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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 21fbb9a | Syrio dice que cada herida es una leccion, y que cada leccion te lleva un paso mas alla. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| eabb751 | Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. | Karen Haber | ||
| 6a88c63 | Lonely? Yes. But a solemn, brooding, tragic loneliness that a man hates with a passion--and yet loves so much he craves for more. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 3ab0631 | Neshchata, koito nai-mnogo obichame, nai-mnogo ni s'sipvat, momche. | George R.R. Martin | ||
| 34e687a | 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." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| df79f69 | Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 718dde2 | Economists are generally negligent of their heroes. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 0fbf1f2 | I would now, however, more strongly emphasize, and especially as to the United States, the inequality in income and that it is getting worse--that the poor remain poor and the command of income by those in the top income brackets is increasing egregiously. So is the political eloquence and power by which that income is defended. This I did not foresee. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 6c75979 | John Kenneth Galbraith said: "Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." | Eliezer Yudkowsky | ||
| 95e0c76 | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 3d40008 | Poverty is a symptom--of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 870c513 | Those involved in mental as opposed to physical effort or who carry the responsibilities of management are presumed to require a higher payment for their submission to the purposes of organization than those who render only physical or manual service, however adept or talented that may be. This is because there is profound difference in the nature and extent of the submission that is made. The person on the shop floor or its equivalent give.. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 9b9bf09 | 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" -- | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 510e90b | In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 4955f4b | All crisis have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 2c3548d | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| cb1fff8 | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| c91e4d8 | Simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 1232a39 | 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 .. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 4bb8c33 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 8ef8add | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 0dbcbc8 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| e77c4d5 | 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." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 44b6e18 | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| fc2649c | Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, asi que no hablemos de predecir el futuro. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 1ef7a7b | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 6c7830b | Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 5e05429 | I don't expect perfection, I expect excellence." I expect 100 percent effort in all you do." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 3da66cf | How are you supposed to get everyone to pull in the same direction when they are all pulling primarily for themselves? | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| f674096 | When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight. | statistics | Steven D. Levitt | |
| a01b683 | Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true. | journalism | Steven D. Levitt | |
| 4512803 | Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists. | journalism | Steven D. Levitt | |
| a227cda | An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention. | politicians | Steven D. Levitt | |
| 94fcd97 | For emotion is the enemy of rational argument. | politics | Steven D. Levitt | |
| b06e770 | Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 846029c | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 9280098 | 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... | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 849f49e | Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don't be afraid of the obvious. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 8d64312 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| c2ca627 | 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" | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| cf09266 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 1453fb2 | What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common? | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 0cbc910 | 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. | power | Steven D. Levitt | |
| ab07034 | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt |