrier, imposed by people who lack your imagination and drive and creativity, think hard about ignoring it. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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f8e680a
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Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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75937e7
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The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understand how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love).
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Steven D. Levitt |
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3169f2b
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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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44ea98a
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So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded? The first step is to appreciate that your opponent's opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "We can be blind to the o..
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Steven D. Levitt |
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549135d
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The next time you're in a real jam, facing an important question that you just can't answer, go ahead and make up something--and everyone will believe you, because you're the guy who all those other times was crazy enough to admit you didn't know the answer.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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fa25ed6
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Were writing Freakonomics, we had grave doubts that anyone would actually read it--and we certainly never envisioned the need for this revised and expanded edition.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0c0661c
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No CEO in the world, therefore, is so delusional as to expect his employees to show up every day and work hard for no money. But there is one gigantic workforce asked to do exactly that. In the United States alone, they number nearly 60 million. Who is this massive, underpaid throng? Schoolchildren.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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7b404f4
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Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them--or, often, deciphering them--is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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78f37bd
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Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn't resonate for the recipient, you won't get anywhere.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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8baefb0
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The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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0c85b52
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But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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17ac97b
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It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)
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Steven D. Levitt |
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bffe724
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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 to self-esteem."
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Steven D. Levitt |
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4da091d
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If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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8e05560
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But guns are not the whole story. In Switzerland, every adult male is issued an assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep the gun at home. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world. In other words, guns do not cause crime.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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5685982
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Here's a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is--like the high-school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery--at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger indicator of success than, well, a name.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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fa6b3b7
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Roland G. Fryer Jr., while discussing his names research on a radio show, took a call from a black woman who was upset with the name just given to her baby niece. It was pronounced shuh-TEED but was in fact spelled "Shithead."*"
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Steven D. Levitt |
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579f290
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A moral compass can convince you that all the answers are obvious (even when they're not); that there is a bright line between right and wrong (when often there isn't); and, worst, that you are certain you already know everything you need to know about a subject so you stop trying to learn more.
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Steven D. Levitt |
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ccf0d23
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The evidence linking increased punishment with lower crime rates is very strong.
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Steven D. Levitt |