Steven D. Levitt · 320 pages
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“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“The conventional wisdom is often wrong.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“When a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby’s health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn’t yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
conventional wisdom.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commission is typically split between the seller’s agent and the buyer’s. Each agent then kicks back roughly half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent’s pocket. So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4,500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent’s additional share—her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000—is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren’t aligned after all.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“But in both instances, the dissemination of the information diluted its power. As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once wrote, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“Since the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter, then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“Turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This disparity has often been called racist, since it disproportionately imprisons blacks.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“And while it sounds bad to hear that Americans underpay their taxes by nearly one-fifth, the tax economist Joel Slemrod estimates that the U.S. is easily within the upper tier of worldwide compliance rates.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“la economía como ciencia consiste fundamentalmente en un conjunto de herramientas, más que una cuestión de contenido, ningún tema se halla fuera de su alcance.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
“The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1)
Steven D. Levitt
Born place: in The United States
Born date May 29, 1967
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You recognise it because you don't feel like leaving. Not because it's perfect, obviously. There aren't any perfect places. But there are places where at least no one tries to hurt you.”
― Fabio Geda, quote from In the Sea There are Crocodiles: Based on the True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari
“You alone are responsible for what you do, don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you.”
― Darren Hardy, quote from The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success
“I want you to listen to me you seem to be under the misconception that there is something wrong with you, that there is nothing special about you. There is nobody else in the whole world that I would rather be with. I could look at you for hours an never get sick of it. I could spend ever second of everday in your presence and I would die a happy man. You belong with me.”
― Tiffany King, quote from Meant to Be
“The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.”
― Albert Jay Nock, quote from Our Enemy the State
“I like your hair," he said quietly, "but I think you'd look good whatever you did with it."
Here's the thing.He looked like he meant it, and like it had been the most natural thing in the world to say. I blinked at him.
"Okay," I said. "You want to know something about me that I don't really want to tell you? How about this. I dont get it.This.I hate that I don't. I wish I were the kind of girl who took guys like you as my sovereign right in life. But I don't."
"Yeah,I've sorta figured that out,too." He let go of my hair and put his hand on my waist, so his thumb was against my skin. I shivered. "Here's my first reveal for the night. One day, not so long ago, I'm just sitting in the dining room, digesting, minding my own business-literally. Trying to decide whether the second hamburger had been such a good idea and whether to break up with my girlfriend of a year and a half. Then I try to stand up, and suddenly there's this really pretty girl doubled over and looking at my book like it was covered with crap-"
"I wasn't."
"Yeah.You were. So there you were, with that amazing face and a yard of hair that smelled like flowers, and all this stuff drawn on your jeans. I really liked that."
"You liked my jeans."
"Among other things.But, jeez, Ella. After that, if you weren't making me feel like I had the IQ of a stone, your friends were looking at me like I'd crawled out from under one. I won't even go into what you obviously think of my friends."
"Chase Vere is a reptile.”
― Melissa Jensen, quote from The Fine Art of Truth or Dare
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