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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 22df83d | you know everybody has a turn, and you just try to find something interesting every day to make you glad it hasn't happened yet. | mortality purpose | Tananarive Due | |
| 7988ee6 | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 6db7b7a | E sumperiphora ton dioikeseon ton epikheireseon mporei na diorthothei ek bathron, an uparkhei kai to okhi kai toso eukharisto men,pragmatiko de, endekhomeno tes phulakises | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 67e3c84 | The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version. All financial innovation involves in one form or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 1836504 | That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten .. | writing | John Kenneth Galbraith | |
| cf03927 | the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 3b9775f | Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 3adadc7 | prime threat hovering over a society of general well-being. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 4f814ce | Speculation, it has been noted, comes when popular imagination settles on something seemingly new in the field of commerce or finance. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| c467555 | I have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 7ae517b | Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That's its principal function. It's a very good system, really - keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquility. | radicals tenure universities | John Kenneth Galbraith | |
| 7daefdd | The process by which money is created is so simply that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 137eef3 | There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know," wrote Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith." | Rolf Dobelli | ||
| 1bee8b0 | Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to.. | John Kenneth Galbraith | ||
| 7168d16 | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| af88102 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 8eacfad | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 90afb27 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 5e5c499 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 18b3129 | 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." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 43b9b11 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 40034bd | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| a9ac2c0 | 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. | quitting | Steven D. Levitt | |
| cda4c7d | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 048d603 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 06bd37a | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 63b3417 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| f8e680a | Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 75937e7 | 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). | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 3169f2b | 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." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 44ea98a | 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.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 821285a | People will do some things for great sums of money that they would not do for smaller amounts. | InstaRead | ||
| 549135d | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| fa25ed6 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 0c0661c | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 7b404f4 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 78f37bd | Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn't resonate for the recipient, you won't get anywhere. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 8baefb0 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 0c85b52 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 17ac97b | It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.) | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| bffe724 | 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." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 4da091d | If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 8e05560 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 5685982 | 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. | Steven D. Levitt |