Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

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

But if you want to think like a Freak, you must learn to be a master of incentives—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But as we've seen lately, such predictions are generally worthless.

Un estudio que abarca cincuenta años de los Nobel de Química y Física demuestra que los ganadores vivieron más tiempo que los que solo fueron candidatos.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Don't listen to what people say; watch what they do.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.

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

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.

Most of us want to fix or change the world in some fashion. But to change the world, you first have to understand it.

When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don't know.

One thing we've learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.

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 a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.

And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.

A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.

But as 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.

In the United States especially, politics and economics don't mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.