Quotes from Steven Levitt

As I see it, most major philanthropists have been bullied into giving. They feel social pressure to give. It has become a cost of doing business.

Wall Street is populated by a bunch of people whose primary goal is to make money, and the rules are pretty much caveat emptor.

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.

If you really accept that global warming puts the world at risk, then you think you would be open to any solution that could undo it.

I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

Go out and collect data and, instead of having the answer, just look at the data and see if the data tells you anything. When we're allowed to do this with companies, it's almost magical.

No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.

But you also want to be honest about your weaknesses. People are much less harsh on weaknesses that are clear than weaknesses that are hidden -- as they should be.

Don't trust, just verify.

The major challenge facing most foundations is that they are risk averse. This inhibits their ability to experiment and commit to the experimentation and innovation process.

Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.

Good social media is authentic. What makes social media work is actually having something to say.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.

I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

The most obvious things are often right there, but you don't think about them because you've narrowed your vision.