Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.

el único que sufrió una muerte violenta fue Nicolai Ceausescu. No debería pasarse por alto que su muerte fue en gran medida precipitada por la juventud de Rumanía, gran parte de la cual, de no ser por la prohibición del aborto, nunca habría llegado a nacer.

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. If these home-based inputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do.

People aren't "good" or "bad." People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.

Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events.

Cuando [los libros] te pertenecen, y son tuyos —declaró—, y simplemente forman parte de tu vida, todo eso contribuye a crear un sentimiento... de que los libros deberían formar parte de tu vida.»

It's much better to ask small questions than big ones.

It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went…up.

Karen Abbott reports that the Everleigh also offered sexual delicacies that weren't available elsewhere—"French" style, for instance, commonly known today as oral sex.

When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice their plastic shopping bags, their air-conditioning, their extraneous travel, the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.

The leader of another crack gang once told Venkatesh that he could easily afford to pay his foot soldiers more, but it wouldn't be prudent. "You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig?" he said. "So, you know, you try to take care of them, but you know, you also have to show them you the boss. You always have to get yours first, or else you really ain't no leader. If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit.

Because poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.

And while it sounds bad to hear that Americans underpay their taxes by nearly one-fifth, the tax economist Joel Slemrod estimates that the U.S. is easily within the upper tier of worldwide compliance rates.

Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane.

If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That's easy: in most cases, the cost of saying "I don't know" is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least for the individual.

Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.

We are blind to our blindness.

The evidence linking increased punishment with lower crime rates is very strong.

An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.

la economía como ciencia consiste fundamentalmente en un conjunto de herramientas, más que una cuestión de contenido, ningún tema se halla fuera de su alcance.

There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what.

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