Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

son lo seres humanos capaces de actos generosos, desinteresados, incluso heroicos? Desde luego. ¿Son asimismo capaces de actos despiadados de apatía? Desde luego.

As long as you can tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, generating a boatload of ideas, even outlandish ones, can only be a good thing.

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

Whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention.

But if you are hell-bent on persuading someone, or if your back is truly against the wall, you might as well give it your best shot.

it stank to the heavens; when

podría sugerir que la moral representa el modo en que a las personas les gustaría que funcionase el mundo, mientras que la economía representa cómo funciona éste en realidad.

It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)

Los rumiantes del mundo son responsables, aproximadamente, de un 50 por ciento más de gas de efecto invernadero que todo el sector de los transportes.

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. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

The market was particularly strong in Chicago, which had more than a thousand known brothels.

Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don't be afraid of the obvious.

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." He did not consider it a compliment. "We associate truth with convenience," he wrote, "with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most

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.

Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; does this mean that marriage causes happiness? Not necessarily. The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get married in the first place.

What sort of signal does a college diploma send to a potential employer? That its holder is willing and able to complete all sorts of drawn-out, convoluted tasks.

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

Simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.

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

The fact is that solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.

The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn't fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it's all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too.

One can imagine many patients being turned off by the words fecal transplant or, as researchers call it in their academic papers, "fecal microbiota transplantation." The slang used by some doctors ("shit swap") is no better. But Borody, after years of performing this procedure, believes he has finally come up with a less disturbing name. "Yes," he says, "we call it a 'transpoosion.

Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, así que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.