Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline.

Los cinturones de seguridad reducen el peligro de muerte hasta en un 70 por ciento;

Until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

When the solution to a given problem doesn't lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.

on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.

It's easy to envision how you'd change the behavior of people who think just like you do, but the people whose behavior you're trying to change often don't think like you—and, therefore, don't respond as you might expect.

Parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance. But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents?

Por cada punto que aumenta el porcentaje de coches de una ciudad que tienen instalado el LoJack, la tasa general de robos disminuye un 20 por ciento.

The best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency.

A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it. Our job in this book is to come up with such questions.

Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims. The most substantial of these indirect costs is fear of a future attack, even though such fear is grossly misplaced. The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

La información es un faro, un garrote, una rama de olivo, en total, un elemento de disuasión, dependiendo de quién la maneje y cómo.

If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don't.

Incentivize them on the dimensions that are valuable to them but cheap for you to provide.

The key is to learn to climb inside other people's minds to figure out what really matters to them.

Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So why aren't we petrified of them?

un padre dominante se parece enormemente al candidato político que cree que el dinero gana elecciones, cuando en realidad si un candidato no gusta a los votantes no saldrá elegido ni con todo el dinero del mundo.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? 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.

For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it.

An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.

Why has the prostitute's wage fallen so far? Because

Lo que realmente importa para un candidato político no es cuánto gasta, sino quién es.

finding a few bad apples out of millions would be difficult. Our odds would improve if we could somehow trick the bad apples into revealing themselves.

Ante cualquier incentivo, cualquier situación, la gente deshonesta tratará de obtener un beneficio sin importar los medios a emplear.