Stephen J. Dubner

These are the two sides of Steven Spielberg: the reverent grown-up who knows when to say the right thing and the exuberant…

— Stephen J. Dubner

Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee…

— Stephen J. Dubner

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

— 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…

— Stephen J. Dubner

While in the middle of writing a book, I have a hard time reading other books for pleasure.

— Stephen J. Dubner

That's what's good about the digital revolution is it makes information asymmetry much harder to maintain.

— Stephen J. Dubner

Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people.…

— Stephen J. Dubner

If the day's writing has been particularly good or particularly bad, a glass of scotch will be involved.

— Stephen J. Dubner

As everyone knows, tips constitute the bulk of a waiter's or waitress's income. But they are also optional, at least in theory.…

— Stephen J. Dubner

What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas…

— Stephen J. Dubner

The Immaculate Reception became the Zapruder Film of sports.

— Stephen J. Dubner

We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine.…

— Stephen J. Dubner

Think small. Don't pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of 'Think Like a Freak,' really.

— Stephen J. Dubner

I think the most fundamental error we make is mistaking a noisy, anomalous event for the norm. This happens all the time…

— Stephen J. Dubner

What's really the driver of talent is not raw ability. It's not even just experience. It's what's called 'deliberate practice,' which is…

— Stephen J. Dubner

In at least one way we are atypical bloggers. That’s because we just keep on posting. The typical blogger, like most people…

— Stephen J. Dubner

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data,…

— Stephen J. Dubner

It's amazing how unwilling most people are to admit they don't know the answer to a question or a problem and instead…

— Stephen J. Dubner

One of the strangest unintended consequences of abortion, of legalized abortion, was that it drives the crime rate down because what abortion…

— Stephen J. Dubner

I grew up in - I personally grew up in a gun culture. I grew up in upstate New York where most…

— Stephen J. Dubner

When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements…

— Stephen J. Dubner

We're surrounded by big problems and people who have been attacking the same big problems for years and years and years and…

— Stephen J. Dubner

We've been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of failure. How do we know that that's true?

— Stephen J. Dubner

What would you rather do? Fix a small problem well or answer a small problem well or flail around at the big…

— Stephen J. Dubner

'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology…

— Stephen J. Dubner