Steven Levitt Quotes
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.
An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation
When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.
Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.
If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.
Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.
The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.
Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.
The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.
An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.
Good social media is authentic. What makes social media work is actually having something to say.