Steven Levitt
Steven D. Levitt is an American economist, professor, author, and podcaster born on May 29, 1967, in New Orleans.
Levitt attended St. Paul Academy and Summit School before pursuing higher education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Working in English, he has maintained careers as both an academic economist and a writer, as well as producing content as a podcaster.
Over the course of his career, Levitt received several notable recognitions. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal and received a Sloan Fellowship, along with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He was also named a Fellow of the Econometric Society. These distinctions were earned during the earlier phases of his professional career and reflect sustained engagement with economic research.
Levitt is co-author of the book Freakonomics. His work as a podcaster extends his output beyond academic publishing and writing into audio media, adding another dimension to his career as an economist and author.
Quotes by Steven Levitt
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.
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.
An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation
Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.
When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.
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.