Quotes from Stephen J. Dubner

People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We've heard about a lot - doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness.

When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.

Cows and other ruminants are worse polluters than all of the transportation in the world, so all of us who try to cut down our carbon footprint by lessening our transportation would do far better by just consuming less beef.

We're surrounded by big problems and people who have been attacking the same big problems for years and years and years and years, and often they're not getting anywhere.

Our worst critics prefer to stay.

If the world gets a lot hotter in a hurry and the primary aim is to cool it down, then the current plan of carbon mitigation will almost certainly not be effective. It'll be too little, too late, and too optimistic - in large part because the atmospheric half-life of CO2 is roughly 100 years.

Si se requiere mucho valor para admitir que no conoces todas las respuestas, imagina lo difícil que es admitir que nis siquiera conoces la pregunta.

What would you rather do? Fix a small problem well or answer a small problem well or flail around at the big ones and pay a lot of lip service?

I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for my whole adult life.

The world is complicated. But does every problem require a complicated solution?

A lot of people are scared of experimentation because they think you have to be scientists, or they're also scared of it because it means that you have to admit that you don't know the answer. A lot of people like to assume they know the solution to a problem when they don't.

Spielberg may have intended 'Schindler's List' as the opposite of entertainment, but the film grossed $321 million and engaged audiences as only entertainment can, coaxing them to cry and shudder, leaving their hearts more heavy than broken.

Deflategate. I mean it's kind of idiotic in one way. On the other hand, look how totally obsessed we are with the fact that the New England Patriots may have taken, I don't know, a half-pound or a pound square inch of air pressure out of the footballs. We love it.

I believe that people generally want to be what we call good. They want to cooperate with people. They don't want to steal; they don't want to cheat. But everybody has a price. Everybody has an incentive.

One of the strangest unintended consequences of abortion, of legalized abortion, was that it drives the crime rate down because what abortion really was, was a mechanism for which fewer unwanted children could be born.

It's amazing how unwilling most people are to admit they don't know the answer to a question or a problem and instead charge forward on a 'gut instinct' that turns out to be crap.

'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology of money,' and since Levitt's an economist, my editor thought I'd be the guy to write about him. Fact is that Levitt has almost no interest in either psychology or money.

I think the most fundamental error we make is mistaking a noisy, anomalous event for the norm. This happens all the time - in the stock market, in reports of crime and natural disaster, etc. The fact is that big, noisy, anomalous events catch our attention because they're anomalous, which isn't a problem in and of itself.

A strange thing happens when Spielberg discusses his own work. His degree of self-criticism seems a direct reflection of each film's box-office performance. You will not catch him complaining that the audience 'didn't get' a film; if it didn't do well, it generally didn't deserve to.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

I grew up in - I personally grew up in a gun culture. I grew up in upstate New York where most families had guns for hunting, target practice, whatever. The vast majority of people I knew never used their guns for any crime.