130 Quotes by Steven D. Levitt

A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person.

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.

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.

He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. “Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million?” he asked her. She looked him over. There wasn’t much to see – but still, $1 million! She agreed to go back to his room. “All right then, “ he said. “Would you be willing to sleep with me for $100?” “A hundred dollars!” she shot back. “What do you think I am, a prostitute?” “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating the price.

No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.

Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. None of us want to look stupid, or at least overmatched, by admitting we don’t know an answer.

Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about.

If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying “I don’t know” is higher than the cost of being wrong – at least for the individual.

I don’t expect perfection, I expect excellence.” I expect 100 percent effort in all you do.