Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

vaunted progress as a major player in the global economy

Beliefs," things we hold to be true but which may not be easily verified.

As pessoas não são boas ou más. As pessoas são pessoas e, como tal, reagem a incentivos. Quase sempre os indivíduos são manipuláveis - para o bem ou para o mal -, bastando, para tanto, encontrar as alavancas certas.

Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even C.I.A. analysts. But numbers don't.

Los padres obsesivos saben quiénes son y generalmente se sienten orgullosos de ello; los padres no obsesivos también saben quiénes son y tienden a burlarse de ellos.) La mayor

Quizá resulte triste, pero para nada sorprendente, descubrir que expertos como Snyder son capaces de actuar en beneficio propio hasta el punto de engañar. Pero no pueden engañar solos. Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios.

If there is one thing we've learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency.

It is easy to get seduced by complexity; but there is virtue in simplicity too.

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. Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger. Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to track down, organize, and analyze the data to answer even one small question well.

Honorable mention in the Six-Feet-Under category to the reader who writes: "In my hometown [Amarillo, TX], there is a funeral director called Boxwell Brothers. This one can't be beat.")

A little girl named Mary goes to the beach with her mother and brother. They drive there in a red car. At the beach they swim, eat some ice cream, play in the sand, and have sandwiches for lunch. Now the questions: 1.  What color was the car? 2.  Did they have fish and chips for lunch? 3.  Did they listen to music in the car? 4.  Did they drink lemonade with lunch?

Some of the most loyal customers any company has are the ones who had a big problem but got treated incredibly well as it was being resolved.

But putting your faith in a coin toss—even for a tiny decision—may at least inoculate you against the belief that quitting is necessarily taboo.

When someone is heavily invested in his or her opinion, it is inevitably hard to change the person's mind.

is still common for a bride's parents to give the groom or his family cash, cars, or real estate. The

Para evitar heridas graves, los cinturones de seguridad funcionaron, una vez más, igual de bien que los asientos para niños de dos a seis años. Pero para heridas más leves, los asientos funcionaron mejor, reduciendo la probabilidad de heridas aproximadamente un 25 por ciento en comparación con los cinturones.

When bad predictions are unpunished, what incentive is there to stop making them?

is a systematic means of describing how people make decisions and how they change their minds;

If there is one mantra a Freak lives by, it is this: people respond to incentives.

Each of us develops a moral compass (some stronger than others, to be sure) as we make our way through the world. This is for the most part a wonderful thing. Who wants to live in a world where people run around with no regard for the difference between right and wrong?

When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

Great news, right? Well, not so fast. First of all, because the average black child is more likely to come from a low-income, low-education household, the gap is very real: on average, black children still are scoring worse. Worse yet, even when the parents' income and education are controlled for, the black-white gap reappears within just two years of a child's entering school. By the end of first grade, a black child is underperforming a statistically equivalent white child. And

paid $2.50 to smother a baby girl born with a cleft deformity