Quotes from Steven D. Levitt

especialmente por parte de los moralistas altruistas que se han convencido de que su sensibilidad estética y la repugnancia instintiva deberían acabar con cualquier esfuerzo humano por salvar vidas.»

ofrecer a los donantes de órganos incentivos como «amnistía fiscal, seguro de enfermedad garantizado, becas universitarias para sus hijos, depósitos en sus cuentas de jubilación, etcétera.»

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.

The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.

Un blog también puede ser un buen lugar para desahogarse, perorar (y, ocasionalmente, despotricar) respecto a asuntos de un carácter más personal.

We arrive at the conservative figure of approximately 200,000 women in the regular army of vice.

most radical accomplishment of once-and-done is that it changed the frame of the relationship between the charity and the donor.

Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.

Most of us have a lot more experience being consumers than producers, so we tend to view things through the lens of demand rather than supply.

As we wrote earlier, the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence.

As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "[W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

desde una perspectiva puramente basada en los hechos y la estadística, la raza no es en ningún sentido central para nuestros argumentos acerca del aborto y la criminalidad.

Harris argued, albeit gently, that parents are wrong to think they contribute so mightily to their child's personality. This belief, she wrote, was a "cultural myth." Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.

income and education are strongly correlated

La distinción entre una mujer que elige controlar su fertilidad y el gobierno que elige limitar su fertilidad es fundamental y la gente con frecuencia parece perder de vista esta diferencia.

la mayoría de los abortos sólo cambian en que un niño no nace hoy pero otro nace unos años más tarde de la misma madre.

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 to self-esteem.

Peter Leeson, whose research has covered topics like Gypsy law and pirate economics, did just that.

cuanto más arriba en el escalafón se encuentran los trabajadores, más propensos a engañar son.

The history of modern doping began with the cycling craze of the 1890s and the six-day races that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night. Extra caffeine, peppermint, cocaine and strychnine were added to the riders' black coffee. Brandy was added to tea. Cyclists were given nitroglycerine to ease breathing after sprints. This was a dangerous business, since these substances were doled out without medical supervision.

A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.

La probabilidad de que un norteamericano medio muera por un atentado terrorista en un año dado es aproximadamente de uno entre cinco millones. Tiene 575 veces más probabilidades de suicidarse.

the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not.

morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work