All Steven Levitt Quotes
- 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… Complexity
- 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… Affecting
- Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done. Beforehand
- The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it. Anything Without
- When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently. Consume
- The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing &… Gulf
- Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live. Book
- 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… Child
- Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry. Corruption
- No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes. Checklists
- 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… Another Side
- 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?… Ailing
- The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one. Arrested
- 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… Along
- Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work. Argued
- Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular. Admits
- 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… Anomalies
- 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… Account
- As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for. C Fields
- The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Conventional
- Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how. All
- An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation Astonishing
- Good social media is authentic. What makes social media work is actually having something to say. Authentic
- If you really accept that global warming puts the world at risk, then you think you would be open to any solution that could undo… Accept
- The major challenge facing most foundations is that they are risk averse. This inhibits their ability to experiment and commit to the experimentation and innovation… Ability