Quotes by Steven Levitt - Page 1

Don't trust, just verify.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Don't Trust
Verify
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The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Conventional
Conventional Wisdom
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Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Corruption
Inquiry
Purity
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As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Cheating
Fields
Said
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No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Experts
May
Time Management
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The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Feedback
Impossible
Keys
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When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Cost
Pay
People
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An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Conventional Wisdom
Experts
Theory
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Good social media is authentic. What makes social media work is actually having something to say.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Social Media
Authentic
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An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation
Steven Levitt / Economist
Bullets
Incentives
Keys
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Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Information
Olive Branches
Olives
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Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Done
Enough
Problem
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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 Levitt / Economist
Data
Lying
Sex
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The most obvious things are often right there, but you don't think about them because you've narrowed your vision.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Obvious
Vision
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Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Girl
Reading
Twilight
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Wall Street is populated by a bunch of people whose primary goal is to make money, and the rules are pretty much caveat emptor.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Bunch
Wall
Primary Goal
Wall Street
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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 it.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Global Warming
Puts
Solution
Undo
Warming
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The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Being True
Information
Knows
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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 than the gun is.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Children
Gun
Swimming
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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 it to tell stories.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Data
Most Powerful
Powerful
Thinking
Mechanisms
Pile
Telling
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Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Book
Ideas
Simple
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As I see it, most major philanthropists have been bullied into giving. They feel social pressure to give. It has become a cost of doing business.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Cost
Philanthropists
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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 Levitt / Economist
Doe
People
World
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People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Benefits
Health Care
Health People Care
Avoid
Health Care People
Inevitably
We Cannot
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Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Experts
Incentives
Treats
Respond
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You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Deluded
Ethics
Fool
Idealist
Prominent
Wall
Statement
Wall Street
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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 process.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Commit
Innovation
Averse
Experiment
Facing
Foundations
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Go out and collect data and, instead of having the answer, just look at the data and see if the data tells you anything. When we're allowed to do this with companies, it's almost magical.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Data
Collect
Magical
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I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Incentives
Tenure
Teachers
Classrooms
Observed
Schools
The Problem With
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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 of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.
Steven Levitt / Economist
Wisdom
Articles
Believe
Conventional
Conventional Wisdom
Global Warming
Reading
Standard
Scientists
Warming
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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 Levitt / Economist
Average
Reality
Thinking
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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 Levitt / Economist
Law
People
Real
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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 Levitt / Economist
Incentives
Littles
People
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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 Levitt / Economist
Fun
Impact
Winning
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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 Levitt / Economist
Home
Mean
Mother
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