130 Quotes by Steven D. Levitt

Trying to keep a public men’s room clean? Sure, go ahead and put up signs urging people to pee neatly – or, better, paint a housefly on the urinal and watch the male instinct for target practice take over.

The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don’t. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.

Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn’t resonate for the recipient, you won’t get anywhere.

Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we all smuggled a few childlike instincts across the border into adulthood? We’d spend more time saying what we mean and asking questions we care about;.

People aren’t “good” or “bad.” 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.

Consider the kind of questions that kids ask. Sure, they may be silly or simplistic or out of bounds. But kids are also relentlessly curious and relatively unbiased. Because they know so little, they don’t carry around the preconceptions that often stop people from seeing things as they are. When it comes to solving problems, this is a big advantage.

Most of us have a lot more experience being consumers than producers, so we tend to view things through the lens of demand rather than supply.

Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don’t be afraid of the obvious.