Steven Levitt quotes:

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

I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

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

I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.

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.

The most obvious things are often right there, but you don't think about them because you've narrowed your vision.

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.

Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.

Don't trust, just verify.

The major challenge facing most foundations is that they are risk averse. This inhibits their ability to experiment and commit to the experimentation and innovation process.

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

Wall Street is populated by a bunch of people whose primary goal is to make money, and the rules are pretty much caveat emptor.

If you really accept that global warming puts the world at risk, then you think you would be open to any solution that could undo it.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.

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

As I see it, most major philanthropists have been bullied into giving. They feel social pressure to give. It has become a cost of doing business.

People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.

If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

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.

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

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

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.

Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.

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

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

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.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

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