Quotes from Steven E. Landsburg

If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone's pants. But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will just have you instead of someone else.

If it's okay to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn't we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets? Most of us don't think that's a good idea, and not just because it might backfire. We don't think it's a good idea because we believe human beings have human rights, whatever their colour and wherever they live. Stealing assets is wrong, and so is stealing the right to earn a living, no matter where the victim was born.

A few lines of reasoning can change the way we see the world.

Selling is a painful necessity, buying is what makes it all worthwhile.

Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries

Most of economics can be summarized in four words: "People respond to incentives." The rest is commentary.

given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution....

Why am I permitted to apply racial criteria when I select a spouse but not when I select a personal assistant?

But when something is easy to imagine, it's often because you've failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.

If you support protectionism because you think it's good for you, you've probably just got your economics wrong. But if you support protectionism because you think it's good for your fellow Americans, at the expense of foreigners, then it seems to me you've got your morals wrong too.

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

The chief merit of the price system is that it makes effective use of information that is not available to any single decision maker. When the price system is overridden, information is discarded. When information is discarded, resources are misallocated. When resources are misallocated, prosperity suffers. If you're trying to make people prosperous, relying on prices is your best strategy.

A low current stock price forecasts a low future price. If today's price is low, there is a good reason to buy more (it's cheap) and also a good reason to buy less (it's likely to stay cheap). The two reasons cancel out and make "buying more when the price is low" no more attractive than "buying more when the price is high.

Freakonomics is out to dazzle you with facts; The Armchair Economist is out to dazzle you with logic.

Of course, ideas can always be misleading—but then so can numbers. Still, we advance by learning new ways to think, even if those ways are not infallible. Much

The governing principle is precisely the same one that predicts behavior at the gas pump. When the price of gasoline is low, people choose to buy more gasoline. When the price of accidents (e.g., the probability of being killed or the expected medical bill) is low, people choose to have more accidents. You

Among college students, economics and philosophy majors have similar current incomes, but it's the economics students who drive cars, because it's the economics students who expect to have jobs someday.

Logic matters. It leads us from simple ideas to surprising conclusions.