130 Quotes by Steven D. Levitt

What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?

The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like – ahem – a Freak.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

It also means that the pain of negative feedback will for most people trump the pleasure from positive feedback.

Running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice their plastic shopping bags, their air-conditioning, their extraneous travel, the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

But guns are not the whole story. In Switzerland, every adult male is issued an assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep the gun at home. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world. In other words, guns do not cause crime.