Steven D. Levitt · 320 pages
Rating: (568.2K votes)
“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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“This flirting is all well and good, but I mean it when I tell you, I cant have you leaving me again. It almost broke me."
My ribs seemed to squeeze all of the air out of my lungs at the thought. "I don't think I could. I don't want to be away from you again either."
"But you need to give me a chance to fix things when I screw up. You know I'm an ass sometimes."
"Sometimes?"
Growling, he whispered, "And I tear lingerie."
I pushed a curl off his forehead, "And hoard it. Don't forget the creepy hoarding.”
― Christina Lauren, quote from Beautiful Bastard
“It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”
― Azar Nafisi, quote from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“My experiences have taught me that things rarely improve with a simple change of scenery.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Power of Six
“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives
“And, even now, as he paced the streets, and listlessly looked round on the gradually increasing bustle and preparation for the day, everything appeared to yield him some new occasion for despondency. Last night, the sacrifice of a young, affectionate, and beautiful creature, to such a wretch, and in such a cause, had seemed a thing too monstrous to succeed; and the warmer he grew, the more confident he felt that some interposition must save her from his clutches. But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from Nicholas Nickleby
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