Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

Being confident you are right is not the same as being right.

One of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences.

The basic reality," Sandman told the New York Times, "is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

have sued for an injunction against Jaws.

Todos desean triunfar en un campo extremadamente competitivo en el que, si alcanzan la cima, les pagan una fortuna (por no hablar de la gloria y el poder que comporta).

But if you are told that you have a 10 percent chance of dying within the next year, you might worry a lot more, perhaps even choosing to live your life differently. And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next minute, you'll probably panic. So it's the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear—which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

Human beings, for all our accomplishments, can be fragile animals. Most of us don't take criticism well at all.

Young women in Cameroon have their breasts "ironed"—beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell—to make them less sexually tempting.

if you are hoping to damage opponents' mental health, go ahead and tell them how inferior or dim-witted or nasty they are. But even if you are certifiably right on every point, you should not think for a minute that you will ever be able to persuade them. Name-calling will make you an enemy, not an ally, and if that is your objective, then persuasion is probably not what you were after in the first place.

rely on accumulated data rather than on individual anecdotes

Quitting is hard in part because it is equated with failure, and nobody likes to fail, or at least be seen failing. But is failure necessarily so terrible?

there is one mantra a Freak lives by, it is this: people respond to incentives. As utterly obvious as this point may seem, we are amazed at how frequently people forget it, and how often it leads to their undoing. Understanding the incentives of all the players in a given scenario is a fundamental step in solving any problem.

Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and—surprise—drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health.

The same thing happens if health care is distributed in a similar fashion: people consume more of it than if they were charged the sticker price. This means the "worried well" crowd out the truly sick, wait times increase for everyone, and a massive share of the costs go to the final months of elderly patients' lives, often without much real advantage.

riesgo = peligro + escándalo.

glaring anomalies, personal opinions, emotional outbursts, or moral leanings.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts.

It is a fact of life that people love to complain, particularly about how terrible the modern world is compared with the past. They are nearly always wrong. On just about any dimension you can think of—warfare, crime, income, education, transportation, worker safety, health—the twenty-first century is far more hospitable to the average human than any earlier time.

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.

De modo que es posible que acudir al hospital aumente ligeramente sus probabilidades de sobrevivir si tiene un problema grave, pero aumenta sus probabilidades de morir si no lo tiene.

After recent events, one might wonder if the macroeconomy is the domain of any economist.

After all, just because you're at the office is no reason to stop thinking.

But running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.