Quotes from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Most of us want to fix or change the world in some fashion. But to change the world, you first have to understand it.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“In the United States especially, politics and economics don’t mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we’ll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?

such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don’t, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity’s steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“From 2002 to 2008, the United States was fighting bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; among active military personnel, there were an average 1,643 fatalities per year. But over the same stretch of time in the early 1980s, with the United States fighting no major wars, there were more than 2,100 military deaths per year. How can this possibly be? For one, the military used to be much larger: 2.1 million on active duty in 1988 versus 1.4 million in 2008. But even the rate of death in 2008 was lower than in certain peacetime years. Some of this improvement is likely due to better medical care. But a surprising fact is that the accidental death rate for soldiers in the early 1980s was higher than the death rate by hostile fire for every year the United States has been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems that practicing to fight a war can be just about as dangerous as really fighting one. And,”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice their plastic shopping bags, their air-conditioning, their extraneous travel, the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you’ve got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don’t. Such are the vagaries of life.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“The data don’t lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, así que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them—smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Why? Because they want to! They derive pleasure from it, or a thrill, or just a break from the daily humdrum. And getting them to change their behavior, even with a fiercely rational argument, isn’t easy.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Over time, some ideas do cross the repugnance barrier to become reality. Charging interest on loans. Selling human sperm and eggs. Profiting from a loved one’s premature death. This last example of course describes how life insurance works. Today it is standard practice to wager on your own death in order to provide for your family. Until the mid-nineteenth century, life insurance was considered “a profanation,” as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer writes, “which transformed the sacred event of death into a vulgar commodity.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don’t contain methane.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“«El prestigio parece ejercer una especie de magia que da salud —dice Andrew Oswald, uno de los autores del estudio—. Al parecer, subir a ese estrado de Estocolmo añade unos dos años a la vida de un científico».”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Saber e fazer são duas coisas diferentes, principalmente quando a situação envolve prazer.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“La gente no es «buena» ni «mala». Las personas son personas y responden a incentivos. Casi siempre pueden ser manipuladas —para bien o para mal— si se encuentran las palancas adecuadas.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“¿son lo seres humanos capaces de actos generosos, desinteresados, incluso heroicos? Desde luego. ¿Son asimismo capaces de actos despiadados de apatía? Desde luego.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“El enfoque económico no pretende describir el mundo como cualquiera de nosotros quisiera que fuera, o teme que sea, o reza por que llegue a ser, sino más bien explicar lo que hay en la realidad. La mayoría de nosotros querría arreglar o cambiar el mundo de alguna manera. Pero para cambiar el mundo, primero hay que comprenderlo.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Supongamos, no obstante, que se puede desarrollar un algoritmo bancario con un 99 por ciento de precisión. Supongamos que en el Reino Unido hay 500 terroristas. El algoritmo identificaría correctamente a 495 de ellos, el 99 por ciento. Pero en el Reino Unido hay aproximadamente 50 millones de adultos que no tienen nada que ver con el terrorismo, y el algoritmo también identificaría erróneamente al 1 por ciento de todos ellos, es decir, 500.000 personas. Al final de las cuentas, este maravilloso algoritmo con un 99 por ciento de precisión daría demasiados falsos positivos: medio millón de personas que se indignarían con razón cuando fueran detenidas por las autoridades por sospechosas de terrorismo.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Los rumiantes del mundo son responsables, aproximadamente, de un 50 por ciento más de gas de efecto invernadero que todo el sector de los transportes.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“La probabilidad de que un norteamericano medio muera por un atentado terrorista en un año dado es aproximadamente de uno entre cinco millones. Tiene 575 veces más probabilidades de suicidarse.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Un reciente estudio académico descubrió que un desastre recibe un máximo del 18 por ciento de ayuda solidaria por cada artículo de 700 palabras en los periódicos, y un máximo del 13 por ciento por cada 60 segundos de cobertura en los noticiarios de televisión.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“carbono. No hay nada especial en el nivel actual de dióxido de carbono, ni en el nivel actual del mar, ni en las temperaturas actuales. Lo perjudicial son los cambios rápidos. En general, el aumento de dióxido de carbono es probablemente bueno para la biosfera; solo que está aumentando demasiado deprisa.» Los caballeros de IV aportan nuevos ejemplos de creencias erróneas sobre el calentamiento global. La”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“«La prueba de todo conocimiento es el experimento —dijo—. El experimento es el único juez de la “verdad” científica». La”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“«se podría meter un camión por los agujeros de nuestros protocolos».”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“A pair of researchers named Kristen Schilt and Matthew Wiswall wanted to systematically examine what happens to the salaries of people who switched gender as adults. It is not quite the experiment we proposed above—after all, the set of folks who switch gender aren’t exactly a random sample, nor are they the typical woman or man before or after—but still, the results are intriguing. Schilt and Wiswall found that women who become men earn slightly more money after their gender transitions, while men who become women make, on average, nearly one-third less than their previous wage.”
― Steven D. Levitt, quote from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

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Popular quotes

“I have been reminded that back in the day, eating was to provide fuel for work, a necessity of life as mundane as bathing or sleeping. Pleasurable, sure, but when did it become such an obsession?   We are bombarded daily with adverts, images, ideas and offers, all urging us to eat more, eat better, eat different, eat cheaply, and then ironically the list of diets available to us to help balance the overconsumption are so varied and many that they are too numerous to list.   Here’s an exercise: try to name six members of the current cabinet. Most people struggle after three. Now try naming me six diets. Easy, huh?   As a food lover and writer, I can say that the eating, preparation and sourcing of food has been a lifelong pleasure. I believe that one of the greatest expressions of love is to cook for someone.   For”
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“By then I was selling the hell out of Buicks at night. So I got a little place of my own and moved her in with me. Now we’re pals. Family. It’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s damn hard. But I look after her and she squeals with delight when I come home, and the sum total of sadness in the world is less than it would have been.

Her real name is Isabelle.

A pretty, pretty name.”
― George Saunders, quote from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

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― Meg Collett, quote from Fear University

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― Ernest Hemingway, quote from Fiesta

“The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

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