Quotes by Steven D. Levitt

“Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find th...”

“For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.”

“A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.”

“But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their...”

“There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.”

“By the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long agowho you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart...”

“David Lester, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, has likely thought about suicide longer, harder, and from more angles than any other human. In more than twenty-five-...”

“Nor should failure be considered a total loss.”

“It might be worthwhile to take a familiar questionwhy is there so much crime in modern society?and stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime?After all, every one of us regularly passes...”

“Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?”

“When the solution to a given problem doesnt lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is n...”

“An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.”

“What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies t...”

“The fact is that solving problem is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it. Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard o...”

“When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”

“Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.”

“Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.”

“It might be worthwhile to take a familiar question—why is there so much crime in modern society?—and stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime?After all, every one of us regularly pass...”

“When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is ...”