Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

offer an environment that is simply not conducive to learning.

Just because you're great at something doesn't mean you're good at everything.

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.

Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. None of us want to look stupid, or at least overmatched, by admitting we don't know an answer. The incentives to fake it are simply too strong.

Ya estamos completamente acostumbrados a las falsas proclamaciones públicas de los políticos. Pero los votantes también mienten.

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it.

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, ferreting them out—is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.

Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea.

declared preferences and revealed preferences.)

drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health.

Cuando a la gente no se la obliga a pagar todos los costes de sus acciones, tiene pocos incentivos para cambiar de conducta.

Décadas de estudios han demostrado que un niño que nace en un entorno familiar adverso tiene muchas más probabilidades de convertirse en un delincuente.

History clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.

emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

For every extra year a young person was exposed to TV in his first 15 years, we see a 4 percent increase in the number of property-crime arrests later in life and a 2 percent increase in violent-crime arrests.

Gun murders are down? Well, you figure, that must be from all those tough new gun laws—until you examine the data and find that most people who commit crimes with guns are almost entirely unaffected by current gun laws.

No fue el control de armas o un fuerte crecimiento económico o las nuevas estrategias policiales lo que finalmente atemperó la ola de crimen en Estados Unidos. Fue, entre otros factores, el hecho de que la fuente de criminales potenciales se había visto reducida de forma drástica.

The more complex a problem is, the harder it is to capture good feedback. You can gather a lot of facts, and that may be helpful, but in order to reliably measure cause and effect you need to get beneath the facts. You may have to purposefully go out and create feedback through an experiment.

At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute.

Vegans are still considered as sort of "out there," a fringe group of animal rights activists with pasty skin and protein issues. However

It should also be noted that many girls' names, including Shirley, Carol, Leslie, Hilary, Renee, Stacy, and Tracy began life as boys' names, but girls' names almost never cross over to boys.)

If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don't know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don't even know the right question. But if you ask the wrong question, you are almost guaranteed to get the wrong answer.

Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or

When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.