Steven Levitt - Freakonomics (2005)

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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.

Steven Levitt
Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.

Steven Levitt
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.

Steven Levitt
As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

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

Steven Levitt
An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
conventional wisdom.

Steven Levitt
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent—all depending on who wields it and how.

Steven Levitt
And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

Steven Levitt
People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.

Steven Levitt
The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.

Steven Levitt