Steven Levitt Quotes

27 quotes in 490 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.
• The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.
• When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
• The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing &…
• Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.
• If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a…
• Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.
• No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.
• 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…
• 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?…
• The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.
• 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…
• Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.
• Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.
• 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…
• 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…
• As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
• The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

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